If you’re an instrumentalist, you know that practice is an important part of getting better. Practice requires you to put a magnifying glass on your technique — and sometimes your musicianship — and focus in on what you find difficult. Some instrumentalists maintain that they make their best improvements by simply playing, rather than by working out […]
In the pop music genres, a great chorus is a self-contained unit. It doesn’t need a verse in order to work, musically speaking; it will work on its own. That’s certainly not to say that a chorus is all you need, or that a verse serves no useful purpose. In most songs, if all you […]
Every songwriter is a communicator. Most of the time what you’re communicating is obvious from the title and lyric, but there’s so much more than words that contribute to the meaning of a song. A few years back I did a blog article that compared two renditions of “Always On My Mind” (Wayne Carson, Johnny […]
When you listen to verse 2 of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle, you’re hearing the main melody, but you’re also hearing, in addition to some simple backing vocals, a secondary melody in the background. Do you find that writing a great melody is your biggest challenge? In great songs, it’s not just about the tune […]
I’m a fan of any songwriting process that requires concentrating on the melody first. The main reason I like melody-first writing is that you’re concentrating on the part of a song that’s the most hummable, and the easiest for someone to remember. If there is one criticism I have of melody first processes, it’s that […]
It’s tricky, writing music that pleases your target audience. They want every song to sound unique and fresh. But at the same time, they want to hear the kind of music that attracted them to you in the first place. So you try to write something that goes in a refreshingly new direction, and they give […]
