guitar, pencil and notepad

Honing Your Lyric-Writing Skills

If you find lyrics are the hardest part of songwriting, the best way forward is to try to emulate the greats. Whenever I hear songwriters describing the difficulties they have with lyrics, it’s almost always that they feel that they’re “lame.” In other words, it’s not so much that they don’t know what to write […]

Singer - Songwriter

On Being Influenced by Other Songwriters

Originality is everything in songwriting. Every time you sit down to write, you obviously need to be writing something that no one else has written before. It’s that need for originality that causes a kind of fear in some songwriters: the fear of accidentally plagiarizing someone’s song. In particular, some songwriters are afraid to spend […]

Guitar, headphones and music

How Listening Makes You a Better Songwriter

As a songwriter, you do something that many people find difficult: you create new musical ideas and pull them all together into a final product called a song. You may be the kind of writer that finds it easy to do, so perhaps you’re writing a new song or two every week. But you might […]

Where Have I Heard This Before? 6 Ways to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

With only 7 notes in common use for any major or minor key, you’d think that the possibility of accidentally plagiarizing someone else’s song would be commonplace. How many ways can you rearrange notes to come up with something truly unique? I’m sure some mathematician can come up with an actual answer for that, but […]

Deliberately Sounding Like Your Songwriting Hero

Always afraid you’re copying other songwriters? Why not try it as a songwriting technique? “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle comes with this 11th FREE eBOOK: “Use Your Words! Developing a Words-First Songwriting Process”. Back when I was a composition student, my favourite composers were Maurice Ravel and Charles Ives. Many are familiar with Ravel’s music, […]