It’s amazing how imaginative you can be using mainly pentatonic scales to create melodies. You might think that limiting yourself to 5 notes per octave means you’ve cut out a lot of possibilities, but that certainly doesn’t have to be the case. If you haven’t done so yet, you might want to give Deerhunter’s new album, […]
Do you like starting the songwriting process by coming up with a chord progression first? Every songwriter has done that — even writers that focus on lyrics as their strongest suit will occasionally resort to playing a chord progression, even if just to get in the composing mood. But here’s a problem you’ll often notice […]
You really have to admire the producers of “Hunting Ground,” the 2015 documentary about rape on college campuses, for presenting a difficult topic with such unblinking honesty, courage and power. Just watching the film trailer will change you, assuming you didn’t already know the scope of the problem. Lady Gaga teamed up with hit songwriter […]
Not all songs use a bridge — that short section that typically follows the second run-through of the chorus. In the earlier days of rock & roll, it was normal for that section (if it existed at all) to be 8 bars in length, hence the alternate term “middle 8.” These days, a bridge need […]
You may not know the song “Comme d’habitude“, written by French songwriters Claude François and Jacques Revaux, but you’ll no doubt know “My Way,” a big hit for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and others. Paul Anka acquired the rights to the melody (for $1), and then penned a new English lyric that brought the song to […]
If you spend any time at all comparing verse and chorus melodies, you’ll notice right away that verses often centre in on one or two pitches. And it may not be that they sing those one or two constantly, but you’ll hear everything coming back, over and over again, to those couple of notes. A […]
