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“So where is YOUR hit song?”

Many people sent me a message or commented on my posts: “so where is YOUR hit song?” – or something like this.

I know that these people are not asking an honest question, they don’t really want an answer. And I almost always ignore them. The only purpose of these comments is to “attack” and argue. New ideas like The Rhythm Code can cause serious cognitive dissonance, which means, people have a hard time adopting something new. Continue Reading

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Word Painting – Music That Sounds Like The Lyrics

music that sounds like the lyrics / word painting

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.

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Songs that use 7/4 time

songs that use 7/4 time

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.

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Songs with one note melodies

songs with one note melodies

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.

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How to develop Relative Pitch

how to develop relative pitch

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.

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