If you look at your most recent song’s verse and compare it to the chorus, you’ll usually notice: There is likely a similarity in the kinds of chords you’ve used in both sections. The lyrics are probably different, with verse lyrics setting up a scenario, and chorus lyrics expressing the emotions created by the verse. […]
Many songwriters feel uncomfortable writing songs by starting with a melody. To them, a melody-first songwriting process means sitting with a digital recorder and mindlessly humming some notes until a usable melody miraculously appears. Then you’ve got the task of adding chords to that new melody, and it all seems daunting. Trying to get a […]
Generalizing any aspect of a songwriter’s output is straying into dangerous territory. That’s particularly true of the music of Lennon and McCartney. They were arguably the most versatile writers of pop song of their generation, and probably even now. As soon as they wrote a hit, it was back to the drawing board to come […]
Songs are vehicles that take a listener on a 3-4 minute journey. However interesting and captivating that journey is, that’s the measure of a song’s success. Since songs are partnerships of many different elements all working together — melodies, lyrics, chords, instrumentation/production, tempo, time signature and more — it can seem to be a daunting task […]
When it comes to technology that helps us as musicians, we’re living in wonderful times. Using smartphone apps or the internet, we have instant access to tuners, metronomes, mixers and recorders. We’ve got software that can write out our musical scores, then print up the parts, all correctly transposed. We can work out lyrics with […]
Chords-first songwriting is a bit of a modern invention. For the great master composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.), composing was almost always about the melody, and so the process of writing music would start there. That’s not to say that composing music was strictly a melody-first process for them after which they’d come up with […]
