For those who don’t create (write or perform) songs, they’d probably have a simple answer to how you generate musical energy: turn up the volume! But if you’ve been a musician for a while, whether that’s writing songs, or being involved in producing or playing them, you likely know that there’s a lot more you […]
As you know, you can strum a chord for quite a number of bars, and the melody that you sing over that chord will usually feature a lot of different notes. Sometimes, the various notes of a melody might actually come from the chord itself. For example, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (Norman Whitfield, Barrett […]
The title of this blog post sounds like a trick question, because you’d probably think that I’m going to say, “Neither is best – it’s whatever suits the musical ideas rolling around in your mind at any given time.” That, of course, is logically the best answer. But for me, I’ve always found melody-first songwriting […]
If you look at the number of different notes that any one good melody uses, you might be surprised by how few there are. For many songs, most of the notes will be from one octave, and often less. In a song like “Hound Dog”, most of the song is comprised of 3 or 4 […]
A few days ago I wrote a post in which I talked about the chords-first method of songwriting (“Giving Your Melodies Some Shape in the Chords-First Songwriting Process“), and warning of the main pitfall of this process: the ignored and uninteresting melody that might result. As in all things in songwriting, you can find exceptions […]
There’s an inherent danger in writing songs by starting with the chords, which is that the melody can get a bit static and uninteresting. You may have come up with a chord progression you really like, but when you try to add a melody to that, you often find yourself stuck on one or two […]
