Check out The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle When it comes to writing melodies, it’s not actually that hard to come up with a chorus that works well with its partnering verse, as long as you follow certain basic principles. But if you’re in a situation where your chorus just doesn’t seem to be […]
Talk about progressions to musicians, and they automatically make the assumption that you’re talking about chords. Of course, that makes sense. The chords in a song aren’t just randomly selected; each chord within a sequence needs to make a kind of musical sense, and that’s in fact why we use the word progression. But in fact, […]
Sometimes you need to hear your own music before you know what your song is actually about. There’s something about the chords you choose, and then the melody that gets created above them, that implies a kind of musical meaning. But occasionally it’s hard to get going because you can feel the melody starting to flow, and […]
I’ve just uploaded a new songwriting video, “How the Rhythm of a Melody Changes as a Song Progresses.” In it, I take a look at how rhythm plays a role in the emotional connection that a melody can make. In large part, a melody’s rhythm is determined by the actual words of the lyric. But […]
Have you ever had the experience of feeling that you write pretty good poetry, but every time you try to come up with a melody and chords that makes it sound like a good song lyric, it just doesn’t work? There are any number of reasons why that might be happening. Here are some possible ones: […]
Melodies and lyrics are the two components of any song that must be unique. Song titles, chord progressions, rhythms… they can all have been heard before, and probably have. But melodies, if they share more than a few notes in a row with some other song, are said to have been plagiarized. Because every melody needs to […]
