What Is It That Keeps a Listener Listening?

When it comes to songwriting, it’s possible to do everything “right” and yet fail to entice anyone to keep listening. Sadly, that’s quite common. For me, when I’m sent an MP3 by someone to assess, I ask myself a critical question: if I turned this recording off right now, would I care? And when I’m […]

Getting Away With Being Weird

Written by Gary Ewer, Senior Instructor, Dalhousie University, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. • Follow Gary on Twitter • Good songs sell! Check out “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle – available now at a 50% savings! ________________________________ Weirdness in songwriting, when it’s done simply for the sake of being weird, usually doesn’t work. It […]

Experimenting with Odd Song Forms Can Pay Off

Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” FOLLOW GARY ON TWITTER Get the most out of your creative abilities! Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” ___________________________________ Most songs follow a rather predictable pattern: after an intro of some sort, you get the basic verse – chorus – verse – chorus – bridge […]

The Good and the Bad of Formula Writing

Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. FOLLOW GARY ON TWITTER Clean up your songwriting technique. Purchase “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” bundle and get a free e-book. _________________ A song with no repeating elements will usually be a song that fails. Repetition is a crucial part of a song’s success. […]

Top 5 Song Intros, And What We Can Learn From Them

Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. Download Gary’s Songwriting E-books here. _____________ A song intro has a fairly simple task: to pull the listener into the song. There are several ways to do this: 1- establishing a melodic hook; 2- setting up a rhythmic/harmonic hook, or 3- establishing a general […]

What Kind of Hook Will Work in Your Song?

Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” suite of e-books. Six texts that show you everything you need to know about songwriting, at a 50% saving. ___________ We usually think that the hook of a song is the chorus: the part of the song everyone […]