The great thing about various possible song designs is that they usually work for any genre. It shouldn’t matter if you’re writing pop, rock, country, folk… the principles that make a formal design (verse-chorus-bridge, for example) work apply to any and all genres. And not just genres… you find them used in practically any era as well. That means that […]
Most songs are said to be “in a key.” If the key is C major, that C major chord is said to be the tonic chord. A dominant chord is one that is built on the 5th degree of a scale. Dominant chords like to move to tonic chords. That’s why G7-C (V7-I) is so […]
How do you make people think something with music? It’s amazing that simply hearing the air vibrate can do that, but such is the strength of being a member of the human race. I’ve mentioned on this blog before that some songwriters, like Paul Simon, like to compose music (melody and chords) and then decide […]
An important first step to being a successful songwriter is to finish songs. If all you have are bits of ideas, with nothing resembling a completed song, you’ve got a huge psychological hurdle to get over. Just finishing something — even if it isn’t what you think of as “good” — gives you a positive shot in […]
I often get emails asking me some variation on the following: How can chords, which contain only 3 or 4 notes, be used to accompany melodies that contain so many notes? The question relates to the fact that you might strum a chord for two full bars (8 beats) or even more, and in those […]
You might think that songwriters who create a lyric first are likely to be poets, but that’s not always the case. Some poetry works well as song lyrics, but only if: the poem has universal appeal: it speaks of issues and situations that most people would identify with on some level; the poem taps in to […]
