Every singer-songwriter has an identifiable style, but what does that word style actually refer to? For the most part, your own “style” refers to the performance and production that listeners hear when they listen to your songs. You can take practically any song and move it firmly into one genre or another just by adjusting the way […]
A number of years ago I taught aural skills (ear training) at Dalhousie University. As part of that course, students had to listen to melodies as I played them at the piano, and then they would write down in musical notation what they heard. As you can imagine, some students found this relatively easy while […]
As you know, I don’t deal much, if at all, with the technical side of the music industry on this blog. I’m a composer, and I leave any of the technical bits to other people who really know what they’re doing. But I know this much: if you’re going to put your songs online, it’s […]
Do you ever find that you randomly come up with a killer line of lyric, something that’s clever, poetic, rhythmic and imaginative all rolled up in one great phrase… but nothing else happens? And try as you might, you just can’t come up with more lyric to add to it? Starting June 22, 2018, “Creative Chord […]
Most of my writing these days is for vocal/choral groups. Sometimes that means writing for piano as an accompanying instrument, and sometimes I’m writing for full orchestra. Some of them are original compositions, and some are arrangements of already-existing songs (public domain folk songs, for example). But in any case, I practically always start by […]
I’m excited to announce that the newest edition of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook is complete and now available at the Online Store. As with previous new editions that I’ve released, this 4th Edition contains some new sections (“The Pay-Off Line”, “The Songwriting Process”, for example), as well as the typical rewording and including […]
