From Amateur to Ace

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From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro | Gary Ewer

From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro Written by Gary Ewer, B. Mus

Copyright © 2013, Pantomime Music Publications Nova Scotia, Canada pantomimemusic.com

All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. This book is protected by Copyright registered with the Government of Canada’s Intellectual Property Office. Permission must be obtained in writing from Pantomime Music Publications for the use of any original contained within this publication. Written permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. Pantomime Music Publications may be contacted by writing: [email protected]

THIS IS NOT A FREE EBOOK.

This book, "From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro", is available only through Pantomime Music Publications through its websites: “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” (http://www.secretsofsongwriting.com) “Essential Chord Progressions” (http://www.essentialchords.com) “Pantomime Music Publications” (http://www.pantomimemusic.com)

From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro | Gary Ewer

Table of Contents Preface: How Do I Become a Professional In This Business Anyway? ................................................................................................4 Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?.........................7 Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?................................... 14 Chapter 3: How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music?..... 19 Chapter 4: How Do I Use Chord Inversions? ............................................. 25 Chapter 5: How Do I Write Songs When I Don’t Feel Inspired? ......... 32 Chapter 6: How Do I Create a Good Song Melody? ............................... 38 Chapter 7: How Do I Write Good Vocal Harmonies?.............................. 44 Chapter 8: How Do I Learn to Write Better Lyrics?.................................. 51 Chapter 9: How Do I Write a Better Song Intro?...................................... 58 Chapter 10: How Do I Write a Hook For My Song?................................. 63 Chapter 11: How Do I Protect My Songs? .................................................. 68 Chapter 12: How Do I Sell or Market My Songs? ..................................... 76 About Gary Ewer................................................................................................. 83

Table of Contents

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From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro | Gary Ewer

You may have been writing songs for years now, but lately you’ve noticed a change in your attitude. Though you’ve been completely ensconced in the amateur world ever since you’ve called yourself a songwriter, you’re starting to get that feeling that now is your time. You want to know if you’ve got what it takes to make it as a professional songwriter. It may be that you’re suddenly getting a lot of attention for your music; it may be that you’ve become a member of a band, and you’re their primary songwriter; or it could just be basic raw ambition. Whatever the reason, you’re tired of writing music only for that small audience that comes to your gigs. You’re wondering: Is it possible to make money as a songwriter? How do I become a professional in this business anyway? You may have noticed that anytime that you’ve mentioned your desire to transition to professional songwriter status, there’s always someone who says, “Well, that’s really hard to do.” Of course it is. But there are lots of things people do in life that are “really hard to do,” and someone’s doing them. And to be honest, if you’ve got talent as a songwriter, writing the music may not actually be all that hard for you. Getting attention for your music is the hard part. Is it possible to become a go-to songwriter, where other professionals are singing and playing your music? Well, again I say: someone’s doing it. There are people all over the world who are writing songs that others sing. If you’ve got ambition and patience, and if you’re writing good songs that others want to sing, the formula is in place for making this hobby a potential moneymaker. This eBook is full of prerequisites for making this happen. There are no guarantees, of course. It’s not like being a doctor, where as long as you complete all the courses and get high marks, the letters M.D. appear after your name, and you’re a doctor, ready for patients. The songwriting business is tricky to break into, and there is no guarantee for success. Like many things in life, you can do everything right and still not get the big break. Preface: How Do I Become a Professional in This Business Anyway?

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But there is one thing, more than anything else, that’s an absolute must for becoming a songwriting professional: you need to be able to write excellent music, and you need to be able to do it consistently. That point is going to be made several times in this eBook, particularly in the last chapter, “How Do I Sell Or Market My Songs?” You’ll be told several times that bad music doesn’t sell. And frankly, good music doesn’t sell either, because being good in the songwriting business isn’t enough to help you stand out from the rest of the pack. To get attention for your songs, they need to be exceptional. So if you aren’t writing excellent music on a fairly consistent basis, that is going to be your biggest hurdle. This eBook answers 12 “How Do I” questions; professionals know the answers, and it’s vital for you to know them as well. Several of the questions deal with important structural elements in music. Many of you, for example, are wasting a lot of time looking for the killer chord progression, and you need to know that killer chord progressions by themselves don’t really exist. That’s Chapter 1. Some of you aren’t aware that choosing a key for a song involves more than just finding one that makes it comfortable to sing the melody. That’s Chapter 2, and dealing with that question will help you as you put a demo recording together. The chapters that follow will deal with things you need to know to make a song work: how to write a hook, how to write a great melody or lyric, ideas on how to create nice backing vocals for your songs, and much more. You’ll also read chapters that deal with writer’s block, and give you solutions to the “How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music” problem that many songwriters (even professionals) face. The final two chapters deal with business issues vital to your plan to become a professional songwriter. Chapter 11 discusses the important topic of how to protect your music. That’s crucial if you’re going to be shopping your songs around. And Chapter 12 is probably the most important one: “How Do I Sell Or Market My Songs?” People don’t hire a songwriter out of the Yellow Pages like they hire a carpenter, so who’s buying music, and how do they let you know they’re looking? And how do you become the go-to songwriter that fills their needs? Making music as a songwriter is difficult, but you don’t need a book that simply reminds you of that fact. You’ve got ambition and drive, and you’re willing to take a chance. What do you have to lose? Like landing a dream Preface: How Do I Become a Professional in This Business Anyway?

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From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro | Gary Ewer

acting job on a hit TV show, however, there is a certain amount of luck involved. You need to be in the right place at the right time. But no actor gets the dream job if they’ve got problems with their acting technique. Bad actors don’t get work, and luck is irrelevant to the problem. Similarly, no songwriter makes it big if their songs have problems. If you can’t write good songs consistently, the songwriting business will never be more than a forever-unfulfilled dream. That is what this eBook is going to help you solve. The ideas in this book partner with the ideas that are described in “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 eBook bundle, and many of you are reading this book because you’ve purchased that set. Between these 7 eBooks, you’ve got the knowledge necessary for making it. But as with anything in the arts, knowledge is one thing, but it’s not everything. Talent, as opposed to knowledge, is an essential component, and it’s something this book can’t really assess for you. Sometimes the only way to know you have the talent necessary is to dive in and try to make your dream happen. So… DIVE IN!

Preface: How Do I Become a Professional in This Business Anyway?

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n a way, there’s a sense of irony in the thought that there might be a killer chord progression out there somewhere. Because of all the many thousands of songs that have become hits over the past 6 decades or so, it’s probable that the chord progression has been “killer” (if by which we mean the stand-alone reason for the song’s success) in far less than a dozen. There’s an obvious reason for that: people don’t generally walk about humming chord progressions. No, chord progressions don’t usually get the attention from average listeners that songwriters often hope or think they do. People will hum melodies, and the lyrics that are attached to them. They’ll feel the rhythm and tempo of the song. And to an extent they’ll bring the chord progression to mind, but only as a vehicle for all the other bits.

But now to look at this in a rather different way. In a sense, everything about a song has to be killer in order for it to rise to the level of being a hit. It’s not so much that a chord progression must be killer, because on its own it probably isn’t. Melodies have a better chance of being killer than chords. That’s because the melody you write must be unique or it’s not yours. That kind of uniqueness allows for the possibility of excellence to which chord progressions usually can’t aspire.

Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro | Gary Ewer

So why has the term “killer chord progression” insinuated itself into the lexicon of songwriting jargon in a way that might be described as an unhealthy fixation? What is it about chord progressions that makes some writers think, “Oh, if only I could find the killer chord progression, they’d listen to my song!”? The answer to that question may lie in the songwriting process itself. Many songwriters begin a new song by working out a chord progression. When you use chords as a starting point, it’s understandable that the desire for something unique – something “killer” – would be strongly sought after.

Earlier I stated that for hit songs, all elements need to rise to being killer in order for a song to be great. What I mean by that is that a song is not just a coming-together together of melodies, chords and lyrics. A song is a relationship of melodies, chords and lyrics. A melody is great if it’s the proper vehicle for the lyric. By itself a melody may sound unremarkable. But if that melody, and its own particular structure and sense of contour, marries perfectly with the emotional content of the lyric – perhaps enhanced by the instrumental construction – that melody can become enormously successful in a way that might not have happened on its own.

British progressive rock group Genesis describe their normal way of writing as a group improvisation. Lyrics, and the main vocal melodic lines from their early albums were often created after everything else, a habit they’ve described in interviews as being problematic, frequently resulting in vocals that were too busy for the instrumental mix.

Similarly, a chord progression, on its own, might sound uninteresting and unadventurous. But all chords, and the way they work together, have the potential to create mood. And if they create the right mood for your song’s melody, those chords can rise to the status of killer by virtue of Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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the way it supports that melody. The progression can gain attention for itself in a manner that’s possibly more than it would otherwise merit. When it’s all done well, listeners aren’t often aware that one element is succeeding so well because all or most of the other elements are succeeding just as well. “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” has a melody that’s famous for its beauty, but everything is beautiful about that song.

In a way, searching for a killer chord progression is like looking for a killer plotline in a television drama. Sure, a plot can seem to be killer, but in fact it’s everything together that makes it seem so. The best TV dramas are very well written, but also require an excellent cast, with excellent direction and technical crew. Background music needs to be well written or at least well chosen. Once you’ve got everything working together it’s easy to focus on the parts that seem to be killer. But then you’ll notice: everything is killer. I think the chords for Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know” – the fact that they waver back and forth between being in D minor and then in F major – are killer chords, because that kind of ambiguity enhances the mood and character of the lyric. I also think the chords for "Puff the Magic Dragon" (A C#m D A D A F#m B7 E...) are killer chords, because of the rising bass line at the beginning that partners beautifully with the melancholy descending melody, and because of its delightful simplicity. On their own, neither progression will necessarily draw attention to itself, but in both songs they are integral components, and a vital part of the recipe for each song’s success.

Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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So hopefully we can put to rest the search for the killer chord progression. On its own, it doesn’t really exist. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not searching for something. It could be that what’s stopping your songwriting An implied harmony means process at the moment is that you don’t that only part of a chord is have any chords that are working for present, but enough of the you. Sometimes, all you need is a bunch chord exists to imply the chord. of chords that you can experiment with, To give an example, if the bass just to get the songwriting process going is playing a C, and the singer is for you. moving around between the notes E and G, a C major chord If that’s all you need, it’s why four of the is implied, even if no other eBooks in “The Essential Secrets of instruments are playing. Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle pertain to chords. Because there’s no such thing as The opening instrumental a killer chord progression does not mean hook of Rihanna’s ”Only Girl to say that chords aren’t important – (In The World)” demonstrates they most certainly are. They are the the concept of the implied landscape upon which any good song is chord. The dancing 8th-note built. figure outlines an F#m chord, and pitch memory allows the My immediate advice would be to start listener to put it all together to playing through the chord hear the triad. progression lists you’ll find in “Essential Chord Progressions” and “More Essential Implied chords are a great way Chord Progressions.” Once you’ve played to thin out the texture of the a few of them, start reading “How to music. It works really well as an Harmonize a Melody” and listen to the instrumental technique for sound samples. Then go back to the verse 1 of a song, where you chord progression collections and play want a lighter sound before through a few more. Then check out giving a fuller texture in the “Chord Progression Formulas.” chorus. As you work in this fashion, your understanding of how chords work will improve, and you’ll start to notice that you’re able to create progressions of Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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your own. And hopefully you’ll also notice that on their own, chords are simply a foundation upon which and with which songs are constructed. If you can get chords, melodies and lyrics all partnering with each other, you’ll truly have something that is killer.

It may not be clear to you that the kind of progressions you might use in a verse are often a bit different from the kind you’d find in a chorus. But there are often differences. If you’re really keen to make sure that your chords have the potential to rise to the status of “killer” (i.e., really make everything else in the song stand out), here are some important tips:

1. Verse progressions can wander a bit, but chorus progressions are usually strong, short and repetitive. By “wander a bit,” all that’s meant is that it mirrors the intent of the lyric, which in the verse usually tells the story. Since choruses are comprised of short, catchy musical phrases, they are best accompanied with short progressions that point strongly to the tonic chord as being most important. 2. Good progressions feature lots of root movement of 4ths and 5ths. This means that from one chord to the next one, it’s beneficial to the overall strength of the progression if the roots of adjacent chords are 4 or 5 notes away from each other. This is even truer of chorus progressions than verse ones. 3. Consider balancing your use of major and minor chords within a song. For example, it’s very effective to use mainly minor chords in a verse, and then switch to major in a chorus. That’s all part of the contrast principle, which states that it’s beneficial to place contrasting (even opposite) ideas next to each other. In songwriting, besides minor moving to major, it’s also common to move from soft to loud, low to high, rhythmically tranquil to rhythmically busy, and so on.

Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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How to Substitute One Chord For Another There’s very little that’s random about chords. There’s a lot more that can be learned about them than this chapter could possibly give. But one important topic with regard to finding the progression that’s perfect for your song is to consider chord function. Most of the chords in any particular key can be classified as being tonic, subdominant or dominant. Not to oversimplify this, but you can create some beautiful progressions by switching one member of a category with any member of a category – assuming that the melody note still fits. So here’s a quick guide to doing that. The specific chord examples all come from the key of C major, but the Roman numerals are a way of showing you how to substitute chords no matter what key you’re in.

TONIC CHORD SUBSTITUTES: Am (vi); F (IV); (Ab) bVI; Dm7 (ii7)

SUBDOMINANT CHORD SUBSTITUTES: Dm (ii); Am (vi)

DOMINANT CHORD SUBSTITUTES: Em (iii); Dm/G (V9); F/G (V11); Dm (ii); F (IV)

 In pop music, most chord progressions are relatively strong, not fragile (ambiguous).  Good chord progressions will have a relatively obvious goal.  For any one key, there are 7 chords that exist naturally in that key. All other chords are considered altered chords.

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 The strongest progressions use chords whose roots are a 4th or 5th apart. That’s why circle-of-fifth progressions (C F Bdim Em Am Dm G…) are so strong and so common.  All chord progressions can be described by using Roman numerals, where the tonic chord (the one representing the key) is called ‘I’.  All chord progressions can be transposed to any key.  Predictability in chord progressions is not a bad thing.  Slash chords (inversions) need to have a reason for being used. Don’t just toss them into your music. The two most common reasons: 1) smooth out a jumpy bass line; and 2) provide a bit of chord variety if you’re using too much of the same chord.  Songs that begin with the writer working out a chord progression run the risk of having boring melodies.  Good chord progression contrast can happen as simply as using mainly minor chords in the verse, and major chords in the chorus.  Most songs need a constant harmonic rhythm, which means a sense of regularity to the frequency of chord changes. An altered chord is any chord that doesn’t naturally belong to the key of your song. Many songwriters use certain altered chords with regularity: flat-III, flat-VII, and so on. But here are two other chords to experiment with: 1. Secondary dominant chords: Take a minor chord, change it to major, and then follow it with a chord whose root is 4 notes higher. (e.g., C – F – Dm7 – G becomes C – F – D7 – G) 2. Augmented 6th chords. Play a major chord on the flat-VI degree of the key you’re in, adding a minor 7th on top, and follow it with a major chord whose root is one semitone lower. (e.g., C – Am – Ab7 – G – C )

Chapter 1: How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression?

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he key you choose for your song is mostly a matter of vocal practicality: how high and/or low can you sing? And if you want to know just how important that is, go to YouTube’s homepage and search for “Carl Lewis Singing National Anthem”. Get the key right, and you’re a star. Get it wrong, and you’re immortalized forever in the worst possible way.

How key intersects with singing range should be obvious. Every song has a tonal framework, a range within which all or most of the notes fall. For many songs in the pop genre, the range is surprisingly small. It’s not that common for songs to extend beyond an octave. There are reasons why pop songs are not overly adventurous when it comes to range; probably the most important one is basic singability. It makes sense to write a song that practically anyone can sing in the shower, or hum as they walk down the street. Writing a song that’s difficult to sing possibly means that it’s difficult to remember as well, and that’s not good.

The key of your song, because it ties in to vocal range, affects the overall energy of your music. Like other aspects such as tempo and instrumentation, moving the key up or down is going to have an effect on the performance. As they age, many singers are no longer able to hit the high notes like they used to. That’s because aging causes many of the body’s soft tissues to thicken and stiffen, including the vocal cords. Like strings on a piano or guitar, thicker vocal cords are not able to vibrate at the same rate as Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?

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thinner ones. So it’s interesting to compare a studio version of a classic tune from a few decades ago to something live done more recently. You’ll notice that the more recent versions have been transposed down a semitone or two to accommodate the aging voice. The lower key has a noticeable, if not accurately measurable, effect on the song’s energy.

The best way to choose the ideal key for your song starts with simply singing it in the key that you chose when you wrote it. That probably takes care of the range issue; you’re not likely to have written it in a key that’s unsingable for you. Having said that, though, your first choice of key may not be the ideal key. That’s because there are at least five different factors that can and should influence key choice.

There are at least five different reasons that you might give the key of your song more than just a passing thought: 1. The higher a voice is required to sing, the more the emotions are enhanced. 2. Experiment with the range, and observe the effect moving the key up or down has on the feel of the song. This kind of experimenting can produce interesting results. 3. Another factor that may affect key: the accompanying instruments. If you find that you like the key of E major, keep in mind that if you’re using an alto sax, that instrument will be playing in C# major – 7 sharps, which may be a bit beyond the abilities of some players. 4. Consider the possibility of changing key mid-song, if the first part of your song needs lower energy levels with the second part needing higher ones. A nice example of this is The Eagles’ “The Last Resort” Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?

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from their “Hotel California” album, which starts in E major and then modulates (changes key) to G major for the big ending. 5. If you’re putting a CD together (demo or otherwise), having all your songs in the same key can produce a kind of fatigue with your listeners. Always try to vary your song order and song choice to cover a range of moods, vocal ranges and key choices.

You may find as you work to choose a key that all the notes of the melody sit quite nicely in your chosen key except for that one high note. If that high note represents a climactic moment for your song, don’t be shy to scream it out a bit. In other words, one note sitting a little outside your vocal range Does Key Really Matter? should not necessarily mean that the There are very few entire melody must be moved down. It songwriters who think about might actually be a nice effect, or worry about key as a depending on the nature of your song starting point. Besides and lyrics, to shriek it and keep going. affecting vocal range, key The Carl Lewis attempt at the American might only really matter when National Anthem would be an example it comes to expanding your of when shrieking doesn’t work. Paul chord palette. When you know the key, it makes McCartney’s scream on the line “And I transposing of music easier. In see you again!” at the start of “Helter that sense, however, choosing Skelter” is a good example of a scream key really means coming up that works well. with the right chords that make the vocal line easiest to sing.

There are other factors to consider as well. For example, where you place the key doesn’t just affect the main vocal line. It also affects the way background vocals sound as well. You can hear the subtle difference in affect when you hear The Eagles sing the opening of their famous “Seven Bridges Road”, which they perform in the key of D major. Now listen to a group like “The Kentucky Lineman” do it a whole tone lower, in C major. The pitch relationships are all the same, but there is a subtle difference in tonal quality that impacts on the feel of the song. Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?

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And one other important factor to consider is the thickness and power of your backing instruments. I doubt Paul McCartney would have been comfortable screaming out his lines in “Helter Skelter” if he had been singing a cappella (i.e., with no instrumental accompaniment), or with a strummed acoustic guitar. If your band consists of loud instruments – electric guitars and bass, full drum set and keyboards – that kind of support is going to allow you to use a bigger voice, which allows you to sing higher.

How high you sing is often where the issue with key really lies. There aren’t too many songs that require you to place the key in order to accommodate the lowest notes of the song. Of course, if you want to sing “Elvira”, written by Dallas Frazier and made most famous by The Oakridge Boys, you’ll want to get that iconic bass vocal “Oom poppa oom poppa mow mow” to come out with some measure of strength. Too high, and it just doesn’t sound right. Too low, and it sounds like an obscene phone call.

 The most important consideration when choosing key is vocal range.  It’s possible to write songs without ever knowing what key they’re in.  The last point notwithstanding, it’s easier to develop more interesting chords if the key is known.  Audience members are rarely, if ever, aware of key.

Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?

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 Key is important if you’re writing out parts for instrumentalists or background vocalists.  Though rare in pop music, it’s possible for a song not to be in any particular key.

When we talk about changing a song’s key, we’re not usually talking about changing the quality of the key. In other words, major key songs, once transposed, are still major. But it can be a very interesting experiment to change a major key song into a minor key one. To do that, you need to be aware that building a chord above notes of a major scale will give you different chords than building them above a minor scale: Chords in a major key: I (major), ii (minor), iii (minor), IV (major), V (major), vi (minor), vii (diminished). Chords in a minor key: I (minor), ii (diminished), III (major), iv (minor), v (minor, or adjusted to major), VI (major), VII (major). To make the change from a major to a minor key, translate your chord progression to Roman numerals, move your song to a new tonic note, then convert the Roman numerals to minor key ones.

Chapter 2: How Do I Choose a Key For My Song?

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often use the analogy of going for a walk to describe the way different elements of songwriting work – how chords usually progress, especially. And that analogy is an appropriate one for the annoying problem of not knowing what to do if you’re stopped after only a few bars of music. Because if you were going for a walk, and you stopped after 10 seconds or so, you’d know the reason right away: you didn’t give enough thought to where you wanted to go. It can strike a bit of terror into you as a songwriter if you notice that your last few attempts at songwriting have ended in frustration mere bars into the task. The terror comes from the sinking belief that you’ve got enough of a spark to “get going”, but the spark quickly fizzles and you’re left with nothing but an 8-bar idea. Just to be clear – what I’m describing here isn’t writer’s block, per se. You can start any number of songs; you just can’t keep going.

As the going-for-a-walk analogy demonstrates, these kinds of problems usually come from not thinking things through at the beginning. Songwriting by individuals as a hit-or-miss activity, where you start conjuring up ideas and then hope that they lead to more ideas until you’ve got a 4-6 minute song, often doesn’t work. There is certainly a songwriting process that bands engage in where composition happens as a result of group improvisation. But the benefit of group improvisation as a compositional tool is that there is a constant flow of ideas from several different people. In Chapter 3: How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music?

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that case, improvising on scant ideas as a starting point might actually be a good way to work. But with songwriting as a personal, single-musician activity, what can you do to ensure that once you get started, you’ve got enough of something there that you can continue?

Bob Dylan once said, “A song is anything that can walk by itself,” and by saying so he adds to our analogy. Good music doesn’t sound like it’s being led in a certain direction. Good music: 1. has a sense of goal and purpose that comes from within; 2. gets its energy from its own components; and 3. has a sense of form and design, even if it’s not overtly thought about. So if you pick up your pencil to start writing ideas down, but only get a few minutes into the task before you feel yourself running out of artistic steam, your music will feel far from something that can “walk by itself.” If you feel that your last few attempts at songwriting have left you feeling that your musical walk has come to a confusing stop, here is a process that can get you sorted out. It involves sketching out a song map, which is simply a graphic representation of your song: 1. Take a sheet of paper, turn it horizontally, and draw a line along the bottom, from left to right. 2. Draw blocks from left to right above the horizontal line that represent the various sections you plan your song to have, and label them as such. This may change over time as you work out the details of your song, but it’s good to have a starting idea. So draw blocks that represent verse, chorus, bridge – any section you foresee the final version having. If you decide to start with an intro, put a block for that. Chapter 3: How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music?

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You may choose to start with the chorus, so be sure that’s reflected in your song map. If your plan changes significantly as you spend time on the project, you may want to toss the original map out and start another one. 3. Sketch out different musical ideas that you’ve formulated thus far. You may have a verse melody in your mind, so try to indicate it somehow within the verse block. If you write music, try some musical notation, written in, pasted or taped to the block. Do the same for the other sections of the song as appropriate. Sketch out the chord progression, and indicate any bits of lyric and any other elements that you’ve thought of so far. 4. At this point, you should be Not being able to continue feeling a sense of after the first 8 bars of music confidence as you see your might seem like a writer’s song appearing before your block issue, but in fact it’s eyes. Put anything and more likely to be a everything down as you songwriting technique issue. work out your song. If you By implementing the decide to change anything, suggestion of sketching out reflect the changes on your your song, you keep the form map. of your song foremost in your 5. If you’ve only got 8 bars of mind. It keeps you organized, music and nothing else, and allows you to give your you’ll see that very songs a good dose of structural obviously demonstrated by integrity. the fact that you’ve got a verse block with Chapter 3: How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music?

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information in it, and blanks everywhere else. So if you feel that your song is going to have a chorus, try creating a chorus lyric and melody that sound like an emotional response to the verse. Think about how a typical chorus will be pitched a bit higher than a typical verse, and that its rhythms are simpler, with both rhythm and melody working together to produce something catchy and more “hook-like” than a typical verse. The song map allows you to see what you know already, and what you need to decide in order to make your song work. 6. Start playing your song through, joining verse and chorus, and indicate any modifications that you make to your song on the map.

An architect would never think of planning a building by simply sitting and thinking about it. Soon into the creation process any good designer starts writing ideas down. Eventually those sketches need to be more clearly indicated, and this leads to a typical architect’s blueprint. In the world of songwriting the architect analogy works to a certain degree, especially as it pertains to the blueprint: a plan is necessary. You need to be able to keep your ideas clear and organized. By writing nothing down, your mind can get confused, you can forget some great ideas, and the creative process can grind to a halt. Trained musicians who can read and write music have a notation system that’s tailor-made for describing musical ideas with accuracy. But even if you can’t read music, the sketch method described in this chapter is going to serve you well. You might be surprised how easy it is to learn to read and write musical notation, and you’ll be pleased by how beneficial it can be to describing your compositional ideas to other musicians. Any good rudiments course will give you the tools you need.

Chapter 3: How Do I Keep Going After the First 8 Bars of Music?

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5 Great Ideas for Finishing a Song That Gets Stalled: 1- Ignore the song for a few days. Just put it aside, and you’ll be surprised to see that your brain was working on it even when you thought you were ignoring it. 2- Change your instrument of choice. If you’re a guitarist and you’re stuck, sit at a keyboard and keep working. Just start improvising, and you’ll benefit from the different shapes and ideas that naturally fall under your fingers. 3- Change your song’s tempo. Try your song slower or faster. You’ll discover things about the chords, melody, lyrics and rhythms that you likely wouldn’t have learned otherwise. 4- Listen to some good music. Listening to other music can create a lot of ideas. You’ll feel a sense of musical excitement that can stimulate your musical brain. 5- Analyze! You’ll recognize this suggestion from Step 2 of “7 Ideas to Help Kill Writer’s Block” from the previous chapter. Find a song that you like and study it. Analytical skills are a must for any serious songwriter.

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 Songs usually get stalled because you haven’t done any preplanning.  Improvising to develop ideas can work, but shouldn’t mean that you don’t need to plan your song.  Writing ideas down is far better than trying to remember them all.  Listen to good music from all genres.  Good music is like a musical journey. As with all journeys, travelers like to think that something good is about to happen.  Consider forming a songwriting partnership as a good way to make it easier to write more than 8 bars of music.  Putting a song away for a few days is a good way of clearing your mind.  It’s sometimes a good idea to be working on more than one song at a time.

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f you’re a guitarist or player of some other chording instrument, you’re already likely to know about slash chords, which are chords that use a different bass note than what the letter name indicates. They’re called slash chords because of the way they are normally indicated in typical pop song chord chart notation: Fm/Ab The slash in the chord above separates the name of the chord – Fm – and the note that the bass should be playing – Ab. The technical name for a slash chord is an inverted chord. Using slash notation means that it’s theoretically possible to indicate a note after the slash that doesn’t come from the chord in front of the slash. You could technically write Fm/B. But that circumstance is rare, and it’s more common that the bass note be one that exists in the chord being played above it. Chord inversions have a wonderful way of making music sound different while still using the notes of the original chord. It’s common to think of chords as having just three pitches, and four if you include a 7th. But a chord is any simultaneous playing of three or more notes. In that sense, you could lay your forearm on the piano keyboard, and whatever 50-note smash-up happens is a chord. Not identifiable using normal chord chart theory, but a chord nonetheless.

Chapter 4: How Do I Create and Use Chord Inversions?

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But in tonal music, by which we mean any music that points to one particular chord as being the tonic (the harmonic goal) it’s the triad that will concern us most. A triad is a 3-note chord that’s been constructed to have a root, and 3rd and a 5th, like this F major chord:

Most if not all of the music you write, play and listen to use triads. The triad above is said to be in root position, because the root is the lowest note. Shall I make this really simple? If the triad looks like a snowman, with the three notes equidistant, it’s in root position. To invert a triad means to put one of the other notes at the bottom, and move the root to a higher position:

The triad above is still an F major chord, even though F is no longer the lowest sounding note. Why? Because it’s the notes that make up the chord, not the order of the notes, that tells us which chord it is. And since there are three notes in an F chord, there’s one more way those three pitches can be configured:

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So with any triad, there are 3 possible positions in which it can appear. Root position we already discussed, which is any triad with the root on the bottom. When the 3rd is on the bottom we call it 1st inversion, and when the 5th is on the bottom it’s called 2nd inversion. What Is a Pedal Point? In this chapter we’re talking about putting a note other than the chord’s root at the bottom of a chord. If you choose one particular note, and keep it in the bass no matter what the chord is above it – even if it doesn’t technically belong to the chord – it’s called pedal point, and it’s a nice effect to experiment with: F/C C Bb/C C G/C C…

The chords on the previous page are shown in their simplest form: three notes. But of course, you hear a lot more than three pitches when you strum your guitar. And if you play in a band, you might be hearing a dozen different tones all happening at the same time. But if you make note of which ones are actually happening when a band plays an F chord together, you’ll notice that everyone is probably only playing an F, an A or a C. When we talk about chord inversions, we’re really only interested in the bottom note. If you are the guitarist in your band, and you see ‘F’ in your chord chart, you strum an F chord with F as the lowest sounding note. Even if you aren’t playing F as your lowest note, your bass player should be. That’s what’s required when

you see ‘F’. If you see F/A, it’s intended that an F chord should still be played, but the note A should be the lowest sounding note – the so-called 1st inversion. It offers a subtle change in the sound of the triad. It’s still an F chord, so it will still have that sound. But changing the bottom note to an A makes the chord slightly less stable. In this context, less stable does not at all mean less desirable. It’s simply less likely to be the kind of chord you might want to end a song on. (Having said that, Queen ends their hit single “You’re My Best Friend” from their “A Night At The Opera” album on a C/E, which, like F/A, is a major triad with the 3rd on the bottom.) Chapter 4: How Do I Create and Use Chord Inversions?

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Of all the possible positions you can play, 2nd inversion triads are the least stable of all. F/C means that you’re playing the notes of an F chord (F-A-C), with C (the 5th) in the bass. Again, least stable does not mean ugly or unpleasing in any way. Since you can hopefully hear that the various possible positions of chords give subtly different sounds, the question, and indeed the point of this chapter, is: how do you use chord inversions? In fact, why do we use them at all? There are two main reasons in pop music why inversions are used. The first reason is one we’ve been alluding to, which is that they provide a subtle variation on the sound of the triad. A root position triad is by far the most common position that songwriters How do you know if a chord use. Just check most chord charts for inversion is being used hit songs, and you’ll see that the vast majority of the chords are indicated properly? The decision is up to you, and to what you feel by simple letter names, meaning sounds good. It’s often risky to root position. But every once in a simply throw chord inversions while, you’ll see chord inversions, into the mix with no specific mainly for the reason of adding a theory behind the decision. But slightly different colour to the music. sometimes that kind of The second reason is to smooth out a randomness can succeed for no particular reason. Don’t be jumpy bass line. There’s nothing afraid to experiment. wrong with jumpy bass lines, of course. But once in a while, particularly in slower tempo songs, it’s a nice effect to try to get the bass line moving by step rather than by leap. When you hear the so-called “walking bass line”, you’re probably hearing lots of inverted chords.

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A song that shows both reasons clearly is “God Only Knows”, written by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, and recorded by The Beach Boys for their seminal album “Pet Sounds.” The first two inversions used in the chord progression for the verse are the first type, the kind that is meant to offer interesting variety of sound. The other two inversions in the second half of the verse are there to smooth out the bass, creating an appealing chromatic line:

In general, you’ll find that verse chord progressions will use inversions more often than chorus progressions, but that is by no means a rule. As you study “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”, you’ll discover that chorus progressions tend to be shorter and tonally stronger than verse progressions. Part of what makes a progression stronger is the tonic chord being more obvious, but also that chords are presented in root position.

So if there were any guiding principles involved with chord progressions and inversions, it would be the following:

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 For every inversion you use in a progression, you should be able to answer the question, “What’s that doing there?”  Inversions work best in the middle of progressions, and are trickier to use at the very beginning or very end.  To make a chord progression more interesting, the best first option would be to try inverting some of the chords rather than changing the progression by adding altered chords.  If a progression that uses all root position chords doesn’t work well, it’s doubtful that inverting some of the chords will improve things.  Avoid using too many inverted chords in a row. They’re a bit too unstable, and need a root position chord every once in a while for strength.

Chord Inversions, Bass Lines and Melodies It’s always a good idea to think about how the melody of a song interacts with the bass line. Listeners tend to notice melody and bass before they notice other song elements. So when you use chord inversions, not only are you changing the bass line, you are also changing the relationship between the bass and the melody above it. For any song you write, whether you use inversions or not, it’s a great idea to sing your song with just the bass as an accompaniment, and listen to how those two lines interact. This is especially advised if you are using chord inversions, because they will always change the bass line.

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 Most pop music uses triads, which are 3-note chords, comprised of a root, a 3rd and a 5th.  Most chords in pop music are in root position, meaning that the root of the chord is the lowest sounding note.  A chord inversion means that a note other than the root is lowest.  Inversions are also known as slash chords because guitar charts use a slash to separate the chord name from the desired lowest note.  Every time you use a chord inversion, you should always be able to answer the question, “What’s that inversion doing there?”  A chord inversion is used either for variety of sound, or to smooth out a jumpy bass line.  Inversions often work best in the middle of a phrase, not so much at the beginning or end.  Chords (triads) with the 3rd in the bass are called 1st inversion triads.  Chords with the 5th in the bass are called 2nd inversion triads.  Triads in root position are the most stable, followed by 1st inversion, then 2nd inversion triads.

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ave you ever noticed that we tend to use river analogies when we talk about our creative minds? We often describe what we do as “getting in the flow.” Sometimes, when we can’t seem to “get in the flow”, we might describe our difficulties by saying that our ideas or abilities have “dried up”. It’s understandable that we think that way, and it’s a very good analogy. Every once in a while I get an email from someone that must be a difficult one for them to write. They’re certain that they must be a songwriting imposter. What else could explain why songwriting used to be relatively easy, and is now practically impossible? That it used to be easy to get the ideas to flow, but now everything seems to have dried up. There is a quality of permanence to rivers. When we see a river flowing, we don’t think of the possibility of it suddenly drying up. When it does, and that riverbed looks dry and cracked, it certainly looks permanent. So if you think of your songwriting abilities as being analogous to a flowing river, suffering from writer’s block may seem like a permanent drying up, even if it’s only been a few days. The creation of good music is based on certain principles, and not so much on rules as such. At times, though, when writer’s block has left you unable to come up with anything good to write, you almost wish there were rules. Then at least you could follow a set of steps and you’ll be back to writing again in no time. Kind of like fixing a stalled lawnmower; for someone who knows what they’re doing, there are only a few things that are likely to have gone wrong, and a mechanic following a list of steps usually fixes it quickly.

Chapter 5: How Do I Write Songs When I Don’t Feel Inspired?

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Fixing writer’s block can be trickier than fixing a lawnmower because Patricia Houston, past editor-inthere can be many reasons why the chief of the Canadian Medical ideas have dried up, and even Association Journal, uses a great knowing the reasons doesn’t analogy to describe writer’s block: necessarily solve the problem. It’s normal for songwriters to “[T]he car is in gear and the experience a mild kind of writer’s foot is on the gas pedal, block on an almost daily basis. [but] the person is not That’s to be expected. Most people going anywhere because simply can’t keep churning out ideas anticipatory anxiety has hour after hour, day after day. compelled the driver to put Almost daily, the notion of what to on the emergency brake.” do next will suddenly feel elusive. But at those times, you solve it by doing the most natural thing: you stop. Then you go do something else. Either later that day, or the next day, you’ll find that you feel suddenly refreshed and able to continue to work. Sometimes it’s best to take a day or two away from the task of songwriting, and we call that “recharging the batteries.” But what do you do if the block continues for more than just a couple of days? What if it’s been a week, and you still feel uninspired, and can’t seem to generate even one creative thought or idea?

Back in 1983, an educational psychologist named Robert Boice conducted an experiment on 27 university professors who were all suffering from chronic writer’s block. He divided the professors into three groups of nine. He instructed the first group to only do writing that was essential to their daily job. In effect, he told them to stop writing. For the second group, the

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instruction was to only write if they felt inspired. (This is probably what you instinctively do to solve writers block.) It was with the third group that Boice implemented his most interesting scheme. If you want to give this method a name, I suppose the best would be: cure by punishment. For these profs, he instructed them to produce three pages of writing every day. But he did more than that – he fined them $15 for every day that they missed their writing target. And he decreed that the $15 would go to an association that they hated. It was a little like telling Rush Limbaugh that his $15 would go to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

So what were the results? For the first do-only-essential-writing group, the results were less than stellar. On average, they came up with one good idea to write about every 5 days or so. For the second write-when-you-feel-like-it group, the outcome was a bit better. They produced a good writing idea every 2 or 3 days. But the third group – the ones that were forced to write for fear of financial punishment – they excelled. They produced a good writing idea every day – at least! Keep in mind that these were university professors, and you’d think that a $15 fine would be pretty small potatoes to them, even in 1983 dollars, and hardly an incentive to write at all. But it worked.

So what should this mean to a songwriter? Assuming that the way a writer of words comes up with ideas is similar to the way songwriters do (and I believe that to be the case), the most important thing you can do to solve writer’s block is to create a daily songwriting schedule and stick to it no matter how uninspired you feel. That’s because Boice discovered something that hadn’t been considered before: the creative process begins with writing, Chapter 5: How Do I Write Songs When I Don’t Feel Inspired?

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not with inspiration. Once you get something written down, you start to feel inspired. It may not feel that way, but all the evidence points to this being the case. So create for yourself a daily (or almost daily) writing schedule, and force yourself to write even if you don’t feel like it. You will be amazed by how quickly ideas will start to flow, and inspiration returns. That feeling that you must be a musical imposter will also disappear. Are you going through writer’s block, but you’ve got deadlines and commitments to meet that don’t allow you to stop? One idea you can try is to grab an instrument you don’t normally – or even ever – play, and have a go at writing music with it. If you’re a guitarist for example, your piano skills may be bad or even laughable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try making melodies. The fact that it’s an instrument you’ve never played before means that you’ll find yourself creating melodic shapes and ideas that are fresh and novel, because those shapes may not naturally occur for you when you play your more familiar instrument.

Songwriting, BungeeChord Style

Curing Writer’s Block With Mindless Activities

Try this: Set a timer for 2 minutes, and try writing a complete song. Don’t do any pre-planning, just dive in! As soon as you’re done, record your song and give it a listen. No matter how bad you think it sounds, there are huge benefits to this kind of speedwriting. It actually teaches your brain how to be creative!

Research shows that doing mindless things actually stimulates the creative side of the brain. So when you feel frustrated and lacking imagination, try doing a crossword puzzle, assembling a model airplane or jigsaw puzzle, build a house of cards – anything that allows your brain to relax and recharge.

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7 Ideas to Help Kill Writer’s Block 1. Do small-scale writing projects. Don’t feel you must try to write a full song every time you sit down to write. 2. Choose a favourite song that’s not your own, and analyze it. Dissect it, pull it apart, and try to figure out what makes it work. 3. Get involved in another art form. You’d be amazed what doing something entirely different – singing, dancing, painting, short-story writing – can do to get your creative juices flowing again. 4. Concentrate on practicing your instrument. If songwriting is proving to be a frustration, change your focus to working up your instrumental chops. 5. Give songwriting or instrumental lessons. If creating music isn’t working for you, giving guitar, piano or singing lessons is a way to feel inspired and get motivated. 6. Transcribe music. You know that Van Halen guitar solo you always admired? If you’ve got some music theory, try transcribing the solo. Even if you can’t read music, try replicating the solo yourself. It’s a very inspirational activity. 7. When all else fails, stop. There’s nothing wrong with simply taking a few days off. Feeling creatively dry may simply mean that you’re creatively exhausted. So take a break for 3 or 4 days, and see if your musical excitement returns.

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 Inspiration should not be a requirement for writing.  The professional’s creative process usually starts with writing, and inspiration then follows.  Songwriters need to create a daily, or almost daily, schedule that is

their time to write – no distractions, and no exceptions.  Waiting to feel inspired is not the best way to cure writer’s block.  A normal writing session should be 20 minutes to an hour in length.  Having ideas dry up during a writing session is normal, and not an indication of writer’s block.  Feeling uninspired is not a reason to avoid writing.  When you feel unable to create musical ideas, try other art forms, such as painting, short story writing, dancing or listening to music.  Creating a songwriting partnership with another composer is a great way to stay excited about writing.

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usic is a concept that’s immediately understood on some level by nearly everyone. True, most have a very limited vocabulary when it comes to describing what they’re hearing. And most do a rather poor job of accurately relating what they like or hate about a certain song other than to say, “I really like this part”, or “This song sucks.” But everyone “gets” music. You start playing, and immediately even the most unmusical people we know will start tapping their foot, nodding their head, and humming the melody, even if badly. It’s astonishing that we’re able to know anything at all about music. Think of it this way: what we’re doing when we hear music is we’re listening to the air vibrate. And that’s all. I could go to a piano right now, play the first few notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, and even your tone-deaf Uncle Bernie would be able to name the song. He could tell you nothing else, mind you. He wouldn’t be able to tell you the key. He’d have no idea what notes were just played, which time signature was implied, what rhythms were used, or anything. And yet… he’d tell you with certainty that “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was just played. In short, all he heard was the air vibrate. His brain interpreted the resulting sounds as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and that’s as natural a mental process as walking and talking.

Chapter 6: How Do I Compose a Good Song Melody?

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In Chapter 1, “How Do I Find the Killer Chord Progression”, the point was made several times that chords only become “killer” if everything else in the song is killer. The same applies to melodies. It’s hard for a tune to do well if it isn’t being supported by great lyrics and or a good chord progression. But just as with chords, there are things you can do to not only make your melodies beautiful, but to make them more easily remembered. Actually, the ability for a melody to be remembered is arguably more important than its inherent beauty. In this chapter we’re talking about what makes a good melody, which is possibly different from what makes a beautiful melody. Some melodies, such as Arlen & Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, Peter Cetera’s “If You Leave Me Now”, and the classic folk song “Danny Boy” are songs famous for their beautiful melodies. But many songs become number 1 hits on Billboard without having a melody that would be described as beautiful.

You’re going to discover, in “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”, that what makes a good verse melody is not necessarily what would make a good chorus melody. There are a few crucial differences:  Verse melodies are often lower in pitch than chorus melodies.  Verse melodies often avoid overuse of the tonic (key) note, while chorus melodies use it as an important melodic goal.  Chorus melodies use a good amount of repetition, often in conjunction with a noticeable hook. Keep in mind that these are generalizations, not rules.

Beauty, when it comes to melodies, is simply a characteristic that may or may not play a part in a song’s success. There are things that make a melody beautiful, and this chapter will deal with them. But what about “good”? For a melody to be good (and here we must talk about a melody as if its qualities are not affected by other song components), it usually needs to exhibit the following five characteristics: 1. Uses repeating melodic shapes. (Think of the verse of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”, and you’ll see what I mean. The melody is comprised Chapter 6: How Do I Compose a Good Song Melody?

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of short melodic fragments that repeat either identically, or almost identically.) 2. Uses short, easily sung phrases. This is especially true of chorus melodies. Long, wandering melodies can blur the sense of form and be difficult for a listener to recall. 3. Has a strong sense of harmonic goal. One way to see if your melodies have this crucial element is to sing it with no accompaniment – just you singing, and nothing else. As you sing, it should feel at least a bit obvious where chords should change, and the notes of your melody should hint at what those chords might be. 4. Sits within a relatively compact range. It might surprise you that some of the world’s best melodies don’t actually use all that many notes. An octave range is usually sufficient for most typical pop songs. The range of your melody, from lowest note to highest, is typically different for the verse than it is for the chorus. Verse melodies are usually lower than chorus melodies. Here’s something interesting 5. Uses a song’s lyric to to try: create a “new” song imply melodic contour. melody by taking an alreadyYou can go a long way to existing melody and playing it making a song more backwards. It doesn’t always memorable if you place work because melodies are emotionally significant designed to work in one words in musically direction. But every once in a significant places. One way while you’ll discover hidden to do this is to place key beauty by playing from back to words in high or otherwise front. climactic spots in your melody. I know of no study that can put a percentage on this, but I would wager that at least 80% of the biggest hits in the modern day popular song genres demonstrate those five characteristics.

But what about beauty? What is it about a melody that’s beautiful, as opposed to (or shall I say “in addition to”) good? Part of the formula is a Chapter 6: How Do I Compose a Good Song Melody?

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characteristic quite apart from melodic shape: tempo. We usually require the tempo of a beautiful song to be somewhat slow, certainly no faster than moderately slow. Faster than that, and a certain kind of musical energy enters the equation. The tempo of a song seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of beauty. In addition to being relatively slow, a beautiful melody usually needs to display the following characteristics: 1. Has a noticeable climactic high point. That climax usually happens near – but not exactly at – the end of the melody. 2. Is mainly stepwise, with a few leaps for musical energy. Those leaps are usually in an upward direction (“If You Leave Me Now”), but sometimes downward leaps can be effective (“Man In The Mirror” – written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett, made most famous by Michael Jackson on his “Bad” album (1987). 3. Uses a good mix of short and long note values, with longer ones on emotionally significant words. The slower a melody is, the less likely it’s going to have or need a “hook”. A hook is a short melodic and rhythmic idea, frequently found in the chorus, that makes a song immediately memorable and attractive. Hooks are often an important part of the success of a song. But in slower songs, the songwriter is more likely to rely on a melody’s contour (in addition to the lyric) to “grab” the listener.

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The Difference Between a Melodic Hook and a Melodic Motif You often hear about the hook as a crucial songwriting element. A hook is a short musical idea, typically a melodic fragment partnered with a catchy rhythmic component that often appears in a chorus. It repeats frequently, and many see it as a crucial part of a hit song’s success. There are in fact several kinds of hooks, and they can be an important ingredient to making a song memorable. But there is another element related to the hook, called the motif. Like the hook, a motif is a short, repeated idea. But while hooks tend to repeat the same way each time, and are very noticeable, a motif serves as a starting point – a building block – for other ideas that appear in a song, and does its work mainly in the background. Think of a motif as being similar to a certain shade of green that’s used as the main wall colour in the kitchen, but also serves as the colour of the mat in the bathroom. You wouldn’t notice that unless you were looking to make the comparison. All you’d notice is that the mat colour looks great. A couple of musical examples to make the comparison between hook and motif clear: David Bowie’s repetitious “Golden years…”, in the chorus of the song by the same name, is a perfect example of a hook. The Beatles’ song “Yesterday” uses a melodic motif. The word “Yesterday…” is 3-note motif, where the first note is followed by two notes a tone lower. That shape is repeated on several different words, starting on different pitches each time: “far away”, “here to stay”, and so on. That is a textbook example of how a motif is so useful in music. It strengthens the structure of the song in ways that listeners aren’t often aware. An example of a song that uses hook that also operates like a motif, helping to create and develop other ideas within a song, is Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl“. The title words are sung as three strong notes in a catchy, hooky sort of way. But in addition to that 3-note idea acting as a hook, it serves as a building block for much of the melodic/lyrical development that happens in the song “…uptown world”, “backstreet guy” (which features an octave leap), and then develops into a new melodic idea on “…told her why”, and continues to develop from there.

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 Melodies are most memorable if they use short musical phrases made up of repeating ideas.  Verse melodies tend to sit lower in pitch than chorus melodies.  Verse melodies don’t make great use of the tonic note; chorus melodies do.  The most successful melodies tend to move in a mainly stepwise fashion, with a few leaps at significant spots in the lyric.  Many melodies make use of a climactic high point, a spot that serves as a kind of melodic goal.  Most climactic high points happen near, but not directly at, the end of the melody of a song’s section.  The climactic moment in a chorus is usually more significant than the climactic moment in a verse.  Melodies do not need a lot of notes to make them good, and most pop songs feature melodies that are an octave or less in range.  The energy level of a song tends to move up or down as the melody moves up or down.

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he music of the Renaissance Era (c.14501600) is known for its exceptional beauty and exquisitely blended sound. It was during this time period that the concept of vocal harmony as we know it today got its start. Before the Renaissance, in the medieval period, music was mostly written to be in 3-part “harmony”. I put the word harmony in quotation marks because the medieval notion of harmony is very odd to our ears today. If you want an example to listen to, try “Viderunt omnes” by French composer Pérotin (c.1200). It’s lovely, to be sure, but sounds like music of a very different world. By the time of the great Renaissance composers such as Palestrina (1525 – 1595), the vocal sound had become much fuller, mainly in four or more vocal parts, and resembling a style of musical composition that sounds a bit more familiar to us. Palestrina’s “O Magnum Mysterium” is gorgeous when sung professionally. One only needs to turn the lights down, sit back, and with eyes closed feel the tensions of the world melt away. It’s strange to consider that the way Palestrina wrote vocal harmonies would have anything to do with pop music of today. Indeed, there are some noticeable differences. For example, give that Palestrina composition another listen and you’ll notice that no single vocal line seems to be operating as a melody. “O Magnum Mysterium” was written for six vocal parts: 2 sopranos, 2 altos, a tenor and a bass. At any one moment, any one of those voices might be considered a melody. The idea that the highest vocal line is usually the melody line was a concept that wouldn’t really take hold until the Baroque Era (c.1600 – 1750). So the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, with the way he crafts his vocal harmonies, sounds even more familiar Chapter 7: How Do I Write Good Vocal Harmonies?

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to our ears. Listen to a choral rendition of his “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and you’ll see what I mean. The melody is now firmly in the top (soprano) voice, with the other vocal parts supporting that all-important line.

And now fast-forward to pop music of the 20th century. It may seem like an enormous leap to listen to Bach one minute and The Beatles the next, but there is more similarity than you might think. If Bach were able to hear The Beatles’ “Because” from the “Abbey Road” album, or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, or The Eagles’ “Seven Bridges Road”, he’d possibly cringe at the odd performance style, but would probably recognize a vestige of the rules of harmony that he helped to establish centuries ago. The topic of how to write good vocal harmonies needs its own book, not just its own chapter. But you could say that about most things that need to be done well, so let’s see what we can discover about writing good backing vocals (‘BVs’) in a page or two. Because 21st century audiences (in fact audiences for the past 300 years) automatically concentrate on the highest voice as being the melody, your temptation might be to create BVs that are lower than the melody. But that would be a mistake, and music of the popular music genre is full of great examples of harmonies that sit above and below the melody. What makes a melody pop out as being melody has as much or more to do with the way it is recorded, and then the way it is mixed. Melody lines in pop music tend to be a bit low in range for female voices, and rather high in range for men’s voices. In either case, BVs often sound good when one or more voices are higher in pitch than the melody line. But that’s a matter of personal taste, really. There are some stylistic norms that need to be taken into consideration here as well, and as I say, one chapter isn’t long enough to deal with everything about vocal harmonies.

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It’s possible to create good BVs through a step-by-step approach, and that’s what we’re going to try here. But before we do, let’s lay out a couple of guidelines to consider. In fact, if you’re having trouble with your BVs, you’re probably violating one or both of these: 1. Too much BV. Vocal harmonies are more prevalent in a chorus than in a verse. That’s because vocal harmonies tend to add musical energy to a song, and increased energy is what you’re often looking for in a chorus. Using vocal harmonies everywhere can be tiresome. Unless it’s a style that’s known for its treatment of harmonies (e.g., Barbershop, vocal jazz, etc.), good songs often show a mix of unharmonized and harmonized melody lines. 2. Ignoring genre norms. It’s important to be listening to lots of recorded music in your chosen genre, and try to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes the harmonies work. So armed with those two principles, let’s see if we can create vocal harmonies for your song. It’s easier to do this if you can read and write musical notation. It’s hard to write BVs and communicate those notes to your singers without referring to something being written down. It’s technically possible to do these steps, however, by ear – just a bit harder.

To begin, choose a chorus melody that you’ve written recently. It should go without saying that you will need to finalize the chords that will accompany that melody. When you create your BVs, you will be creating one or more vocal lines that, at a minimum, change when the chord changes. BVs sometimes follow the melody line, either higher or lower, while singing the same words. This is what you’ll hear in The Beatles’ “Because” that I referred to earlier. Sometimes a good BV is simply singing “ooh” or “ah” on a long note while the melody is active above or below it. The Beatles used this approach with the second verse of “Hey Jude.” A lot of those kinds of decisions can be made later in the writing process. Chapter 7: How Do I Write Good Vocal Harmonies?

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For our step-by-step guide that follows, let’s assume that we want to create a long-note “ooh” type of BV consisting of three voices. This kind of BV is a basic backing harmony that works well in many genres. It requires you to understand the difference between strong beats and weak beats. Most songs are in a 4/4 time signature, which means that it alternates between strong beats (on beats 1 and 3) and weak beats (on beats 2 and 4). For “ooh”-style BVs, notes typically change mainly on strong beats. The best way to get nice, sparkling background vocals is to have your singers practice without instrumental backing – purely a cappella. If they can get vocals to sound great without instruments, they’ll sound great anytime, with any instruments.

Now do the following: 1. Finalize the chords that will accompany the melody. 2. Create basic BV lines that will fit your harmonies. This means singing long notes that fit the chord of the moment. To that end: a. Be sure that the 3rd of the chord is always present in your BV. b. For most of the time experiment with the highest BV voice mainly above the melody and the other two below. 3. Any time you change BV voices to a new note, let it happen mostly on a strong beat. More often than not, a BV should move to the closest note possible; be very careful with having your BVs leaping to new notes, as it tends to draw too much attention to itself. 4. “Ah” is a more energetic syllable than “ooh.” Use that to your advantage as you plan your BVs. You’ve now written a backing vocal line that should be similar in approach to what you hear during the guitar solo in Elvis Presley’s version of “Blue Suede Shoes.” It’s really important that you listen to lots of music in your chosen genre to get the final tweaking of your harmonies right. That 4-step process that you’ve just done can also work for the kind of BVs that use lyrics instead of “ooh” or “ah”. As long as the notes of your BVs are in the chord of the moment, they will work.

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Good background vocals will play an important role in giving your songs a professional touch. Once they’re written, they need to be practiced and polished. How you know they’re working is that they stay out of the way, and audiences hardly notice them. With good BVs, listeners notice the effect more than they notice the actual notes.

Background Vocals, and the Problem With Parallel Motion In the writing of background vocals it’s important to consider how the various voices move relative to each other. There are four possibilities:

1. Parallel motion: two voices move in the same direction by the same interval. 2. Similar motion: two voices move in the same direction but by different intervals. 3. Contrary motion: two voices move in the opposite direction. 4. Oblique motion: one voice stays on the same note while the other moves up or down.

In vocal writing, the ideal is to use a good mix of all four. But parallel motion can be problematic in certain circumstances. When two voices sing together they produce an interval. Some intervals can sound rather stark or “bare” – perfect 4ths and perfect 5ths in particular. If, during the creation of your background vocals, two voices form a perfect 5th, it can sound unpleasant to follow that interval with another perfect 5th. For example if your lower voice is singing a C with the upper voice on G, a parallel 5th happens if the lower voice moves up to an E and the upper voice moves up to a B. This situation, known as a “parallel 5th”, draws attention to itself in a way that might work in some genres, but not in others. It’s the vocal equivalent of “power chords”, which sound great in some styles, but would be startling in others. The problem comes from the bare, hollow quality of the perfect 5th: it tends to draw attention to itself in a way that’s not ideal for background vocals. They’re often best avoided.

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Some great examples of background vocals from decades past, and why they worked so well: 1. “Close To You” – The Carpenters. Richard & Karen Carpenter were known for their excellent harmonies. These harmonies are a good mix of “ooh & ah” and text harmonies. The harmonies don’t kick in until the second half of the song. 2. “Sail on Sailor” – Almost anything by the Beach Boys will be a good demonstration of good backing vocals. The “oohs” where the harmonies start in this song are lush and warm. 3. “California Dreamin’”- The Mamas & the Papas were great harmonizers. This song demonstrates how to fit text in and around the main melody line. A couple of great examples of more contemporary backing vocals: 1. “Earth” – Imogen Heap, from her album “Ellipse” (2009). The backing vocals are complex, creative and extremely effective. 2. “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” – written by Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, Terius "The-Dream" Nash, Thaddis "Kuk" Harrell and Beyoncé Knowles. The effectiveness of the backing vocals is in part due to the fact that they’re only used very occasionally, and also to the tightness of the writing, meaning that each voice in the 3-part harmonies are as close as chord tones will allow.

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 Badly tuned BVs are worse than no BVs.  Recording BVs is different from recording the main vocal line. Get professional advice.  “Close harmonies” or “close spacing” refers to the circumstance where the voices are as close together as the chord allows; there are no “vacant” chord tones.  “Open harmonies” or “open spacing” refers to the circumstance where the voices are spread out, leaving some tones unsung within an octave.  Close spacing in harmonies tends to increase musical energy, while open spacing often helps to relax musical energy.  Be judicious when using BVs. They don’t need to (and shouldn’t) go everywhere in a song.  The lower your BVs are (especially in male voices) the muddier they get.  BVs should ideally use a mixture of parallel, similar, oblique and contrary motion.  The sound of BVs has a lot to do with the genre. What’s acceptable for Country BVs is somewhat different from rock BVs, for example.

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s a songwriter, it goes without saying that there’s one kind of list that you don’t want to find your song on. That’s any list of “The Worst Songs Ever.” People love talking about the songs they love, but they’re even more excited to list the songs that turn their stomach. What makes a song bad is hard to define. It’s one of those things that you find hard to put your finger on, but you know it when you hear it. There are lots of things that make a song bad. But more often than not, the one song element that seems to be responsible for bad music, above all other song elements, is the lyric. Look at any list of “The Worst Songs Ever”, and you’re probably looking at a list of “The Worst Lyrics Ever.” We communicate directly to the audience through lyrics. Lyrics aren’t the only way, of course. All song components work together to present a message to listeners. But while melody, chords, tempo, rhythm and instrumentation convey mood and attitude, a lyric conveys its message in a much more straightforward way. And if we don’t catch the meaning of a lyric, or don’t understand what’s being said, we’re more likely to ask “What does that mean?” with reference to lyrics, than we are about any other song element. No one listens to a melody and says, “What does that melody mean?”

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When we talk about bad songs, we’re usually implying that the song had to have been a hit, or at least somewhat popular, at some point in the past. Like a “Worst Dressed” list which shows pictures of what the stars wore at the Oscars this year, we’re not all that interested in what “unfamous” people are wearing. We focus on stars because, deep down, we believe that they should know better. So the worst songs ever are usually ones that have captured our collective attention at some point. And more often than not, we’ve come to see them as bad in retrospect, and it’s that lyric that’s often to blame. How about some examples that prove the point that the lyric is what we think of when we rate the quality of a song: “You’re Having My Baby” (Paul Anka) – “The need inside you/ I see it showin'/ Whoa, the seed inside ya/ Baby, do you feel it growin'/ Are you happy you know it…”

Think about how melody and lyric work together. For example, if your lyric expresses feelings of anger, determination or forthrightness, or expresses strongly held opinions: your melody should use many repeating notes, should start on a strong beat, and should be pitched high in the singer’s range. If your lyric expresses feelings of love, compassion, tenderness: your melody should use a motivic leap i.e., a leap, generally upwards, that gets repeated throughout your song, and should be placed generally in the middle of the singer’s range. If your lyric tells a story: your melody should use lots of stepwise motion, with leaps at those climactic moments.

“Honey” (Bobby Russell, recorded by Bobby Goldsboro) – “See the tree, how big it’s grown; but friend, it hasn’t been too long, it wasn’t big…” “MacArthur Park” (Jimmy Webb) – “Between the parted pages/ And were pressed in love’s hot fevered iron/ Like a striped pair of pants…”

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So before we get to the subject at hand – how do you write a good song lyric – let’s look at the five basic lyrical errors you want to be sure you don’t commit: 1. Forced lyrics. Lyrics should always feel natural, as if it’s the best way the thought can be conveyed. Avoid putting the natural stresses of the text on the wrong syllables just to make the text work. 2. Overused phrases or clichés. If you find yourself writing things like “Oh baby, I really need you” as your central message, you’ve got the makings of a corny song. 3. Forced rhymes. A forced rhyme is one that draws your attention more to the rhyme than to the meaning of the words. (“Saw my wife, she’s the love of my life/ Without her, I’d be in so much strife…”) Just say no! 4. Over-the-top analogies. An analogy should focus the listener in to the particular emotion being conveyed. An over-the-top analogy just means you went too far, or simply went off the mark. Starship’s “We Built This City” might qualify here. 5. Bad grammar. Lots of song lyrics use bad grammar, and that’s not actually the problem. It’s a problem, however, if it’s forced, or sung by someone who shouldn’t be using that bad grammar. If it somehow feels out of place, you can cause a lot of people to groan and giggle at the same time. Gwen Stefani’s, “Bubble Pop Electric” comes to mind, especially the lyric, “I’m restless, can’t you see I try my bestest.”

A good lyric is not necessarily good poetry. That may surprise you, but it’s true. In fact, though there are a number of songwriters who think of themselves as poets, many good song lyrics are structured very simply, and use casual, everyday words. There is a good reason for this. If you really want to make a strong connection with your audience, you’ll want to use the kinds of words that your listeners likely to use, and to do it in a way that creates

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strong images. Complex verbiage with uncommon or esoteric words will usually fail to make an emotional connection. There are some songwriters for whom the lyrics are their strongest suit. That’s not to say that their melodies and chords are shabby, but certainly their words have been what they’ve become known for. Any list of the best lyricists from years past would have to include Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and more. And today, a whole new crop is rising: Nas, James Mercer (The Shins), Josh Ritter, and many others.

A metaphor can be a wonderful poetic device to use, but too many of them that seem disconnected can make a lyric needlessly cluttered. Be more consistent. For example, if your lyric describes your love life by talking about being lost in a forest, go with that metaphor, and think of other forest-type images. Don’t over-do it, though. This can also cause corny lyrics if you’re not careful. The basic guideline here is: Pull your lyrics together by unifying the metaphors you use.

We often speak of a song’s lyric as being one long, continuous poem or text. But in fact, the kind of lyric that is used in the verse is not usually the kind we’d find in the chorus. And the bridge – that’s another kind of lyric as well. What differs between verse and chorus is the purpose of the text. The job of a verse lyric is to tell a story, describe a person or illustrate a situation. In that sense, a verse lyric gives information to the listener that serves as important background information. The chorus, on the other hand, is where the songwriter emotes. If the verse describes a story, the chorus offers an emotional response to that story.

Get that lyrical development in the wrong order, and you’ve got problems. If you use your verse to wail about how you lost your boy/girlfriend, you’re emoting too quickly without giving enough of a story first, and your song quickly sounds like a 4-minute complain-a-thon. Here’s a quick list of how lyrics should typically change as a song progresses: Chapter 8: How Do I Learn to Write Better Lyrics?

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1. Verse 1. Don't start verse 1 by telling the listener how you’re feeling. It's too soon. You'd be trying to elicit a response from the audience, and you haven't given them anything to commiserate with you about. Use this verse to set the stage, to tell the listener mainly what the situation in your life is, and mention your own emotional response only as it plays a part in that story. This part of your song should be you saying, "This is what's happening." 2. The bars leading up to the chorus ("pre-chorus", or "rise") should be a place where you can start to modify your lyric. It's as if you want to say, "I can't believe this is happening to me!" Allow more emotional response to come through. 3. The chorus should allow you to open up more fully, emotionallyspeaking. It’s your chance to say, "This is how I'm feeling." 4. The second verse is still narrative, but you can interject more emotion-based observations into your lyric. After all, the listener has already heard your emotional response, so while you are expanding on the story, you can allow more of the emotion to come through. 5. The lyric of the second chorus is usually identical to the first, but if it's different, allow for deeper emotions on key words, and perhaps move the melody higher on certain key emotion-laden words. 6. The bridge needs to expand on how you're feeling, and in addition, the bridge can be a great place to add to the story you've set up in verses 1 and 2. Perhaps consider alternating observations-based lyrical lines with emotional-response-based lines. If you get that procedure working for you – that moving from “narrative” to “emotive” – you’ll have solved one of the most prevalent problems in the writing of song lyrics.

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Starting a Song With Lyrics If you’re like most songwriters, you probably start songs by working out chord progressions and melodies first, and piece together the lyric from there. But why not start with the lyric – it can be an exciting, new approach for you, and very rewarding. 1. Get a working title for your song. Think of choosing a title as a way of establishing a song’s topic. And though you’ll likely change it as the song materializes, it can help focus your musical mind. 2. Create a list of words and phrases that relate to the title/topic. Don’t think of this (yet) as being a list of lyrics. Basically, you’re just coming up with vocabulary. You’ll notice that a “feel” or mood starts to happen as the list grows. 3. Create two categories of word lists: positive and negative. This will be an important part of generating lyrics that stimulate the listeners’ imagination. For example, if you’re writing about too much hatred in our society, you’ll want to create words that relate to a more perfect life: love, harmony, hand-in-hand, children, tomorrow, peace, etc. In the negative list, add words that make those positive words hard to achieve: hatred, pain, anger, out for my/our/yourself, greedy, etc. Again, don’t think of these as lyrics; think of them more as words that focus our attention and get us identifying what the song will be about. 4. Create a “possibles” list. A possibles list includes words and phrases that jump out as having a good implied rhythm, or roll off the tongue easily. You can start to assemble words together that are on your two existing lists, and so now you get to start thinking in terms of creating a lyric. For example, “The air was filled with anger/ no peace or love to find…” or something similar. You may not ever use it, but you’ll notice that you’re beginning to sense a mood, and kind of lyrical structure happening. 5. Concentrate now on your “possibles” list, saying each word and phrase over and over. See if you can work them into even longer lines or phrases. Each line you create should start to feel like a lyrical line. Get creative. See what happens when you mash up a positive with a negative word or phrase. (“Pain today, peace tomorrow…”)

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 Use common, everyday words with lyrics. They have the best chance of making an emotional connection to listeners.  The best lyrics are the ones that create images in the mind of the listener.  Verse lyrics should describe; chorus lyrics should emote.  Bridge lyrics should expand on a song’s topic, and often move quickly back and forth between description and emotional response.  Songs on “worst of” lists are usually there because of problems with the lyric.  Lyrics do not necessarily have to be poetry.  A good poem does not necessarily mean it will be a good lyric.  Emotive lyrics that don’t have a story behind them often leave listeners feeling empty.  When setting a lyric, consider the natural pulse of the words, and align them properly with the strong beat-weak beat nature of the time signature.

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here doesn’t seem to be a lot involved in a typical song intro. In its simplest form, an intro tells the audience that verse 1 is about to begin. But if that’s all you think an intro does, you might have cause to wonder why the topic merits its own chapter in this book. A good song intro does need to do the obvious – introduce the song. But it’s tricky. Just as getting through the first few seconds of an Indy car race are crucial to the eventual outcome, the first few seconds of a song are truly make-or-break; if you haven’t captivated your audience within ten seconds, they’ll be ready to give up. Done badly, a song intro says, “If you wait for a while, someone’s going to start singing, but not until I’ve strummed these two chords a bit longer.” Done well, a song intro entices the listener by presenting captivating musical motifs, hooks, or other elements. An intro can set up a song beautifully, or it can be a colossal waste of time. And in a day and age when you’ve got to charm the listener and do it quickly, a bad intro can cause a potential new fan to click off your song, and onto something else. So don’t waste time. Use your song’s intro to its best and fullest effect.

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A good intro sets up the mood of a song, and also does a few other things: Most song intros are establishes the key (though not always: instrumental, so for a touch of “One More Colour” (Jane Siberry) has innovation, try one that an intro in E-flat major, with verse 1 in G features singing. This kind of major), tempo, and often intro can work because we instrumentation. A song intro tend to get pulled in to what a sometimes gives a bit of the chorus or voice is saying to us. If your refrain (“Bridge Over Troubled song is strong and energetic, Water”), or more commonly offers a try a slower intro with lots of simple playing of a guitar or piano pauses that make it feel that chord. In days of yore (by which, in pop something bigger is about to music terms, we only mean the 60s and happen. Example: Don 70s), a song intro was arguably a bit McLean: “American Pie” more interesting and involved than what you often find being created today. Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” (1985, written by Mark Knopfler), which is a sort of 2-part intro, or Lighthouse’s “Pretty Lady“ (1973, written by Skip Prokop), are great examples of song intros that acted as mini-compositions in their own right. No simple strumming of a guitar chord with those songs – older pop tunes often used intros based on a melody that’s neither verse nor chorus. In those cases, a song intro also often acted as a connector between verses, such as with America’s “Sister Golden Hair” (1975, written by Gerry Beckley).

The question, “How do I write a better song intro,” implies that there is a problem that needs a solution. How can a song intro go bad? It’s hard to define. Probably the worst sin of a song intro is that it offers nothing more than a basic strumming chord, when there could be so much more. The thing is, sometimes that basic strumming chord can be the beginning of a hit: “I Drive Your Truck” (2012, written by Jessi Alexander, Connie Harrington, and Jimmy Yeary and sung by country singer Lee Brice). That simple opening is perfect because it contrasts nicely with the powerful chorus. That song reminds us that it’s not song intros, specifically, that are bad or good, but rather how well they support the rest of the song. Chapter 9: How Do I Write a Better Song Intro?

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So with that thought in mind, here are five classic songs, most of which have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 at one point. Each song has a distinctive song intro that does two things well: 1) supports the song by setting the mood, and 2) pulls the listener in quickly with a melodic and/or rhythmic hook. 1) “Tidal” (Imogen Heap - 2009) This song is a very high-energy tune with a mainly electronic accompaniment, as we find with much of Imogen Heap’s music. She could have used any bit of the chorus as a successful intro, or done something to establish the tempo and energy level we hear in most of the song. But the intro she chose is exciting in its own right: an ad lib-style cello as a starter, with reversed-sound percussive effects that fade in. It’s certainly catchy! HINT: Sometimes it’s just good to give the listener something that they weren’t expecting, for no other reason than to grab attention quickly. 2) “Moves Like Jagger” (Adam Levine, Benjamin Levin, Ammar Malik and Shellback, recorded by Maroon 5 - 2011) This song’s intro hook – that iconic whistle – is immediately recognizable and distinctive. It may not do what most intros do, which is to clearly set mood and overall feel, but it’s a fantastic way to start. HINT: Your hook does not need to directly relate to any melodic shapes from your song. Even if this hook didn’t get used again, it’s still a great way to start. “Smoke on the Water” and Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” are other great examples of the hook-intro. 3) “SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT” (Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl, recorded by Nirvana - 1991) The intro for this song really establishes the mood and character of the music perfectly. If you’re looking for an intro that establishes the basic sound of a song and previews the important harmonic/rhythmic ideas of the chorus, this song is a great model to follow. An intro like this, which presents itself at the same dynamic-level (volume) as the chorus, lets the audience know that even though the verse is quiet, all hell will soon break loose. HINT: If your song pumps up the energy level, use your song intro to let listeners know what’s coming.

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4) “NEW BORN” (Written and recorded by Muse - 2001) In an opposite approach, Muse’s “New Born” uses an intro that doesn’t give any hint at all that you’ll be hearing anything other than a gentle lullaby with a peaceful keyboard accompaniment. HINT: Don’t assume that if your song is high-energy your intro must be high energy as well. A quiet intro for a driving song can work really well. 5) “WHITER SHADE OF PALE” (Gary Brooker, Keith Reid, and Matthew Fisher, recorded by Procol Harum - 1967) A great intro of the countermelody type, the gorgeous melody presented by the organ has arguably become more identifiable than the actual vocal melody of the song.

For many songwriters, it seems obvious that you’ll want to create an intro for your song, but that only means you are ignoring one other option: don’t use an intro at all. While The Beatles used Like any other component of a intros that were interesting and song, the intro is one section longer than just a couple of bars that can be fun, interesting and (“Baby You’re a Rich Man”, worthwhile to experiment “Birthday” and “I am the Walrus”), with. Many listeners can they often used very short intros identify the song just by (“Fool on the Hill” and “I’ll Follow hearing those first couple of the Sun”), or as mentioned earlier, intro beats, so that should tell none at all: “Penny Lane”, “Hey you a little about how Jude”, “Hello, Goodbye”. important it is to give this some serious thought. If you’re If you question whether your song’s working with a band, try intro is doing a good job of different intros for the same supporting the rest of the song, try song, and remember: be leaping right in at the beginning of creative. verse 1 with no intro at all. You may find that it’s just extra clutter your song doesn’t need.

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 Not every song needs an intro.  If your intro simply takes up time without offering anything of interest to the listener, consider the value of no intro at all.  Using part of the chorus can work well as an intro.  Intros that use a melodic idea different from the verse and chorus can also work as a connector between verses.  An intro should ideally establish the mood, tempo and key of the song.  Song intros in pop music of the 21st century tend to be between 10 and 13 seconds in length.  After a long bridge section, a song intro can happen once more, strengthening the song’s structure (Van Halen: “Jump” (1983); Genesis: “Your Own Special Way” (1976).  Hooks can work well as song intros (Chicago: “25 or 6 to 4” (1970); “Superstition” (1972).

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ere’s something to ponder: you almost never hear a Classical composer talk about “the hook.” And that’s in spite of the fact that many of the world’s most powerful and long-lasting Classical works have musical ideas that are, in anyone’s books, built on killer hooks: Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”, Ravel’s “Bolero”, and Dvorák’s famous “Going Home” melody (as it’s come to be popularly called), from his “New World Symphony”. But despite those works and many, many more that make good use of what anyone might call a hook, the term seems to be almost exclusively applied the composition of pop music. There’s an important reason for this. While many musical works from the Classical era are long, pop songs are short, at least by comparison. In the world of Classical music, composers are engaged in a task of what might be called musical idea development. A composer’s job is to present musical ideas – bits of melody, chords and rhythm that form motifs – and then to build upon those motifs, creating new melodies, new harmonies and new rhythmic treatments until the work culminates in a climactic moment, as Tchaikovsky so expertly does in his “1812 Overture.” It represents a kind of musical journey, and it’s what people usually love about Classical music. By comparison, pop songs are short – usually anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes in length. There just isn’t the same amount of time to develop musical ideas, at least not in the same way that Classical composers can and do. So since that aspect of musical composition – “development” – is not as easily done in pop music, there needs to be something else that captivates the listener. Enter: the hook.

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A hook is any aspect of a song that keeps listeners coming back. In that regard, hooks are usually short melodic-rhythmic ideas that are catchy and memorable. They aren’t usually “developed” in the same way that a motif might be. Hooks keep returning throughout a song pretty much as-is. It might be a word or two sung in an odd sort of way, like The Lumineer’s “Ho Hey” (2012); it might be a sound effect like the “stamp-stamp-clap” at the beginning of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, or the guitar shot during the chorus of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” (which is played during another famous hook, the sax solo lifted from a 1968 Larry Coryell tune, “Half a Heart”. By far, the most common type of hook, however, is the chorus hook, the bit that usually incorporates the title of the song. There are lots of contemporary examples of great chorus hooks – “Moves Like Jagger” (Maroon 5 Featuring Christina Aguilera), “Just a Kiss” (Lady Antebellum), “Paradise” (Coldplay), “Rolling in the Deep” (Adele), and many others. You know it’s a hook if the chorus repeats the song title at least twice, like “Moves Like Jagger” and “Paradise.” If you’re looking to create a hook for your song, you’re probably looking to write a chorus that features some melodic/rhythmic/lyric idea that repeats enough that it becomes the name of the song.

There are many ways to make a chorus hook work. In its simplest form, you just need to find a catchy, short melody that everyone will love and immediately recognize, perhaps like Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”. But for something interesting and slightly different, here are two other ways to write a chorus hook:

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1. Write a chorus melody and lyric that can be sung over a changing chord progression; 2. Write a chorus melody that gets partnered with a second hook, usually instrumental in nature. Coldplay’s “Paradise” is a good example of the changing-chord method. What you want to do is to write a melody that can be harmonized in a variety of different ways – at least two, anyway. The ”Para- para- paradise” melodic hook has two basic harmonizations that form the first 2 phrases of the chorus. The start of the chorus is harmonized with a Gm – Bb progression. The melodic phrase is then repeated, with the chords F – C. The first harmonization repeats as a 3rd phrase, and the 4th phrase of the chorus is a new melodic fragment. There is something musically enticing about hearing a melody repeat while the chords change. It has a way of making that melody all the more memorable.

It’s normal to think of the hook as something that gives rise to the rest of a song. But if you find that your song is missing that “something special”, you can always consider taking a finished song, and working a hook into it. It’s relatively easy to do this. Create an interesting background instrumental idea that draws a bit of attention to itself, something that can serve as a good intro. This needs to be interesting enough that it pulls listeners in, as hooks should do, but not so much that it pulls focus from the main voice when the singer starts. A perfect example of this kind of “background hook” is used in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” The iconic bass line and drum opening, with the syncopated keyboard chords, identify this song even before Jackson starts singing.

“Moves Like Jagger” provides a good example of the partnered hook method. As mentioned in the previous chapter, you know that the whistle song-intro hook is very prominent, very catchy. As the song moves from verse to chorus, that instrumental hook gets partnered with the chorus hook – the melody that incorporates the song title. The title is then repeated 3 times: the first 2 times over an Em chord, followed by the chorus melody taking the whistling hook as its melodic shape. It is the melding of these two important hooks that makes the song so powerful, so effective. Chapter 10: How Do I Write a Hook For My Song?

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Not every pop song has a hook, at least not the prominent “in your face” kind. But it’s quite true that many or most of the songs that make it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list do make great use of this feature.

Step-By-Step for Creating Two Other Kinds of Hooks TO CREATE A RHYTHMIC HOOK: Keep a beat (tap your foot, or slap your knee) 1. Sing (improvise) a short, catchy 4-or-8 beat rhythm. 2. Create a 1-or-2 chord progression that repeats easily. (e.g., C-Fm7, C-Bb, C-Eb, etc.) 3. Create a bass line where the end of the line connects smoothly back to the beginning. Avoid using the same rhythms as the drum or other instruments.

TO CREATE AN INTRO HOOK: 1. Improvise a short melodic idea (4-to-8 beats long) that has a strong, catchy rhythm. 2. Focus mainly on notes from the pentatonic scale (for example, in C major, use the notes C, D, E, G and/or A). 3. Create 3 separate chord progressions that will successfully accompany the hook. Those 3 should be able to serve as verse, chorus and bridge progressions. 4. Allow the hook to appear and disappear as your song progresses. Intro hooks are great, but can get tiresome if the listeners hear it all the time.

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 Not every song needs an obvious hook.  An important principle to remember: adding a hook to a bad song gives you a bad song with a hook.  Hooks need to be short, catchy and memorable.  A hook reappears throughout a song in the same way, while a motif serves as a building block for other musical ideas.  The most common type of hook in a song is the chorus hook, which usually incorporates the title of the song.  Developing a hook can be a good way to start the songwriting process.  Once you’ve almost entirely forgotten a song, what remains in the memory is probably the hook.

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f you visit YouTube on a regular basis, you quickly become familiar with a certain kind of statement that appears in the “About” field of a video for which the uploader doesn’t own the copyright. This statement, which reads something like a quasi-legal declaration, is meant to disavow any pretence to ownership of the video. Here’s an example of one I’ve seen recently, verbatim: “I claim no copyright for the video clip's, and i claim no ownership for the video clip's. I claim no copyright for the music and I claim no ownership for the music.”

Something tells me a lawyer didn’t write this. Now, think about it. The person who uploaded the video has just stated that they don’t own the music or video, and have no copyright claim at all. They believe that by stating that to be the case, they now have the right to upload it for the world. It’s a bit like standing beside a car on your street, declaring in a loud voice that you don’t own it, then hotwire it, drive it across the city, and offer it to a guy at a corner store. And you believe you’re in the clear because you’ve made no claim to ownership. At the time of the writing of this book, the phrase “My song was stolen”, when typed into the Google search engine, results in more than twenty thousand hits. And that just includes the people who chose to share their experience on the world wide web. Protection of any kind of intellectual property, as it is generically described, is a huge concern for artists of all genres; every country in the world has a copyright office for which the protection of music and other creations is the primary mandate.

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There are several ways that your songs can be “stolen,” but the truth is (and leaving aside the possibility that someone will upload it to YouTube or other online sites), that it’s not likely to happen. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be concerned with protecting your music. After all, being in a serious airplane accident also is not likely to happen, but flight attendants still show you where the flotation device is beneath your seat. For the people who do experience the unwelcome circumstance of having a song stolen, it’s almost always by someone they know, almost never by a complete stranger. And it almost always happens as a result of a misappropriation based on joint authorship. We’ll get to that a little later on.

Copyright laws differ slightly from country to country, so you’ll need to contact your own country’s copyright or intellectual property office to get specifics. In every country, however, copyright is the same thing: your right to do whatever you want with your music. Copyright is a muchmisunderstood word, however. You might be surprised to learn that what you thought copyright is isn’t actually true.

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If you’ve written a song with other members of your band, you are all joint owners of the copyright. It’s possible to come up with a unique percentage allocation of how any money you make from the song will be split between you, but as far as copyright is concerned, you are all co-owners of the entire copyright. Here’s an important note: As coowner of the copyright, you can record your own version of the song without needing the other copyright-holders’ permission. But if you make money from your recording, that money needs to be shared with the other copyright holders.

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For example: 1. Copyright is not just the right to copy, it’s the right of the creator of an original work to do practically anything with it. 2. Copyright protects the interests of the creator, but, in and of itself, doesn’t have a lot of teeth with which to do the protecting. To use an analogy, having a deed to a house doesn’t protect you from someone breaking in. 3. Copyright can be shared. And shared in as many ways as there are creators of an original work. 4. Copyright is automatic. You don’t have to apply to have your song protected by copyright. 5. Claiming copyright is not proof that you wrote a song. To use another analogy, claiming you are the son of Elvis Presley does not prove you are his son. You need more.

It’s at this point that we should deal with a kind of copyright “protection” that’s touted by many – the so-called “poor man’s copyright.” In brief, the suggestion is that if you mail a copy of your song – either a physical recording or sheet music – to yourself by registered mail, you’ve just proven that you own the copyright to the music. You need to know, however, that there is no record of this kind of “protection” ever winning a court case over a copyright claim. The far better way of protecting your own original song (or indeed anything that you create) is to register your copyright, a service that most countries offer. It involves sending a physical copy of your music to your country’s copyright office along with a filled-out form (check with your own country’s copyright office for details), and a cheque ($35 in the U.S.A.). In that regard, “poor man’s copyright” might serve as a good interim step between writing a song and receiving confirmation of its registration. (Some countries do not require that you send a physical copy.)

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That physical copy of your song can be anything from a cassette or disc recording, to a digital recording on a flash drive, to a page of sheet music with the melody and chords. It’s a good idea to place a copyright symbol on whatever it is you are submitting, followed by the year, followed by your name. Though that designation is not legally required in most countries, it does have a benefit: it announces to the A mechanical license is the world that not only are you the right someone has to make copyright holder, you intend to and sell recordings of a defend that claim if you must. copyrighted song. Related to this is the concept of Thirty-five dollars may seem like a lot of “compulsory license”, which money to register your song, allows anyone to record your particularly if you’ve written several song (and why wouldn’t you dozen tunes. But there is good news want them to). That means, here. If the songs are part of a though, that they are required collection, you can register the to pay you. copyright of the collection for that same $35 fee.

Ideas are not protected by copyright. So if you have a great idea for a new song that involves recording and sampling the sound of 100 watermelons being dropped simultaneously from a 10-story building on your street corner – keep it to yourself until you actually do it. (Check local law regarding the dropping of watermelons). Once you’ve registered the copyright of your song, you’ve got a right to sleep well at night. If anyone challenges your claim, your copyright registration should hold up in court, and in some circumstances that registration also entitles you to have your lawyer’s fees paid. It’s possible to register a song after a legal battle, but don’t expect those attorney fees to be paid in that circumstance. So that’s another reason to get your songs registered before you start singing them in public.

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Plagiarism is a constant worry for some songwriters who are concerned that their love for a certain artist means that their own music is going to start sounding disturbingly similar to that of their hero. The question is: how similar is one song allowed to sound to another? After all, there are only a certain number of notes, and a certain number of ways they can go together. Or you may have just heard a song from a former bandmate who has gone out on his own, which just happens to sound rather similar to your song from last year. Can he do that? Without copyright registration, you’re probably out of luck. (Have I mentioned… get the copyright of your songs registered!) If your song’s copyright has been registered, you’ve now got ammunition. The problem is that there is no rule or law that specifies how similar is too similar. You might hear rumours that 20% of the notes are allowed to be the same, but that’s false. It really depends on the judge hearing the case, and the skill of the lawyers involved.

If your music is being performed by others, it’s a good idea to be a member of a performing rights group such as ASCAP or BMI, or SOCAN in Canada. Performance rights involve the right of a person to perform live music. But a person performing your song should be paying the copyright holder of your music. If your music is published, that fee will go to your publisher, who then shares it with you on a 50/50 basis. If your song is being played on the radio, that station is paying a set fee to BMI and ASCAP, who then in turn pays its members.

If you decide to intentionally use a portion of someone else’s song as a sample for your own song, expect to pay a licensing fee for that. There is a fair bit of confusion on this point, but the law is clear. Anytime you use material in your own music that’s owned by someone else, you need that person’s permission. It’s possible to obtain that consent for free (because anything is possible), but don’t expect it. No matter what your intent is for the bit of music you want to use, if it’s protected by copyright you need permission to use it. It doesn’t fall under “fair use” (see ‘How Does “Fair Use” Work?’ on the next page).

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When a creative work is in the public domain, it means, at least in most cases, that the copyright has expired. That’s something that automatically happens a certain number of years after the death of the creator. In most countries, that number of years is either 50 or 75. If the copyright was owned by a group of people, it expires 50 or 75 years after the death of the last surviving member. If music is in the public domain, it means that you can copy the music without permission. You can also create arrangements, do performances, and make recordings of the music without A song does not need getting permission. Individual musical to be published in order arrangements and recordings of a public to be protected by domain work may be protected by copyright. Copyright is copyright, though. So you can incorporate automatic upon the that famous “da-da-da-DUM” motif from creation of any work. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony into your music, but you can’t sample a recording of it if the copyright holder of the recording hasn’t been deceased for 50 (or 75) years. You should also note that an expired copyright doesn’t affect authorship. If it needs to be said, Beethoven will always be the composer of his Symphony No. 5.

Related to public domain is the notion of fair copy or fair use. That’s a term that’s meant to convey that someone has the right to use small bits of a copyrighted song, book, play, website, or other creative work in certain circumstances without necessarily having the copyright holder’s permission. You see this almost every time you type a term into an online search engine. Google shows you the first several words from a website, or perhaps a book

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or some other item that has copyright protection, without getting permission to do so. Historically, fair use was developed as a way for a reviewer to critique a copyrighted work without needing the permission of the copyright holder to print certain sections purely as a reference. Its use today, though largely the same, has extrapolated slightly to fit newer situations. The basic intent of fair use hasn’t changed, however. If your intent is to refer to a copyrighted work as part of, and in support of, a larger venture, you’re probably adhering to the intent of the fair use concept as laid out in copyright law. If, however, your intent is to supplant the need for someone to acquire the copyrighted work, you’re probably in violation. You cannot write a book that starts, “I think Michael Ondaatje’s books are totally amazing, especially ‘The Cat’s Table’…”, and then proceed to replicate the entire book for your readers. You should get any agreement with your bandmates over distribution of money in writing. While all band members will own the entire copyright equally, it’s up to you how you share royalties. You can avoid a lot of nasty fights by getting a standard evensplit (e.g., 25% each in a 4-member band) for all royalties, no matter how much is contributed by each member. If everyone is contributing, it’s just too difficult to decide, song by song, how much was contributed by each individual. And over time, it all evens out. Whatever you eventually decide on, get it in writing.

But now we’re getting a bit beyond what you’re likely to encounter in the world of songwriting. For you as a composer of music, here are the most relevant items you need to know: 1. Copyright is automatic; you do not need to apply for it. 2. Registering your copyright is the only reliable way to protect your music from being stolen or used without your permission. 3. “Poor man’s copyright” (i.e., mailing a copy of your music to yourself by registered mail) is unreliable, and has never held up in court. 4. Ideas for songs are not protected by copyright. Chapter 11: How Do I Protect My Songs?

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5. Copyright can be shared by several people. 6. Original melodies and lyrics are protected by copyright. 7. Song titles are not protected by copyright. 8. Chord progressions are not protected by copyright. 9. There is no specific law that determines how similar a song is allowed to be to another one. That is determined by judges and lawyers in a court of law.

Self-Publishing Have you ever thought of publishing your own music? It requires very little financial outlay to get it set up. It usually means setting up what’s termed a “sole proprietorship.” There is likely a small administrative fee for this. The advantage of publishing your own music using your own company is that you retain the copyright. Anyone wanting to sing or record your music has to go through you, not an outside agency. The distribution of music, however, is time-consuming and complicated. Letting other singers know of your music is not easy task. Large publishing companies usually have long-established lines of communication, so they’re better at getting the word out about your music. But publishing companies traditionally take a large royalty fee, so you have to weigh the advantages of a much larger potential audience with a smaller payoff. But self-publishing might be a good starting point for you as a new songwriter. By publishing your music, you keep control of it and any money coming to you.

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he answer to the first part of the title of this chapter is easy: you don’t. As in, you don’t (usually) sell your songs, as such. The answer to the second part of this question is more difficult; marketing your songs is tricky, and often has more to do with blind luck than anything else. If you take nothing else from this important chapter, however, hopefully it is this: bad songs don’t sell. If you want to be a go-to songwriter, like the many who have been known and respected for the quality of the songs they write for other singers, you need to be able to write good songs, and do it consistently. The quality of your songwriting is not really what this chapter is about. But I only mention it here because it’s an important reason why so many new songwriters fail to get that big fish. While it’s true that there are famous stories of songs that had to be shopped around to many of singers before finally getting attention, the truth is that no song makes it if it has problems. So if you want one sure-fire way to increase the chance that your songs will draw professional consideration, work on the quality of your songwriting. Once you’ve gotten to the point where your songwriting is reliably strong, it’s time to think about how to attract some professional-level attention. This topic is so large and all-encompassing that you’ll want to do some research that goes beyond this book. But the purpose here is to get you going in the right direction, so keep reading. Becoming a pro in the songwriting field is an area of great debate and argument. Some say that the quality of your demo Chapter 12: How Do I Sell or Market My Songs?

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recording is a make-or-break step, while others say that the quality of the demo isn’t all that important: A&R (artist & repertoire) personnel at record labels know a good artist and a good song when they hear one. Some say that you should be sending your music to any and all labels, while others can cite cautionary tales of woe about the annoying songwriter who just won’t go away. There’s little that’s worse than making yourself an irritation to the people who possibly hold your future in their hands.

Generally, when songwriters talk about making money from songwriting, they’re talking about getting famous singers and bands interested enough in their music that they record their songs. When your song is recorded, you are entitled to royalties from every recording sold, as well as money that’s paid to you when the song is performed live or on the radio. But there are other ways that songwriters can make money, including providing a song for use in a television or film. In many cases, you are as likely (or perhaps more likely) to be “discovered” than you are to be successful as a result of direct promotion to a record label. English superstar Adele (Adkins) was discovered when a record label, XL Recordings, came across a demo of one of her songs on her MySpace page. There is no way to guarantee that having a MySpace page will make you successful, because there is no way to guarantee that the right people are going to head over to your page. Having said that, a web presence of some sort is a must for anyone wanting to get some attention. For every person who has made it as a professional songwriter, there are just as many unique ways that they accomplished the feat, and, just like songwriting itself, there are no rules, just guidelines. So having said that, and assuming that you’ve got a good number of high-quality songs ready for promotion, you’ll want to give yourself opportunities to have your music heard.

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As a starting point to becoming a professional songwriter, you need to be doing the following: a. Get your songs performed regularly in public. Get involved in songwriters’ circles, performing at local cafés, college hangouts, on local TV and radio, and wherever else you’re likely to be heard. The Just because you’ve got idea is that you need to be some basic website developing a local fan base. programming skills Getting other artists interested is doesn’t mean you should be going to start with you – your own the one to develop your performances of your own songs. website. Professional b. Record good-quality demos of developers know what your music. Demos that are today’s websites are looking poorly recorded, using like. A self-made site, with substandard equipment and dated programming mediocre performers, makes it techniques and protocols, difficult to make a positive can make you look like impression. It may take time and yesterday’s news before you money, but it’s a vital part of the even get started. equation. While good songs are good, no matter how bad a demo is, you can’t beat the invaluable impression that a good demo makes. c. Develop a Website. Whether MySpace, Facebook, a blog, or your own page with your own unique domain name (or a combination of the above), you need an online presence. If you can afford it, have your website developed by a professional. It really matters. It just isn’t possible to break into the world of music without a professional website. Very important: You must keep your website up-to-date with current news, releases, sound files, videos, calendar and other information, with the stress on current. Having a page where the latest information posted is from last year sometime is a death knell for anyone trying to get attention. d. Get on Twitter, and/or develop a newsletter mailing list. It’s all part of the plan: get in people’s faces, and stay there.

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e. Improve your singing/instrumental skills. This is especially true if you’re promoting your songs by using your own solo skills. If you sing badly, get better by taking lessons from someone who understands your genre.

Once you’ve become known in your area as a writer of good-quality music, how do you get your music “out there”? How do you contact the record labels and let them know that you’re a writer with material that their clients might be able to use? One of the I truly believe in getting demos trickiest ways is to start soliciting recorded by trustworthy labels. This is hard to do, and often professionals. It may seem like a results in a rejection. A rejection lot of money (and the prices can doesn’t necessarily mean your songs vary immensely, so do what you are bad or deficient. It more often can to get a recommendation means that they aren’t filling a need from someone in the business), for that company at the moment. but the money spent is definitely But if you decide to go this route, worth it. A professionally recorded you’ll want to get 3 or 4 good songs, demo dresses your music up in record them professionally to make the finest clothes possible, and a demo package, and start pitching that’s always a good thing. them. To know which companies, labels and publishers are looking for music, you might grab a current copy of “Songwriter’s Market.” You can buy it from Amazon or any number of online booksellers. It lists publishers, record companies, agents, producers and more, along with information on current industry needs. For going on your own, you need this book. It’s a lot of work to market yourself in this way, and one of the downsides is that many companies are understandably wary of music that gets sent to them from “out of the blue.” There may be a better and easier way: become a member of an A&R company. A&R companies provide a bridge to get your music heard by the labels that are looking for it. An A&R company has a Chapter 12: How Do I Sell or Market My Songs?

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direct line to the labels, and songwriters like you can take advantage of that relationship. Membership in A&R companies usually has a substantial fee attached, so you need to decide if it’s something you’re ready for. Once you are a member, the process is simple. The labels are constantly contacting A&R companies with specific musical needs, and that information gets passed on to its members. If you think your music fits any one specific requirement, you send it to the A&R company, who then evaluates it. If they think your song is right, they’ll send it on to the label. It’s a very simple process, and can be ultimately rewarding. TAXI is an example of a large, independent A&R company. They collect a first-time fee of about $300 for the first year, $200 for subsequent years, and then it’s time to wait. And watch. You also have to be patient. It can take a long time to make it as a professional, and that’s not necessarily a reflection on the worthiness of your music. In a sense, it could be compared to fishing, where your music is the lure and the record labels are the fish. You can have a wonderful lure, but if the fish aren’t biting, there’s only one thing you can do: wait. In that regard, an A&R company can at least make it easier to determine if you’re casting your lure in the right place.

If your dream is to break into the business world of songwriting, the first step is to become better than good. In the professional songwriting world, good means that you’re at the level of thousands of others. To attract attention, you need to be exceptional. And you need to be writing exceptional music with some measure of regularity. That means being disciplined and dedicated to your art. The people in the business need to know that you are writing all the time, and that most of what you write is of very high quality. It’s not easy, but it can be very rewarding.

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 Becoming a professional songwriter means you must be writing good songs consistently.  Songs can (and do) get discovered even if the demo is poor. But a well-recorded, well-performed demo helps the odds.  Bad songs don’t sell.  Getting known as a songwriter starts with building your own local fan base.  Building a fan base means you need a website, and a social media connection of some sort.  Using an A&R company is usually better (because it’s easier) than contacting labels yourself.  A rejection from a record company is not necessarily a condemnation of the quality of your writing.  Seek feedback when you get a rejection, but don’t be obsessive. If your song gets rejected, move on.  Self-publishing music where you are the sole author has the positive aspect of not having to share mechanical or other rights or royalties with anyone else.  Self-publishing music has the negative aspect of not having easy lines of communication to record companies; distribution of your music is harder.

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82 From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro

| Gary Ewer

ABOUT GARY EWER Gary Ewer received his B.Mus degree in Music Composition from Dalhousie University in 1982, and then continued studies with various composers at McGill University. His career has been mainly in the teaching of music at all levels of education from grade school through to university: music theory, ear training, composition, arranging, tonal counterpoint and orchestration. Gary also has conducted choirs, orchestras and bands. His compositions, mainly for choirs and orchestras, have been composed for, and performed by, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Symphony Nova Scotia, The Elmer Isler Singers, and many others. Through his high school years, Gary’s main interest was in pop music; Genesis, Yes, and Chicago were his main influences. His university training was largely Classical, but far from abandoning his interest in pop, he saw how, on many levels, pop songwriters and Classical composers were all attempting to do the same thing: compose musical works (though in very different styles) that takes listeners on a coherent musical journey. His interest in the relationship between the pop and Classical worlds eventually led him to write a text for songwriters (“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting”) that analyzes hit songs in much the same way a Classical musician would analyze a symphony: by showing writers what works, why it works, and how to use those same kinds of ideas in their own music. Gary is has recently finished a senior instructorship at Dalhousie University to devote himself to composition, trumpet playing, and to conduct clinics with musical learners of all ages. He owns Pantomime Music Publications, a company through which he distributes much of the choral music he writes. He is the author and developer of “Easy Music Theory with Gary Ewer”, a 25-lesson DVD-based course in music rudiments. He also maintains the very popular ”Essential Secrets of Songwriting Blog”. That blog gets well over one thousand visits daily from songwriters looking for ways to improve their skills. If you have any questions about any of Gary’s products, he welcomes your email: [email protected]

About Gary Ewer