If you find that you battle songwriter’s block on a somewhat regular basis, here’s something you can try that might help: release yourself from the duty of writing an entire song in a sequential manner. It’s likely that the part of a song you work out first is the chorus hook. That’s common, because if […]
Every songwriter has an Achilles’ Heel — a weak spot in their writing technique. Surely that shouldn’t surprise us too much. That’s probably a truism that applies to practically anything we do in life: we have the things we do well, and then the things we struggle a bit with. As you practice that weak […]
One of the reasons that you might add a bridge to your song is that it can make it just a bit longer, if all you’ve got is a couple of verses. So if, by the time you’ve reached the end of your second go-through of the chorus, you feel that your song would sound […]
You may think that a good chord progression is the end result of a random process, but it rarely is. If you spend your time playing one random chord after another, you’ll be looking for a long time before you find something that works. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have the […]
When a songwriter is asked the question, “How do you start a song?”, they usually mean, “Which element of a song (lyrics, melody, chords, etc.) do you work on as your first step?” That element then becomes the identifier for a particular songwriting process: a “lyrics-first process”, a “melody-first process”, and so on. No matter […]
If you like starting the songwriting process by figuring out a good chord progression, you probably like how chords very quickly convey a mood. And once you’ve got that mood, you find that other things fall into place quickly, especially a song topic, tempo, rhythmic treatment, and so on. But there are some potential problems […]
