Author: Tamas Bodzsar

It’s obvious that all songwriters want to create a chord progression that is interesting and effective so listeners will be engaged while they listen to the song.

But what if your chord progression is too simple or sounds boring? How can we create a more effective chord progression without overcomplicating the song?

We can use countless songwriting tools to make a chord progression sound more interesting, but I’m going to write down only a few of them here. If you want to learn more, you can go through my course to learn the tools that are used by successful songwriters.

Sometimes it’s hard to be unbiased with our own song, and it’s hard to decide if it’s good or it may need some fix here and there. One of the examples is when we don’t know if our chorus is long enough and we can’t decide if it’s too long or too short.

I don’t believe that we should follow strict rules and patterns, and there are many different kinds of forms in songwriting. However, it’s always good to have a “benchmark”, or a guideline, something we can compare our songs with. So it’s always good to check out what are the most common forms in highly successful songs.

And don’t forget that there is a reason why certain song forms are very popular in songwriting. There are songwriting tools that are used by many successful songwriters because they are effective. They influence the listener on an emotional level.

So you can always experiment with your music, but keep in mind that the more your song differs from these popular forms, the more risk you take!

I analyzed a huge amount of songs (mostly in popular genres), and here is the result to answer your question: what is the average length of a chorus. In terms of the number of bars, seconds, and lines.

Continue Reading

If you have never written an original song before you might be wondering if it would worth the try to create your own songs instead of playing only covers.

I have a friend who is a two-time Grammy-winning sound engineer, who once said to me: “The most important things in the music industry are the songs. It’s all about the songs.”

I never forget this idea because it’s very true. If you are serious about your music career, it’s extremely important to write your own songs. But why is it so important?

Continue Reading

There are situations when extended chords can be used when we write a song. In this article, I will go through some of these situations, and show you how you can decide whether you should use an extended chord or not.

But first, I would like to make it clear what are extended chords.

Continue Reading

Writing a song takes time. Sometimes it’s a LOT of time, especially if someone is not an experienced songwriter. It took me about 2 years of work to publish my first single, then I created an album in a few months, and then I wrote my second album in one month. This is because I constantly learned more and more about songwriting. I would like to share all these songwriting tools that I learned in the past 10 years to help you write songs faster.

So here are the five tips that helped me write songs much faster:

Continue Reading

So you finished your song, but the problem is, it became too short, and you have no idea how to make it longer. There are a lot of ways you can extend your song, but first, let’s talk about how long a song should be.

The average pop song is about 4 minutes or less. And there is a reason why certain things are working in songwriting. There are some examples where the songs are shorter or longer, for example, the song “Power” by Kanye West is 1:43, which is much shorter than the average, or the song “The Rise And Fall Of Bossanova” is an extreme 13 hours long song. But the more you move away from the average, the more “risk” you take with your song.

So let’s take a look at what you can do if your song is much shorter than the average.

Continue Reading

We can choose from many scales and modes, and each of these different scales will give your melody a very different characteristic.

But let me tell you why it’s best to choose a simple major scale for writing a melody.

Continue Reading

If you ever tried to write your own songs, whether you are an experienced music virtuoso or a beginner, you probably realized writing original songs is not that easy. We can see that there are thousands of great musicians out there, but only a fraction of them are trying to create original songs. And most of these created songs are mediocre or worse.

But why is it hard to write songs?

Continue Reading

So you just finished a new song, and you are thinking about submitting it to a songwriting contest. And you are probably wondering if songwriting contests are worth entering or not. Let me share my thoughts about this topic.

It’s obvious that the winners can score big cash awards and other incentives, and you may think that your chances are very small for winning, but that shouldn’t discourage you.

I think you shouldn’t think of this as a lottery ticket. A songwriting competition is not a lottery, and you have much more to earn besides the first prize. Here are some of the benefits.

Continue Reading

In the previous post, I explained how you can find the best chords for your melody. In this post, I will explain how you can arrange a vocal melody in a way, so it becomes a 3-part, 4-part, or even a 5-part vocal melody.

I assume that you already have the chord progression for your melody, in fact, it is crucial to have the chords, so if you only have the melody, then go back to our previous post to find the right chords for the melody.

There are several techniques we can use when we write vocal harmonies, so let’s see what are these techniques.

Continue Reading