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 […]
At first blush, creating musical tension in a song doesn’t sound like something you want to do. We’ve learned in our everyday lives that tension is usually something negative — something that needs to be resolved. But in music, tension is a crucial characteristic of some of the best song melodies written. That’s because musical tension […]
“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook bundle includes “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression”. Learn how to write great songs by starting with the chords, and then avoiding all the potential pitfalls of the chords-first songwriting process. Recently I wrote about the importance of musical energy in all songs, whether they’re loud or soft, and that […]
