I’ve been thoroughly enjoying 3 days of adjudicating at the Truro (Nova Scotia) Music Festival. It’s mainly concert bands that I’ve been listening to, and the festival gives me the opportunity to do workshops with the students. We are certainly blessed with some very fine, dedicated music teachers who work hard to bring out and […]
As a songwriter, your hope is usually that once people have heard your song, they want to hear it again. That usually translates into sales, so the more clicks your songs generate, the more potential there is for monetary reward. It’s unlikely that anyone will want to listen to your song again if there’s nothing […]
An important first step to being a successful songwriter is to finish songs. If all you have are bits of ideas, with nothing resembling a completed song, you’ve got a huge psychological hurdle to get over. Just finishing something — even if it isn’t what you think of as “good” — gives you a positive shot in […]
Yes, there is a trio called “The Three Basses“, created on the coattails of the much more famous “Three Tenors.” The bass voice appears less able to generate the kind of wow-factor that the tenor voice is able to create. The three tenors were able to have audiences on their feet even before the music was finished. […]
I often get emails asking me some variation on the following: How can chords, which contain only 3 or 4 notes, be used to accompany melodies that contain so many notes? The question relates to the fact that you might strum a chord for two full bars (8 beats) or even more, and in those […]
Using a chords-first songwriting method usually means starting out by improvising on chords until something interesting pops into your mind. But one of the drawbacks to this process is that you can waste a lot of time simply trying to find chords that work well together. I’ve placed two charts below, one for major keys and […]
