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 […]
Writing music wouldn’t hold a lot of interest for us if everything was completely predictable. We like the fact that we think we’ve written something others will like too, but then we must wait and see what the final impact on an audience is. Over the past number of decades of pop music, there have been […]
Discover the 11 secrets that pro songwriters have known for decades. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle is being used by thousands of songwriters to take their music to a new level of excellence. Now with a 7th FREE eBook. Read more… ______________ Sometimes a poem will make a good song lyric, but don’t be surprised to find that […]
