Musical ideas

Good Songwriting, and the Demand for Uniqueness

I’ve had an approach to writing music that I’ve described on this blog before, which is that second ideas are often better than first ones. That shouldn’t be so surprising, since your second idea will usually take the first one as its model — whether consciously or subconsciously — and modify it. In most cases, that […]

Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper

Composing Opposites as a Songwriting Exercise

On those days when you’re between songs and don’t know what to write about, you can avoid frustration — and ultimately writer’s block — if you change your focus and work on some songwriting exercises. The end result of a songwriting exercise is usually a fragment — a fragment that might or might not ever […]

Guitar, headphones and music

How Listening Makes You a Better Songwriter

As a songwriter, you do something that many people find difficult: you create new musical ideas and pull them all together into a final product called a song. You may be the kind of writer that finds it easy to do, so perhaps you’re writing a new song or two every week. But you might […]

Song melodies

3 Tips For Generating Melodic Ideas

Some songwriters have a flair for coming up with just the right tune. Most of the time, the best melodies are good because they partner so well with the lyric, and of course with the chord progression. But even with those elements in place, it can still be hard to write a great tune. So […]

songwriting session

7 Tips For a More Productive Songwriting Session

“Writing a Song From a Chord Progression”: Discover the secrets of the chords-first songwriting process. It’s part of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle” Songwriting should be, at least on some level, fun. It’s not something you’d do unless you were getting a certain level of enjoyment from it. But if lately your songwriting sessions are frustrating […]