Good moments in music are good because they make us believe that even better moments are coming, and so we want to keep listening. The inverse of that is true as well: bad moments in music make us believe that nothing better is coming, and so we give up listening and click to hear something […]
There are ways to make sure that the various sections of your song connect well together. Some of them are obvious – like keeping a consistent key throughout, or keeping the tempo the same, and so on. It’s possible (and relatively common) to have various sections in different keys, but the connection comes from the choice […]
Do you find that you constantly get stuck at the lyric-stage of songwriting? When everything you write sounds wrong, it can leave you with practically no new direction to try. Compare that problem to a similar problem with writing melodies. If your melodies aren’t working, more improvisation should get you finally moving in the right […]
Last week I received an email from a blog reader, with a question regarding chord progressions. It’s similar to one that I receive a lot, and so I thought perhaps I would post it here, along with my answer [slightly edited in spots for clarity], and hope that it might be helpful for those of […]
Years ago, songwriting practically always meant sitting at a piano or with a guitar, with no assistance from a computer. For many, that’s still the case; songwriting, of course, need not happen at a computer at all. Assuming you were planning on performing the song yourself, you and your band would then make some decisions regarding […]
If you’re a carpenter and you like to build your own furniture, you know that your hobby is mainly two activities: Designing your project. Building your project. There is a similarity between carpentry and songwriting in that both activities involve designing and “building”. The main difference, though, is that songwriters are often designing as they […]
