Do you ever go through periods of time when lyrics just seem to suddenly come easily to you? Or perhaps it’s creating melodies, where you used to find melodies difficult. Every once in a while you’ll find that to be the case: you’ll suddenly go through a very creative time. You might wonder what to […]
I don’t know of a single songwriter who doesn’t want to improve, no matter why they got into songwriting in the first place. Whether you write songs because it’s part of a career choice, or because it’s just a lot of fun, getting better is part of the challenge and part of the enjoyment. If […]
Yesterday’s blog was all about using chord inversions — so-called “slash chords” — in your songs. It got me thinking about other aspects of chord use in songs. Here is a quick list of five things every songwriter should know about this very important topic: 1. Chords work very much the same way regardless of […]
The intro of your song is that one section that’s part songwriting, part production. In other words, for many songs you can take the existing intro away, replace it with some other intro, and the song is still essentially the same. In that sense, a song intro can be decided upon during the production stage […]
As a songwriter, when the song you’re working on seems to be going nowhere, it’s a source of great discouragement. You find yourself facing a day of reckoning: Do you keep going with it, or do you declare it a dud and toss it? There is another option: put it aside, and revisit it at some […]
Songs are short. Most of them, anyway. And by short, I mean usually less than four minutes. That may seem like an insignificant detail that’s hardly worth mentioning, but the shortness of songs is a kind of musical challenge: in a very short period of time, you need to offer the audience a complete musical […]
