As a songwriter, you’re always trying to get the notes of your melodies, as well as the chords that accompany them, to sound somehow magical. At least, that’s the way most audiences will perceive what you’ve done. But hopefully you know that it’s not magic. It’s not even random, even though you may use improvisation and […]
Once you’ve written a song, you like to think of it as your baby, something that had a gestation period, and now — here it is! Except… you’re not very happy with it. The song’s done, but it just sounds lame to you. The first step in dealing with a song that doesn’t work very […]
Sometimes just editing verse lyrics won’t give you what you want. It might happen that despite how many times you change a word here and there, you still wind up with a verse that’s weak in some way. It can be frustrating. So here’s a different way to fix the verse (and lyric) that isn’t […]
The best editing in the creative arts makes things shorter, not longer. That’s not a rule, and it’s not exclusively true, but it’s almost always the case. Pop songs tend to be 3-4 minutes in length. That’s usually because of the subject matter. People think it’s because we don’t have attention spans that will allow […]
A few posts back, I mentioned that in the creative arts (songwriting and other forms of composition, for example), good editing is more often about what you remove than what you add or change. In other words, the best fixes to bad music frequently happens when you remove stuff, not add stuff. If I’ve written something that’s 5 […]
Do you ever find that while songwriting can be fun and rewarding, you rarely get that “wow, I really like what I wrote” feeling? Without having that feeling at least sometimes, you can feel more and more negative about your songwriting over time. Back in the days when I was teaching in the public school system, […]
