You know that there are many songs where verses and choruses are in different keys. When it comes to questions about chord progressions that I receive, the most common kinds of questions relate to that issue: how to get from one key to another in a typical song. It’s not unusual for a song to […]
I mentioned cadences in my last post. A cadence is the end of a musical phrase — the end of a line of music or lyric. Sometimes that cadence sounds temporary, when the lyric sounds like the a pause in the middle of a sentence (at a comma), and sometimes much more final, like the […]
A song is a musical journey. Like any journey, it has a beginning, middle and end. On a literal journey, you’ll visit towns and cities. On a musical journey, those towns and cities are of a different sort: you’ll visit keys, melodies, lyrics, and so on. Bad songs are actually incredibly close to being good […]
There are songwriters that like to use complex progressions that really take us on an intricate musical journey. But the fact is that most of the time, particularly in popular music genres (pop, country, folk, etc.), chord progressions are largely predictable. No songwriter I know likes to use the word “predictable” in describing any aspect […]
When you get an idea for a song, you’re actually getting several ideas all at once. That’s how creativity works. You might think that you’ve just conjured up a single entity called a hook, but in fact you’ve brought together at least 3 different things very quickly: A catchy little melodic bit; A chord progression […]
There was something about the best music teachers of my youth that made me want to be better. They weren’t just good teachers; they were good musicians. Because they excelled, I wanted to excel. To excel at anything requires two things: An instinct A passion Those two qualities go hand-in-hand. It’s unlikely you’d develop a […]
