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.
We continue the series in which we analyze the songwriting techniques of successful artists. In previous articles, we wrote about the songwriting technique of Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, and Max Martin. This time we will discuss how Taylor Swift writes songs, and what chords she uses in her songs. From this article, you will learn why Taylor Swift’s songwriting is so unique. As I mentioned in the previous articles, today’s hit songs are constructed not by one person, but by many songwriters. Usually, it takes four or five songwriters to write a hit song. But let’s see how Swift’s songs are different from other artists’ songs.
Neo Soul or sometimes called Progressive Soul is a popular genre that incorporates elements from funk, jazz, RnB, hip hop, and even EDM. In this article, I will show you how you can build your own neo soul chord voicings and chord progressions from scratch. You can download all these chord progressions by subscribing to our newsletter!
Max Martin is a Swedish songwriter, producer, who is associated with many artists that became extremely famous with number one hits. And it was only recently that it became clear that it was the same person behind many of these hits. Obviously, many artists want to know the secret of how he can publish so many successful songs. In this article, we will talk about what chords Max Martin prefers, and what patterns we can find in songs he co-wrote.
Ed Sheeran is one of the most successful songwriters of the past few years, so naturally, many people want to learn how he can write so many good songs. In the songwriting course, I show many tools and techniques that he is using in his songs, including chord progressions, melodies, rhythm, and many more. In this article, I want to write about the system he is using to make chord progressions. For that, I analyzed 16 of his most successful songs, so keep in mind that this is not statistics of all his songs.
Ariana Grande is one of the most successful artists today. And even though her songs are relatively simple, I believe that they are very unique and different from any other artists out there. In the songwriting course, I already explained many of the songwriting tools and techniques that they use in her songs. In this article, I would like to write specifically about the things that makes her songs unique and better than other songs in the same genre.
The songwriting process consists of many parts and many steps. If you are a bass player, you might add extra emphasis on the bass groove. If you are a drummer, you might work extra hours on the drumbeat. But what is the most important part of the song? Is it the lyrics? Is it the drumbeat that makes people dance? Let me share with you what I think to be the most important part of the song, and why it is important to understand it.
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.
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.
