I was asked by the folks over at Songwriting.net to write an article for their website. They posted it yesterday, entitled “7 Ideas for Creating Chord Progressions.” I hope you’ll take a look. I’ve put a short excerpt below: There are basic principles about the way chords work that aren’t much affected by genre. What […]
Writing melodies may not be the part of songwriting you find easy at all. You may find it easy to create chord progressions that you like, and you may even be a decent lyricist. But if you’re finding that your melodies sound like aimless wandering — a disorganized collection of notes — that’s a problem […]
It makes sense that if you want good feedback on your songs, you’ll want to run them by good, experienced songwriters. After all, they’ve been there; they know the struggles it takes to get a song working, and can (hopefully) pass their experience on to you. But have you considered musicians other than songwriters as […]
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 a songwriter, if you’re not taking regular breaks from your writing activity, you’re probably not getting the most from your creative brain. It’s been well-researched and well-documented that we’re more likely to have bursts of creativity immediately following a period of downtime. (Read this interesting article, How Resting More Can Boost Your Productivity.) There’s […]
Do you find yourself wishing that your chord progressions were just a little more interesting? Here’s a quick tip for taking something that’s basic and simple to come up with something that sounds more imaginative: transpose your progression. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say that you’ve been improvising on a simple progression like: C Dm […]
