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My Five Favorite Books For SongwritersOver the years, along with writing around a thousand songs, I’ve read quite a few books on the topic of songwriting and creativity. Below is a list of my top five books for songwriters in no particular order. If you’re serious about mastering the craft of songwriting, it would be well worth your while to give |
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Four Ways Simplifying Your Lyrics Can Make Your Songs BetterIn my early years of running my recording studio in Nashville, I had the privilege of demoing songs for quite a few hit songwriters. This provided me with the opportunity to observe, up close, not only the work habits of super successful songwriters but also an in-depth look at what made up their songs. I’ll |
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Seven Tips for More Productive Songwriting SessionsWhether you’re writing a song by yourself or collaborating, the time you set aside to create is valuable. Making the most of your songwriting session is a goal worth striving for each time you sit down to write. Below are a list of tips that will help you squeeze every ounce of effectiveness out of |
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Eleven Tips & Tricks to Help Songwriters Write Better LyricsLyric writing, at its heart, is about telling a story. However, it can help to remember that it’s not just the story we tell but how we tell it that gets people to listen to what we have to say. To that end, I’ve put together a collection of tips and tricks to help you |
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Seven Questions Songwriters Should Ask For Better LyricsAt its best, lyric writing is a magical mixture of creativity and storytelling that can bring your listener into a world you’ve created and hold them there for the length of your song. However in order to create the perfect, tightly-scripted narrative that great lyrics possess, countless hours of writing and re-writing are often necessary. |
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Getting Out of Your Songwriting Comfort ZoneOne of the many challenges we songwriters face is that we’re tasked not only with creating something from nothing but also our “somethings” need to be unique not only compared to what others have written but also compared to what we’ve written before. This is no small thing and the moment you think you’ve “figured |
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Four Practical Dos and Don’ts for Different Songwriting Methods“Which do you write first, the music or the words?” This is the classic question that all songwriters get asked. In my experience, there’s no easy – or correct – answer to this one. Sometimes it’s the music, sometimes it’s the lyrics and, often, it’s some mystical, organic combination of the two. More importantly, there |
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Four Simple Tricks For Rewriting A SongAs songwriters, we so often get bogged down in the micro-details of our songs (whether to use “and” or “but,” should the last note of the chorus melody go up or down, etc.) that we tend to overlook the big issues that can help us tighten, streamline and otherwise improve our songs in major ways. |
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Three Tips for Writing Better Song IntrosIn an era of significantly shorter attention spans and increasingly distracted listeners, you, as songwriters, have an even greater responsibility to grab your audience as quickly as possible. The first and best place to do this is in your song’s intro. This can be done partly in your songwriting and partly in the production of |
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All Good Things…Whelp… After over 150 posts on songwriting, studio work and the music business, I’ve decided to step away from my blog to purse new avenues for my songwriting and teaching. That being said, I’ve worked very hard to make sure that most, if not all, of these posts have what they call “evergreen” information. This |