If you look closely at the way Classical composers wrote their music, you’ll find some very sophisticated characteristics that leave you wondering: Did they actually think people would notice? Here’s a bit of what I mean. Musicologists will tell you that Bach had an interesting way of structuring his music: he would write a short […]
If you’re a songwriter, you probably have experienced this fear at least occasionally: the thought that something you’ve just written has already been written by someone else, and you’ve unintentionally copied it and called it your own. At the least, it’s embarrassing, and at most, it could be a legal liability. The good news is […]
In the pop song genres, the short length of a complete tune (when compared to, let’s say, the classical genres), is an interesting challenge to deal with. Interesting, because the inexperienced songwriter might be fooled into thinking that a short song means you can put it all together quickly. But in fact, a short song […]
You’ll hear lots of songwriters say that there are no rules in songwriting. But while that may be the case, every one of us has written a song that we think really works well, and other songs that we have to admit are real turkeys, and we toss them aside. So if something can be […]
If you’re a player in a band, you’ve got lots of options for controlling the dynamics (loudness) of your music. Other than, of course, simply turning things up, you can add instruments to the mix to get the louder sounds you’re looking for, and/or subtract them to make your music more transparent. Trying to get […]
It’s not unusual for songwriters to think back to a time when songwriting seemed a lot easier. Certainly if you look at how long it used to take you to write a song, you may be discouraged to know that what used to take you hours now takes you days, or even longer. That’s not […]
