I think Rick Beato’s YouTube channel is one of the most important resources for up and coming songwriters and performers you’ll find online. I don’t always agree with his analyses, but that’s music for you. There are many ways to analyze what’s going on in a song, and you’ll always learn if you keep an […]
Songs are short. Most of them, anyway. And by short, I mean usually less than four minutes. That may seem like an insignificant detail that’s hardly worth mentioning, but the shortness of songs is a kind of musical challenge: in a very short period of time, you need to offer the audience a complete musical […]
Not that long ago, most of the music you were likely going to hear was good music. I’m talking about before the internet made streaming easy and everywhere. If you were a child of any time before the later 90s, the music you heard was probably the music on the radio, and then the albums […]
Feedback is a tricky thing in the creative arts. Just because someone dislikes a song you’ve written is not an indication that you’ve done something wrong, or that you need to change anything about the way you’re writing. By the same token, if you only surround yourself with people who claim to love everything you […]
Music develops and changes over time as a kind of evolution: it takes what’s happened before, copying it to a large extent, but making small changes that move in a slightly new direction. It’s what biologists call “descent with modification from a common ancestor” in their field. We like to think that the music we’re writing is […]
