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 […]
With only 7 notes in common use for any major or minor key, you’d think that the possibility of accidentally plagiarizing someone else’s song would be commonplace. How many ways can you rearrange notes to come up with something truly unique? I’m sure some mathematician can come up with an actual answer for that, but […]
The closer you are to finishing a song, the less likely you are to experiment with radical changes. At the start of your process, you might change chords, try different lyrics, and even change the melody. But as your song nears completion, the changes you might try are usually small ones. The song feels “set”, […]
For those of you who find setting lyrics to be the easy part, you can more or less ignore this post and go on with your regularly scheduled life. But if you find the whole issue of setting lyrics to music — especially with regard to rhythm and timing — to be one of the trickiest parts […]
Many songwriters love starting the writing process by generating ideas from a chord progression. That’s a legitimate way to write, and it’s very popular. By starting with chords, you lay down what is in effect a landscape upon which you can place other items. I’ve been working on a new short manual for songwriters who […]
In most songs of the pop music genres, chord progressions can be used to identify the song’s key. This happens whether the songwriter who created the progression is aware of it or not. They may like E C#m B as a progression to build a chorus on, not knowing (or caring!) that those 3 chords belong to […]
