If you can hear the problems with your songs, but you can’t figure out how to solve them, you need to consult “Fix Your Songwriting Problems – NOW!” It centres in on 7 of the most common songwriting stumbling blocks, and offers solutions you can try right away. Here’s a question that may be uncomfortably nosing its way into your […]
When I was a student at McGill University back in the mid 80s, I heard a performance of a remarkable piece of music called Opus Clavicembalisticum, written by the composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, born in London, England. When it was written (1930), Opus Clavicembalisticum was the longest piece of piano music ever written: 4-and-a-half hours in length. The […]
What are you doing to improve as a songwriter? You’d probably answer that question by saying, “Well, I’m trying to write more“, or “I’m trying to become more consistent…” That’s one way of saying that you don’t really have a plan. No one improves without change. You want to get better at baseball? You change the […]
In music, a motif is a short fragment of music that gets developed and repeated throughout the length of a song. The repetition aspect of a motif makes it similar to a hook. But a hook generally repeats verbatim; it generally sounds the same each time we hear it, like “She loves you, yeah, yeah, […]
I’ve had my head a bit out of the songwriting/composition world in the past couple of days, as I had a couple of big concerts on my schedule yesterday. First was a concert where I conducted Symphony Nova Scotia in a performance for seniors, and that’s always a lot of fun. Most of the time […]
Let’s say you’re on a bus or out for a walk, and you’ve just come up with a great little bit of melody. It’s got great possibilities, you’re thinking, but you’ve always found it hard to remember the tune after even ten minutes, and you feel a bit too self-conscious to dig your phone out […]
