If you have a chord progression that works but doesn’t do much to inspire you, you can of course toss it and look for another. But with the simplest of changes, you can take a progression from being mundane to something much closer to awe-inspiring. So let’s say you’ve got the following simple progression: C […]
You are more likely to hear the word “creativity” when talking about the arts than you are to hear the word “imagination.” We usually speak of creating — not imagining — something artistic. Nonetheless, when we do use both words, we tend to use them interchangeably; we think of someone’s creative abilities as being synonymous with their […]
I was remembering this morning a discussion I had with a drummer many years ago. This guy told me that he loved the band he was with because they were so rhythmically tight that he didn’t have to work very hard to “keep things together.” That meant, as far as he was concerned, that he could think of his […]
There’s a good reason why repetition factors into most good songs: it ensures that a song is easy to remember, which means that people are more inclined to sing them. But there are other qualities that make melodies easy to sing. And as a songwriter, you should consider the singability of your melodies to be […]
More so than almost any other genre, pop music has a feeling of spontaneity about it. Done well, a pop song, and in particular its performance, makes great use of the musicians’ collective abilities to improvise on the spot. We love when a guitar solo sounds like it’s happening on the spur of the moment, the ideas […]
Every songwriter has a style. If you’re a well-known writer, that style may be part of what makes your new song immediately identifiable to your listeners, even before they hear that you’re the one who’s written it. More often than not, however, a song’s style of performance is what will give the song’s authorship away, not […]
