Author: Tamas Bodzsar

It’s extremely easy to record our songs and song ideas nowadays. First of all, we can buy a decent microphone and an audio interface for relatively cheap. Technology is getting cheaper and cheaper (and better) every year. And secondly, there are many free DAWs out there we can use to make professional sounding records.

A DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is the software we use to record and edit our tracks. And many of us prefer to use PCs with Windows so we don’t have the option to use popular DAWs like Garageband which is only available for iOs users. So let me show you my top 5 favorite free DAWs for Windows.

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There are many tools a songwriter can use to write lyrics for a song. We can use metaphors, personification, rhymes, alliteration. One of the tools in the lyric writing toolbox is onomatopoeia. This is not a topic that many people are aware of, so I wanted to write an article about it in the blog. So let’s take a look at when and how we can use this technique in lyric writing, and how successful songwriters used it in their songs.

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Every songwriter gets to a point where it seems like all their songs just sound the same. This is a common problem, but there are many different ways to get through this plateau. Keep in mind that if you develop a unique “sound” as a songwriter, your songs will do sound the same in a certain way. And this is not a bad thing. Listen to any highly successful songwriters, you will realize that all their songs are somewhat recognizable. But at the same time, some songwriters publish more varying songs than others. In this article, I tell you a few ways you can vary up your songs if you feel like they sound very similar.

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The vocal melody is the most important part of a song in popular genres. And of course, there is no vocal melody without lyrics. Yet there are not many places where they teach about how to write lyrics. In fact, I haven’t even found a blog post that describes in detail how to start writing lyrics. So in this article, I wanted to share what I’ve learned about creating effective song lyrics after analyzing hundreds of successful songs.

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So you just finished a song and you are wondering whether if it’s potentially a hit? Writing a hit song is one of the Holy Grail for most musicians. And surely, many musicians became famous and successful by writing at least one song that became extremely popular. In this article, I will explain what aspects of the song you need to take a look at to measure whether if it’s a possible hit, and I will also explain why it is not enough to write a hit song.

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There are different situations in life when a songwriter considers whether it’s worth writing songs anymore. This can be a situation when your songs didn’t make any success at all, but I also know highly successful musicians who told me they hate to write new songs anymore. Depending on your situation and goals, there are many things to consider.

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A very old dilemma is whether we should write more popular songs that the audience likes or write songs that we like. I have been there, and I’ve seen the struggle of many bands and musicians. I think there are many misconceptions about this, so let me tell you my opinion.

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Do all chord progressions need to include the tonic? It depends on what we are talking about. Most people identify the “one” (I.) chord as a tonic, but the truth is, we can use four tonic chords in a song even if the song doesn’t modulate into another key. (I teach all the chord functions in our songwriting course.) But even if we only count only diatonic chords, there are two tonic chords: the I. and the VI.

So in reality, there aren’t many chord progressions without any tonic chords in them. However, if we only want to avoid the tonic “one” chord, we can find many examples of these kinds of chord progressions. And the truth is, there is no practical use in avoiding both the “one” and the “six” chords. It’s completely possible, but there’s no point in it.

If you want to learn more about this stuff, go through our online songwriting course in which I show you how you can create melodies for chord progressions that don’t contain the tonic I. chord.

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Adding a horn section to your arrangement can really spice up your song. Horns can play loud and high notes, so they really pop out in your composition, becoming almost as important as the vocal melody. And you can’t write songs without horns if you write in the style of funk, jazz, or Latin. Horns are essential parts of these genres. But it doesn’t have to be a fast, groovy arrangement. You can use horns in slow songs too. So let’s see what are the most important aspects of arranging horns.

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R&B is one of the most popular genres on the planet. However, R&B can mean a lot of completely different styles. Over time, R&B songs adopted the elements of pop, hip-hop, and EDM, and they became more and more simple. So if we go back in time, we can find very different sounding songs in every decade that are still considered to be R&B songs. In this article, I will write about how you can write a contemporary R&B song.

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