Singer-Songwriter in Recording Studio

Redefining How You Look at Your Songwriting Process

If you chat at all with songwriters, the word “process” comes up a lot, and most competent songwriters will express the importance of having a good one. But here’s the problem: if you use the same basic procedure for all your songs — the same process — you’ll wind up with songs that all sound pretty […]

Songwriting - Producer

Showing the World You’re Different

Are you afraid of having others hearing your songs? Do you lack artistic confidence? Writing songs means striking a balance between predictability and innovation. Every song is at least somewhat predictable. That’s partly how we have genres in the first place. And every song is at least somewhat innovative, or we hope so. If there’s […]

Singer - Songwriter

Locking Lyrics Into the Basic Beat of Your Song

When lyrics sound stiff or rhythmically awkward, it’s usually the case that the basic pulse and accents of the words and phrases aren’t being honoured by the pulse and feel of the music. One easy way to deal with this is to read your lyric aloud, getting a sense of the natural pulse of the […]

Singer - Songwriter

Choosing Topics Versus Choosing Words

It would be silly for me to try to say that the topic you choose for your song isn’t all that important. Of course it is. But audiences don’t connect easily with topics. And by “connect,” I mean feel something. Some topics come loaded with emotion, mind you, even by the mere mention of it: the […]

Adele

The Structure of Good Verse Melodies

It’s hard to think about song melodies without also thinking about the chords that we put underneath them. They go hand in hand. Historically (as in hundreds of years ago) music was all about the melody. Eventually (in the early 1600s) it was melody and bass line, with chords starting to fill in the middle. […]

Outline of a guitar

The True Nature of Contrast in Songwriting

We tend to over-simplify what we mean by contrast in a good song, and thereby misunderstand its power. Contrast, in musical terms, means considering musical opposites: loud versus soft, high versus low, and so on. When we over-simplify contrast, we simply think that the contrast principle requires us to mix loud and soft sounds, high and […]