Musicians and psychologists hold slightly different practical definitions for what is known as the contrast principle. A good description of a psychologist’s use of the term might be something like the following, which comes from the JackMalcom.com website: If you put your left hand into a bucket of cold water, and your right into hot water, […]
Occasionally, I find that I have time to offer private video (Skype) songwriting sessions to interested songwriters. If you’ve been working on songs that you’re finding hard to finish, or songs that have problems you simply can’t identify, I’d like to help. My schedule will allow for me to work with 5 songwriters. Rather than […]
It’s an instinct that most songwriters have: to take a song beyond what you’d normally hear in the genre, creating something innovative and unique. You don’t want to give your listeners something so unique that it sounds strange and uninviting, and you don’t want something so much like everything else that it simply bores people. It’s all […]
For many, songwriting is a personal activity done in seclusion. For others, songwriting means getting together with bandmates to work out the next song. Your comfort level with regard to how much you like to write alone or with others probably relates in a direct way to whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. […]
For many songwriters, it’s the lyrics that are the toughest to write. A lot of the difficulty comes from not having a clear understanding of the nature of lyrics. And that nature changes from song to song: Some lyrics rhyme, some don’t. Some lyrics are comprised of sentences, others seem to be more fragments of […]
I believe that in songwriting, no one can improve what they do until they can hear their songs as others hear them. And that’s a big challenge; it’s not easy to develop that level of objectivity. A song represents your heart and soul in musical form. Most of the time, it’s a personal reflection of you […]
