“Hooks and Riffs: How They Grab Attention, Make Songs Memorable, and Build Your Fan Base” shows you how a good hook can make the difference between songwriting success and failure. With great examples from pop music history. If you’re like most songwriters out there, you’re probably dealing a lot with your “inner critic.” That term simply […]
If you like starting songs by working with a chord progression, you need to read “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression.” It will give you the pros and cons of this songwriting method, and help you create songs that really work! There’s a benefit that comes from being the sole songwriter on a project: […]
There is a kind of rule of life that most of us are familiar with: that the time it takes to complete a job expands to fill the time allotted to it. In short, if you give yourself a week to finish a task, it will take a week. If you like starting songs by […]
For most songwriters, the act of songwriting is about 10 percent imagination/creation, and then 90 percent working and reworking those ideas until a song is complete. Because of that, don’t be surprised if the first ideas you get for a song seem a bit lame. It can take some time before everything sounds the way […]
It used to be that “repeat-and-fade” was the most common way to end a pop song. There was something nice about it — a sense of “riding off into the sunset” that had the effect of making you feel that the song was still out there somewhere. These days, repeat-and-fade is a lot less common. […]
It happens to everyone – the closer you get to finishing your song, the more you realize you hate it. It’s just not working. You can’t even tell where the problems are, so you don’t know how to fix it. Most of these songs never get finished, because you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns: […]
