Musical Energy

The Best Songs Often Sound Spontaneous

The more you read about The Beatles and how they put their songs together (from about “Rubber Soul” onward, at least), the more you get the sense that each component of the song was planned, calculated and thought about. Their first album, “Please Please Me,” was recorded quickly, mainly all on one day. But as […]

Neil Young

In Good Songwriting, You Can’t Tell a Listener What to Feel

To borrow an important observation from Barry Gibb, “Songs are about feelings.” To put it another way, if you haven’t caused your audience to feel something when they hear your songs, you’ve probably missed the point of songwriting. Emotions are funny things: you usually can’t tell someone what to feel. One event or circumstance can cause […]

Songwriting Excellence

Striving for Songwriting Excellence

If you’re ready to take your songwriting to its highest level possible, you need “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle.” Get the manuals that thousands of songwriters are using. Excellence is something every keen student of anything strives for, but in creative arts like songwriting, excellence is either difficult or impossible to define. For some […]

Guitarist on Stage

Some Thoughts on Songwriting and Uniqueness

This morning I retweeted a great article by producer/engineer Bobby Owsinski, “It’s Getting Harder And Harder To Write A Song Without Committing Plagiarism.” The article makes the point that because the judicial system now considers similarity of the basic feel of a song to be considered in a plagiarism case, along with melody and lyrics, […]

Songwriting - Form

Unguided Practice in Songwriting Might Be Your Biggest Problem

Like starting the songwriting process by working out the chords first? There are benefits and dangers. Read “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression” to get this process working properly for you. Let’s say you’re a guitarist and you want to improve. It makes sense that your best way forward is to practice. But if that’s all […]

Instrumental Melodies

Why Instrumental Music Absolutely Needs a Good Melody

If you’ve written a melody and you want to explore the many ways there are to add chords to it, you need to get “How to Harmonize a Melody.” It shows you step by step, with sound samples, how to create the chords that will bring your melodies to life. Here’s a bit of a […]