It’s common with many songwriters to start the songwriting process by working out the chorus, if only because that’s the part that’s going to be most memorable to your audience. Once you’ve got a chorus that really works well, it acts as a kind of goal — a target, so to speak — for you to aim […]
Musical energy is a term that a lot of musicians use but find hard to define. You might use the word energy in a very nebulous sort of way, where it’s synonymous with intensity. With that usage of the word, most listeners of music would know what you mean if you said, “I really like the energy of this song.” They would […]
Musicians and psychologists hold slightly different practical definitions for what is known as the contrast principle. A good description of a psychologist’s use of the term might be something like the following, which comes from the JackMalcom.com website: If you put your left hand into a bucket of cold water, and your right into hot water, […]
It’s an instinct that most songwriters have: to take a song beyond what you’d normally hear in the genre, creating something innovative and unique. You don’t want to give your listeners something so unique that it sounds strange and uninviting, and you don’t want something so much like everything else that it simply bores people. It’s all […]
I was remembering this morning a discussion I had with a drummer many years ago. This guy told me that he loved the band he was with because they were so rhythmically tight that he didn’t have to work very hard to “keep things together.” That meant, as far as he was concerned, that he could think of his […]
There’s a good reason why repetition factors into most good songs: it ensures that a song is easy to remember, which means that people are more inclined to sing them. But there are other qualities that make melodies easy to sing. And as a songwriter, you should consider the singability of your melodies to be […]
