Let Me Introduce My Song

by Gary Ewer. The ideas in these blog articles are the sorts of ideas you’ll find in Gary Ewer’s Songwriting e-books: A favourite pet peeve of mine is the mindless sort of one-chord intro that gets stuck onto the front end of an otherwise pretty good tune. Your song deserves better. If you’ve got the imagination to create […]

Chords for Minor Key Songs

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: Looking for chords to harmonize your minor-key song? There are actually two different ideas out there for what it means to be “in a minor key.” The one idea is based on traditional harmony, while the other is a more “modal” approach. I’ve put some […]

Writer's Block: When You Just Can't Write Good No More

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website:   Writer’s Block: When You Just Can’t Write Good No More Every songwriter suffers from it from time to time. The ideas just don’t happen. And even when they do, you don’t know what to do with them. Writer’s block is curable if you really […]

The Descending-by-Thirds Chord Progression

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: There’s nothing random about a good chord progression. Starting on any chord, descending by 3rds will give you a great one to try. Let’s use the key of A major as our example. Starting on the tonic chord (A), then allowing the progression to descend […]

Those First Seven Seconds

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: I have a theory that people judge your song within the first 7 seconds. By that time, a listener has decided if they like or dislike what you’re doing. That shouldn’t really surprise us. It’s a product of the age we live in. Television producers […]

Shaping Melodies – Does Your Melody Have a Climactic Point?

With a good song, there’s a strong sense offorward motion. How you know that forward motion is there and working for you is by your own sense of anticipation: if you find that at any given moment in your song, you want to hear what happens next, that’s the vital sense of forward motion working for […]