Songwriter - Synth

Your Songwriting Success: It Always Comes Down to the Quality of the Song

It may seem to you that those songwriters who have had great success just have the right people in their corner. They’ve had the best chances, and quite possibly a healthy dose of good luck. And while all those things are probably true, there’s one thing that’s got to be in place before any of […]

Songwriting collaboration

From Hook to Completed Song: Understanding Typical Pop Song Structure

If you write purely by instinct, it’s time to guide those instincts with songwriting knowledge. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle shows you, with sound samples and other examples, why great songs sound great. Comes with a Study Guide. It’s not unusual for songwriters to be able to come up with catchy hooks pretty […]

Bob Dylan

How Lyric Writing is Always Storytelling, On Some Level

You’re familiar with the genre of the “story song”, where the lyric amounts to “first this happened, then that happened.” But I’d like to make the case that, in a sense, all songs are story songs, where the lyric always works best if it creates a mini movie in the mind of the listener. “Best […]

chord progressions

Speedwriting Songs (Turn Off Your Inner Critic)

There’s a lot of value that comes from writing songs quickly. Speedwriting requires you to use your musical instinct as a primary part of your process. And most good songs have a noticeably improvisatory sound, as if the singer and players are sort of making it up as they go along (in the best sense […]

Songwriter outside with guitar

What AI (Might) Mean For Songwriting

How the role of computers in the creative arts has changed! It wasn’t very long ago that using a computer in music practically always meant using it in some aspect of sound synthesis. So you’d use a computer, or computerized device to generate a particular kind of sound. And at those times, a big challenge […]

Microphone in music studio

Reading Lyrics Aloud is an Important First Step to Improving Them

You’d think that it would occur naturally to us to read lyrics aloud as an important part of the song editing process. For practically every other aspect of songs, we test them out by actually performing them for ourselves: we strum chords, improvise melodies by humming or otherwise singing, try different instrument combinations, and so […]