Articles
Songwriting & Music Industry Guidance
How to Focus Your Music Career—Doing What Matters
We may not realize it, but when we determine to share our music outside the confines of our own living rooms, we shift from being a songwriter to being an entrepreneur.
How to Set Your Lyrics to Music: 8 Tips
Now, with a few decades of lyric struggle behind me, I can understand what is so hard about setting lyrics to music. The fact is, choosing a melody, chords, and groove that enhance the meaning of our words and marry them all precisely is no small task.
The Secret Superpower of Great Songs
At all points in a song, chords, melody and lyric should work together to create a consistent experience. Where the chord progression cadences to the tonic, the melodic phrase comes to a close and the lyric topic finishes, with a strong rhyme like a cherry on top.
Getting Started With Sensory Writing
Sensory writing is writing from the senses of taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and movement.
Getting Past Second Verse Troubles
We songwriters know the challenge of finishing songs, especially when it comes to writing second verses.
How to Write Songs with Killer Hooks
As a songwriter, I know that a hook is a powerful tool that can make my song unforgettable, but what exactly is a hook? And how do songwriters harness this musical and lyrical power?
Simple Tools for Better Melodies
Simply put, melody is rhythm plus pitch. The pitch tells us what note to sing, but the rhythm tells us when and how long to hold it. Many times we songwriters play with pitch while turning a blind ear to rhythm. But it is rhythm, I think, that produces a more definable melody than pitch alone.
How to Manage Difficult Critique
We began making music because we felt we had something to express. So what do we do when the feedback we get on our songs is vague, generalized, and tells us to emulate what is already out there?
The Importance of Contrast
Imagine if every section of our lyric and melody had the same number of lines, the same rhyme scheme, and the same rhythms. It would be predictable at best, and infinitely boring. Many times we find ourselves in just this position, unable to break out of the familiar.
The Power of Destination Writing
It is no secret that writing from an authentic point of view is a great way to get a listener hooked. It’s one thing to tell a story and another thing to tell a relatable story. Easier said than done, huh? In order for the listener to truly feel what you are talking about, they need to be able to imagine themselves in the character’s shoes. We do this successfully with a type of object writing called destination writing.
Focus on the “Why”
Many times, we songwriters focus on the “what” of our song lyrics, telling elaborate stories with various characters and events. But come the chorus section, we begin to face down the “why” instead. “Why” is the reason we wrote the song. It is the culmination of our detail into one complete solitary thought, producing the “ah-hah” moment we songwriters lust after. A song without a purpose is like a joke without a punchline. And we’d be amazed how often we miss that all-important question, “Why?”
How To Rhyme Like a Boss
Rhymes can help give a song its ability to create a believable experience. We are going to talk about five different types of rhymes: perfect rhymes, family rhymes, additive/subtractive rhymes, assonance rhymes and consonance rhymes.
3 Reasons Your Songs Will Never Rival Your Idols…and Why You Shouldn’t Worry
We spend a good portion of our early writer years wafting in and out of love with our songs. One moment, we’re flirting with a beautiful new melody. The next, we’re convinced it belongs to someone else. We can’t seem to find and define what makes our songs lovable. Sometimes it feels like all the good ones are already gone. So why is comparing our songs to those of our idols always a losing game?
Why Your Mom Loves Your Songs & What You Should Do About It
For most songwriters, Mom isn’t a trustworthy source of feedback. She’s delightfully ignorant about the craft, never worked at a record label, and has a history of giving her sweet baby James the benefit of the doubt. Even if mom’s perfected the art of sugar-coated criticism, deep down our inner teen knows the old eye-roll and ‘you just don’t understand me’ puts the guilt back where it should be - in the relationship rather than the song.
4 Tips to Improve Your Songwriting
As songwriters, we’ve all wondered, "Are we doing the most important things to make progress every day with our songwriting craft and our industry aspirations?". Use the following tools regularly, and you will inevitably see progress.
Write Faster, Judge Less
Something I’ve learned over the course of my writing career has come from these two somewhat opposing processes to writing: Involving my analytical brain during the creative brain-storming stalls my writing and clouds my judgement.
Simple Tools to Write from a Title
When we start with the title, we are starting with the main message. The title typically falls in the chorus, is usually in the power positions of the first, last, and even the middle line of the chorus section, and may be repeated several times. Titles that are sensory, meaning they involve a specific image such as when a noun and verb are combined, can sometimes be easier to develop into a song than titles that are more general.
How to To Write Songs with Groove
Some genres of music are driven largely by groove. If we’re not accustomed to writing with groove in mind, it can be difficult to push our songwriting into this space. A great first step to writing more groove-oriented songs is to listen to songs driven by a sense of groove. Trying to emulate those grooves on our instrument is an excellent way to start defining what groove is and how it functions in a song.
4 Critical Listening Tips for Songwriters
One of the most important techniques you can learn as a songwriter is how to listen critically. So how do we learn to do this? We start by breaking the different components of a song into four large moving parts: Melody, Chords, Lyric, and Groove.
How to Work Smarter and Not Just Harder
Having a desire to create without the time or process to create it can feel like an enormous burden. How do we make a plan when we’re not quite sure what activities will land us in the ballpark of the people we want to meet and the songs we want to write?