You should assume that with every song you write, some will love it and some won’t. What you hope for is that the vast majority will be in the righthand side of that bell curve, where most people will either like or love it, and hopefully a small minority will dislike or hate it. And […]
In my last post, “Finding Your Best Starting Point”, I offered suggestions for how to build a songwriting process when you’ve got a small fragment of music as your starting point. One of those fragments might be a bit of lyric. For many songwriters, starting the process with lyrics can yield great results. There are […]
It’s an important principle of all music that the energy we perceive at the end of a song should usually exceed the energy at the beginning. That increase in musical energy keeps audiences listening. But the build in energy is not usually a straight line. It’s an ebb-and-flow quality, and it usually takes the following […]
Part of being a songwriter is being able to objectively critique your own songs. That term, objectively critique, means all of the following: You can listen to your own songs as if someone else actually wrote them. You can focus in on exactly where problems may lie. You can make radical changes to your songs if necessary. […]
When you’re writing a song, one of the best supplies of musical inspiration is your own work! As you come up with new ideas, you get excited and that excitement helps you create even more ideas. That’s normal, and the excitement you feel is what we’d otherwise call inspiration. It’s the worst-kept secret in the songwriting world […]
Most songwriters start the songwriting process by improvising on ideas. You may have nothing to start with, and so the purpose of that initial improvisation session is to come up with something catchy. Let’s say that you manage to come up with something short but great, something that might serve as an important fragment of […]
