I’ve often said that if you’re not doing something unique in your songwriting/performing, you’re missing the opportunity to add something remarkable to the music world. Being unique does not need to mean being strange, or at least certainly not overly strange. Most of the time, what you feel comfortable doing as a songwriter will be constrained […]
“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. Trying to sound like your musical hero is a great way to blast through a bad case of writer’s […]
The best songwriters are also the best analyzers of music. If you don’t have the ability to dig down into your own songs and assess them objectively before your audience hears them, you may not discover problems until it’s too late. There are lots of things you can do which, taken together, make it most […]
Psychologists will tell you that pattern recognition is a bit of an area of expertise for most humans. Our brains just seem to be wired to seek out any and all occurrences of patterns. We get a kind of pleasure from seeing and experiencing patterns. So many songs in the pop genres succeed or fail […]
Words and music need to act as partners in a song, but how do you make sure your melody is helping your lyric? That’s what Chapter 5 of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” deals with. Get that eBook as part of the 10-eBook Bundle, or purchase it separately. One of the reasons that creating word […]
Coming up with song ideas is hard. You start down a path and then you realize that whatever you thought your song was going to be about is just leading to dead ends. There are lots of ways to stimulate your imagination. Sometimes just picking up a pencil and writing, stream-of-consciousness-style, can yield surprisingly good […]
