Song Analysis: “Pumped Up Kicks” (Foster the People)

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 E-book Bundle, and become a top-level songwriter! __________________ Foster The People’s current hit song, “Pumped Up Kicks” is a good model for a song that uses one set of chord changes that serves as the progression for the entirety of the song. Our instincts usually tell us that using […]

Why Some Chord Progressions Sound Aimless

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 E-book Bundle, and become a top-level songwriter! __________________ Writers of music have known, quite literally for centuries, that some chord progressions will unambiguously point to one note as being the tonic note. Such progressions are the kind that we refer to as strong. Strong progressions leave little doubt regarding […]

When Chorus Melodies are Pitched Lower Than Verses

Since you want song energy to either stay the same or increase as a song proceeds, it seems to be obvious that you’ll want verse melodies to sit, on average, lower in pitch than chorus melodies. This is because when pitches move upward listeners tend to interpret that as an increase in energy. But there […]

5 Ways of Starting Your Next Song

There are several tried and true ways of starting the songwriting process. And if you’re smart, you’ll experiment with all of them. How you start a song has a lot to do with how it finally sounds in the end. If you find that all of your songs have a similar sound, it could be […]

For Hit Songs, It’s All (Mostly) About the Chorus

Songs usually make use of several sections, all combining, of course, to make a complete musical composition. But for hit songs, it’s mostly about the chorus. Your verse, and pre-chorus if you use one, will describe a story, but what people want to hear is your reaction to that story. That reaction normally happens in […]

Two-Part Melodies as a Complete Song Structure

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle. Over 390 pages of songwriting instruction, covering every aspect of how great songs are written! _____________ In Classical music, it’s usually known as binary form. In popular songwriting, we normally just think of it as a verse with two sections, usually without a chorus. Two-part melodies are a good […]