For most songs, if you speak of the hook, you’re talking about the chorus, and most likely the start of the chorus. Sometimes the hooky bit might be the end of the chorus, like Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ 1963 hit “Sugar Shack”. For pop songs, the hook has been a perennially essential ingredient. Because […]
“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle” covers every aspect of good songwriting. It’s being used by thousands of songwriters to improve their technique. Start writing the best songs of your life, now! Every song is, to some degree, entertainment. If you aren’t entertaining your target audience, you’re missing the mark. That’s not to say […]
Chord progressions offer an important sense of direction. It’s why they’re called progressions and not successions. And of course, most elements within a song come with a similarly important sense of direction. Melodies and lyrics typically work in a forward direction, but when performed backwards, they don’t usually work at all. “Chord Progression Formulas” shows you how […]
Improvisation plays an important role in pop songwriting. And we love that feeling of quickly coming up with musical ideas and having them sound great right from the start. Hopefully you know, however, that most songs, even the ones that seem to spill deliciously out of our musical minds within minutes, require some working and […]
Every time you create something, whether writing a song, painting a landscape, or writing a novel, you are pulling two vital aspects of artistic creation together: your technical abilities and knowledge, and your creative imagination. In songwriting, we refer to technical abilities by using the word technique, and we summarize the phrase creative imagination by simply referring […]
Being critical of what you’re writing is an essential step in perfecting your craft. Anyone who wants to improve at anything needs to be able to objectively critique what they do. To not have this kind of honest reckoning with yourself as an artist means limiting how much you can improve. The problem with being […]
