Many musicians, especially highly qualified musicians, hate pop music, especially today’s pop songs. If you are one of these people, you won’t like my opinion: if you think that ALL pop songs are bad, then the problem is you, not pop music.
Before you get angry, just hear me out first. Continue Reading
Technology is really cool. It’s cool because it allows you to read this blog post, and it’s also cool because thanks to the internet, people bought my book from 70 countries around the world.
But it’s not “cool” to use technology in song lyrics. Let me explain.
There are countless tools we can use when we construct a song. And word painting is one of the tools in a songwriter’s toolbox. It’s one of the ways to connect the text with the music itself. Word painting is the technique of creating lyrics that describe the underlying music literally, or vice versa. But it’s actually not a very new concept, it has been used by many composers in the past. Word painting developed especially in the late 16th century among Italian and English composers, for example, George Frideric Handel. Now, let’s see some examples of word painting in today’s pop songs.
Most songs are written in 4/4 time. And in fact, if you are aiming for writing a hit song, you should probably use a 4/4 time signature. There is a reason why almost all songwriters write their songs in 4/4 today. It’s what people prefer the most. In this article, we will discuss songs from artists like Sting, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead, The Beatles, Foo Fighters. They all created songs in 7/4 time. But take a look at the most popular songs of these artists. (Go to Youtube, search the artist name, and sort the videos by view count.) You can see that none of these 7/4 songs are amongst the most popular ones. Their most popular songs are all in 4/4. But of course, if you want to write something unique, you should try writing a song in 7/4. So let’s take a look at how successful songwriters doing it.
Most of the time, we use more than one note when we compose a melody or a motif. But it’s completely possible to write good melodies using only one note. But the truth is, there are no songs (at least not successful ones) that have only one note in the melody for the entire song. “One note melody” songs only use one note in certain parts of the song, and they use a “regular” melody in other parts of the song. Even “One Note Samba”, in which they deliberately composed part with only one note, contains SEVEN notes in the entire melody. So let’s see how a one-note melody can work, and how they use it in actual songs.
Whether you write songs or not, having a good relative pitch can be really useful for a musician. In this article, I will show you the technique I developed that helped me learn to recognize ANY chord inversion in 1 second. Using this method, it took me only 30 days to learn all this, working on it only 15 minutes a day. I truly believe that literally, anyone can learn this. If you can recognize songs from the radio, you can learn this.
We all want to write unique songs. Songs that have a very specific sound, a sound that can be associated with us. Obviously, nobody wants to sound like a copycat. So how can we make our songs different and unique? In this article, I will give you a few tips on how you can create your own unique sound.
Previously, we made an article about Lydian chord progressions. Spoiler alert: there is no such thing as a “Lydian chord progression”. In this article, we will discuss how we can create melodies in the Lydian mode.
Even if you have decades of experience playing music, when you start to write songs for the first time, you realize that it’s not that easy. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. You just need to learn new and different things in order to get on track with writing songs. So let’s see what are the things you can do to make songwriting easier.
Someone just asked me the question, “Do chord progressions have to be in the same key?”. In this article, I will explain if we can use any chord in any key, and in what context it is useful to use non-diatonic chords in our chord progressions.
