Microphone in music studio

Reading Lyrics Aloud is an Important First Step to Improving Them

You’d think that it would occur naturally to us to read lyrics aloud as an important part of the song editing process. For practically every other aspect of songs, we test them out by actually performing them for ourselves: we strum chords, improvise melodies by humming or otherwise singing, try different instrument combinations, and so […]

Neil Young

Simplicity in Good Songwriting is a Feature, Not a Bug

If you spend any amount of time listening to today’s pop offerings, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that mainstream pop music is steadily dumbing itself down. Lyrics often fail to inspire, melodies are less than inventive, and chords are usually simple and repetitive. Getting melodies and chords working well together is vital knowledge for any […]

Jonathan Groff

Telling People What You’re Feeling Is Tricky in Songwriting

To say it the way Barry Gibb of Bee Gees fame has said it: “Songs are about feelings.” If you aren’t causing your listeners to feel something when they hear your song, you’ve probably missed the main point of what good songwriting is all about. But there are many ways to deal with feelings in […]

guitarist - songwriter

How the Partnership Between Verse and Chorus Works

Learn how to take a song from faulty to fixed! “Fix Your Songwriting Problems – NOW!” It’s part of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle.” Get it separately, or as part of the bundle package. In songs that use the verse-chorus format, it’s the chorus that really needs to stand out and be memorable. For […]

Ed Sheeran

The Best Way to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

If you’re a songwriter, you probably have experienced this fear at least occasionally: the thought that something you’ve just written has already been written by someone else, and you’ve unintentionally copied it and called it your own. At the least, it’s embarrassing, and at most, it could be a legal liability. The good news is […]

The power of music

Musical Energy in a Song is Emotional Energy

Musical energy is the lifeblood of a song. When you talk about a song’s ability to grab the listener’s attention and then keep them listening for the three or four minutes that it lasts, that all comes down to musical energy. So often people equate musical energy with volume (loudness) or tempo, but that’s not […]