About three weeks ago, Miley Cyrus published a new song called “Flowers,” which you probably already heard. If you haven’t, here’s the music video:

When I first heard it, I didn’t like it, particularly the chorus. At first, I didn’t care much about it and thought it was just another song I didn’t like.

With the promotion of the song, which probably included paying big influencers to promote it on TikTok, I heard the chorus in more and more videos, particularly on TikTok.

At one point, when I heard the song again, I switched on my conscious mind to figure out the melody notes and the chords and I realized why I didn’t like the chorus. Continue Reading

You might think you know how to use a metronome, but chances are, you don’t. After working with hundreds of professional musicians for the past 20 years, I have found that almost all musicians don’t know how to use a metronome – even though they think they do.

If you have read my book, you already know what I’m talking about… but I still feel like I can share more thoughts on this topic. Continue Reading

In the past few weeks, many AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools have been published, and they have become extremely popular. One of the first tools was DALL-E, an AI image generator, which flooded social media sites within the first 24 hours after it was published. Chat GPT, an AI language model, became even more popular – more than 1 million people registered on the site in only 5 days.

It’s not a question that AI is the future, and we just have to learn to use these tools – the sooner the better. The question is, how can musicians use AI tools to make their lives easier? I have spent some time experimenting with these tools, so here are some ideas.

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Sometimes people send me a message or comment on my posts asking “so where is YOUR hit song?”.

I get where this comes from, but the truth is, a theory or system in music isn’t validated by the author’s own catalog of hits, it’s validated by whether it accurately explains patterns in existing successful music and gives others tools to use. 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.

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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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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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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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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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