Joni Mitchell

How the Shape of Your Melody Can Help or Hurt a Song

If you write purely by instinct, it’s time to guide those instincts with songwriting knowledge. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle shows you, with sound samples and other examples, why great songs sound great. Comes with a Study Guide. Most listeners to a song aren’t aware of many of the structural things that make […]

John Lennon - Imagine

Creating Melodies Using Melodic Cells

Every once in a while I take a quick glance through a portion of the Rolling Stone Magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and I’m looking for similarities. I’m willing to accept, of course, that the list is highly subjective, but that doesn’t bother me much. There’s no denying that the songs on the list […]

“Paint It Black”: Connecting Song Melodies

Most songs consist of several sections that are all woven together to produce one coherent piece of music. The trick is to get all those sections to move seamlessly one to the next. Seamlessly, in this context, doesn’t mean that you move from section to section without realizing it, of course. In that sense, it’s […]

Can The Shape of a Song Melody Affect the Mood of a Song?

Try these steps for isolating your song melody to see what kind of mood it’s really conveying. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook Bundle packages come with this eBOOK: “From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro”. We all seem to acknowledge and understand the concept of “happy” music and “sad” music, even if we disagree […]

Connecting the Pulse of a Lyric to the Shape of a Melody

Try this little experiment for getting your lyric and melody to work well together. ___________ It’s an interesting exercise to read a well-known lyric without trying to think of the melody it belongs to. Try it — you’ll likely find yourself putting the same pauses and pulses of the melody into what you’re reading. It […]