Singer - Songwriter

No One Remembers Notes

When it comes to creating beautiful song melodies, the actual notes you use isn’t all that important. No one remembers notes, because no one knows what notes you’re using in the first place. What people remember are shapes and rhythms. Knowing how to get a melody working well with the chords and lyrics is a crucial part […]

Isolating Important Pitches Helps Add Structure to Song Melodies

Do your song melodies feel like aimless wanderings? Good melodies need at least a couple of “focus notes”. _____________ Read more about “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, the songwriting eBook collection that thousands of songwriters are using every day. _____________ Many songwriters find melodies hard to write — not an intuitive, natural thing […]

What You Need to Know Before Writing Your Next Melody

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-book bundle, and learn to write better songs! We usually think of good melodies as having a distinctive shape and a climactic high point. It may surprise you to know, however, that it’s possible to have melodies that use very few notes, almost no distinctive contour, and seem to […]

Creating a Melody Using "Plateau Pitches"

By Gary Ewer, Senior Instructor, Dalhousie University, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. • Follow Gary on Twitter • Make songwriting enjoyable again! Check out “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle – available now at a 50% savings! ________________________________ I use the term “plateau pitches” to describe a way of constructing melodies where the notes dwell on one […]

Melodies Without Shape: Doomed to Be Failures

•Written by Gary Ewer, Senior Instructor, Dalhousie University, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. • Follow Gary on Twitter for website updates, songwriting tips and more. • Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” suite of songwriting e-books at a 50% savings, and get “Chord Progression Formulas” free of charge. _____________________________________ To the untrained ear, a melody may […]

Using Plateau Pitches to Organize the Structure of Your Melody

Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter Jason Aldean’s latest hit on the Country charts, “Big Green Tractor,” demonstrates a great technique for building melodies that work: plateau pitches. It’s a way of structuring a melody to ensure that you get a controlled build through your song that […]