Tuning a guitar

Don’t Ignore Your Playing When You’re Concentrating On Songwriting

Trying to get a handle on writing song lyrics? Discover the benefits of making a lyrics-first method your new go-to process with”Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process. It’s FREE right now when you purchase the 10-eBook Bundle. If you find yourself needing to write a lot of songs in a short period of time, it […]

Pet Shop Boys

Making Your Songs More Energetic

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 […]

Lang Lang, piano

…And On the Other Hand…

A few days ago I wrote a post in which I talked about the chords-first method of songwriting (“Giving Your Melodies Some Shape in the Chords-First Songwriting Process“), and warning of the main pitfall of this process: the ignored and uninteresting melody that might result. As in all things in songwriting, you can find exceptions […]

Finding meaning in music

Does Your Song Still Have Meaning If You Remove the Lyric?

Music, apart from the lyrics that might be going on, tends to convey meaning to us. In other words, you can listen to an instrumental and usually find yourself feeling something, even if you’re not sure what that something is, or what the song is supposed to be about. Obviously, we use lyrics to know what […]

Little Richard

Why Pattern Recognition is So Important in Good Songwriting

Psychologists will tell you that pattern recognition is a bit of an area of expertise for most humans. Our brains just seem to be wired to seek out any and all occurrences of patterns. We get a kind of pleasure from seeing and experiencing patterns. So many songs in the pop genres succeed or fail […]

Smashing Pumpkins

Finishing a Song You Thought Was Finished

If you like starting songs by working with a chord progression, you need to read “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression.” It will give you the pros and cons of this songwriting method, and help you create songs that really work! There’s a benefit that comes from being the sole songwriter on a project: […]