Berkleemusic.com Winter Course Offerings
With the holidays just behind us, the beginning of a new term at Berkleemusic is only a week away. Silent night has transitioned into unfinished choruses and verses in Dorian mode, so I’d like to provide a little information on what types of songwriting courses will be available to tie up those lonely sections. Please [...]
Using Imagery in Songs
…I love the part of your book where you said the greater the detail, the less time has passed. I think we live moment to moment, so it makes sense songs should too.
But one thing that came to mind is, once you have zeroed in on a particular moment with detail, where do you go [...]
How to Set Up a Songwriting Group
One of the most important things we can do to grow our songwriting careers is surround ourselves with a support system. Family and friends can be nice sounding boards when we’ve written a new tune, but we often don’t get the kind of feedback that is going to grow us as writers and push us [...]
Using Metaphor to Build Song Ideas
If you are Object Writing or Destination Writing each day, you’re undoubtedly coming up with lots of material you can turn into songs. Many times we think we’ve got to start with a theme or topic clearly outlined to get a good tune. But, I’d like to show you how you might burst open another [...]
Quick Rewriting Tips
Whether you are the kind of writer for whom the whole song falls out in 15 minutes, or you painfully deliberate for hours over each line, there are a few quick rewriting tools that can help polish that final product. To apply these tools, sometimes we’ve got to be flexible with our melodic rhythms and [...]
What’s In A Critique?
Over a steaming cup of tea and some of the best sweet potato fries I’ve even eaten, I recently met with a past student and fellow songwriter of mine, Joy Gora, in Boston, MA. We talked about the craft, about the daily challenges and the victories we experience as we journey through the business. I [...]
Breaking Out of Your Current Style
If you’ve been writing songs for a considerable length of time, or even if only for a short time, you might notice that many of your songs have a similar style or sound. Perhaps it’s a tempo you write in often, maybe it’s the movements of your harmonies, or rhythmic pattern in your melodies, or [...]
Techniques for Tying Up the Chorus
Have you ever started writing a song, gotten a decent verse and prechorus down, then moved into the chorus and felt yourself losing steam as you tried to figure out how to tie up the section? Or, do you sometimes feel like your songs start strong, but somewhere in the middle of the chorus [...]
Baby, Baby, Where Did Our Craft Go?
I recently received an email from a fellow songwriter that raises some excellent questions about the relevance of what we write as artists to the commercial industry of songwriting, and I thought I’d share my response in a blog. The writer had read my book, Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling, among other [...]
A Few of my Favorite Songwriters
Nashville, TN is the stomping ground of some of the best songwriters in the world. If there were graduate degrees awarded in songwriting, no doubt Music Row could sprout universities with top-notch professors as quick as major labels lose money. Because of the little big town feel, affordable living, and high quality of craftspeople living [...]
keep looking »
