“Simply making Verse 2 louder than Verse 1 isn’t the answer. Simply making things louder doesn’t give you the natural energy build you’re looking for.” Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter I’ve mentioned recently in several postings that the basic energy level of your song should rise […]
“Implied chords are used by performers as a way of lightening up the music texture… you can build the song’s energy in a natural way.” Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter With even just a simple guitar accompaniment, you have a tremendous variety of sounds to […]
“There’s nothing worse than bad lyricists trying to sound deep. Like coolness, profundity can’t be faked.” Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter Leonard Cohen has spoken of songwriting as “cultivat[ing] this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about…” For him, and […]
Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter One of the more important preliminary decisions you make as a songwriter is to settle on a key. And that means you’re either going to choose major or minor. But why not try something that the writers of Jordin Sparks’ […]
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 […]
Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website Follow Gary on Twitter It doesn’t take much to make a song appear to be much deeper than it really is. It just takes doing little things that are just a touch out of the ordinary. Changing the time signature is one easy way […]
