Lately it seems that I’ve been getting a lot of comments, both through email and in the comments section at the ends of various posts, questioning some of the various songwriting principles I write about. Mainly, a comment will go something like this: “You say that chorus progressions are shorter than verse progressions, but I […]
In 2005, when I wrote my first eBook, “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”, I was planning to call it “The Essential Principles of Songwriting.” After some considerable thought, I reasoned that most people would be turned off by the word “principles”, and opted instead for “secrets.” To my mind, however, it conveys the same thing, […]
I don’t know if you feel the same way, but sometimes I learn the best lessons regarding music by thinking of something completely unmusical. Metaphors speak loudly and meaningfully to me. I like building things out of wood. It’s something I love, even if I’m not doing it at a professional level. But with every […]
In order to help students fully understand a topic, teachers will identify a list of principles that strive to explain as much as possible with as few words as possible. We teachers of music do that very thing: we study as large a collection of music as possible, and then come up with a few statements […]
There is a reason why treating the principles of good songwriting as if they were rules is a bad idea: you might inadvertently kill a good song. If good musical composition were guided by rules, many number 1 hits would likely have been tossed into the trash bin due to the fact that they did something […]
In a way, it’s hard to speak of “errors” in songwriting, because that implies that there are rules that have been broken. Songwriting isn’t guided by rules in the traditional sense of that word. If rules governed the creative process, writing music would hold little if any interest for us. Instead of rules, we are […]
