If you really want to see contrast at work in music, you should listen to a Classical symphony. Each piece typically consists of four movements, and each movement will be in a different key, and usually a different tempo. Also, each movement, even if they borrow ideas from previous movements (as 19th-century composers sometimes did), […]
There are many ways to improve your skills as a songwriter, and the best songwriters use a combination of many. These will include: Discussions with other songwriters. Discussions with other non-songwriting musicians (including players, producers, engineers, etc.) Studying the craft of songwriting (via written texts, videos, one-on-one sessions with instructors, etc.) Keeping a songwriting journal […]
Songwriting is supposed to offer you some level of enjoyment and even fun. As we all know, it’s not always like that. Some days you feel the frustration more than you feel the enjoyment. I’m a big fan of breaks. Taking a break has an almost immediate way of reducing frustration and allowing your creative […]
For most songwriters, the act of songwriting is about 10 percent imagination/creation, and then 90 percent working and reworking those ideas until a song is complete. Because of that, don’t be surprised if the first ideas you get for a song seem a bit lame. It can take some time before everything sounds the way […]
I was reading an online article about songwriting recently — a kind of “top ten ways to write great songs” sort of site — and one of the bits of advice was this: since practically all songs you find on the Billboard Hot 100 these days are the results of songwriting collaborations, you should definitely […]
If you’ve written a melody that’s hard for people to remember, it’s difficult to imagine it as something that would make any sort of splash in the music world. If people need to hear it many times before they can start humming or singing it, it’s probably missing the opportunity to make a strong connection. […]
