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 […]
It would be a no-brainer to say that I think Paul McCartney discovered things about songwriting that many other writers just don’t ever get to know. But one aspect of his writing that I think has contributed to his success is his very loose concept of what song form is. Most of the time when […]
In my most recent blog post, I wrote about forward motion, also called momentum, and how tension and release is a vital way for increasing that momentum within a song. But what if the tension and release aspect of your song is working just fine, but you want the whole thing to sound a bit […]
If you take a look at a photograph that’s been reversed, or look through your car’s rear view mirror, you’ll probably not see anything that looks weird, unless there’s a road sign or something else with words on it. Most of the time, you can look at things that are “backwards”, and they still make […]
Chapter 5 of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” shows how melody and lyric need to work together. Learn how to do it right! Get the entire 10-eBook Bundle along with a free copy of “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process.” A good song has a lot to do with the emotion it creates […]
If you look closely at the way Classical composers wrote their music, you’ll find some very sophisticated characteristics that leave you wondering: Did they actually think people would notice? Here’s a bit of what I mean. Musicologists will tell you that Bach had an interesting way of structuring his music: he would write a short […]
