Graham English

Posts Tagged ‘contrast’

A Guide To Hit Song Forms – Tips, Techniques and Tools for Writing Hit Songs

Another bonus you get when you join Samurai Songwriting is A Guide To Hit Song Forms. Inside this valuable songwriting guide, you’ll learn…

How to begin writing songs with superior structure and the techniques you need to master the craft of songwriting.
The basic song sections with advice on how they relate to each other and tips [...]

The Perfect Song Title – 5 Things To Remember

Place Your Song Title At Key Points In The Chorus
Your song title is more likely to be remembered if it is placed in the first or last line of the chorus.
Place Emphasis On Your Song Title In The Chorus
Support your song title by giving it a rhythm, melody, and harmony that sounds natural and intuitive. [...]

How To Master Musical Textures

If you need more compositional choices or your music needs more depth, you might want to play with the textural qualities of music. This won’t be difficult because I’ve prepared a textural dictionary for you.

Polyphonic, while literally meaning “many-voiced,” refers to multivoiced texture of considerable interlinear independence, often imitative; it is understood to have qualitative [...]

Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-09-06

Topics covered: Top 10 Lyric Writing Insights, line length, contrasting ideas, melody, metaphor, prosody, rhyme schemes, rhythm, song forms, spotlights…

How To Find The Head-Turning Hook That Reels ‘Em In

Be the one song your fans listen to today that gets their adrenaline pumping.
Before you commit to a single note of your next song, you want to do some serious sleuthing behind the scenes.
I call it being a hook detective. What you’re looking for is the “hook” of your song–that unique part of the song [...]

How Do You Develop New And Interesting Chord Changes?

Here’s a handful of my top techniques that I use to develop new and interesting chord changes.
1. Stick with I-IV-V
I know, it’s not new, but I-IV-V doesn’t have to be uninteresting. There’s a reason why these chords are so fundamental to our harmony. So master them. Use their constraints to challenge your songwriting ability.
2. Copy [...]

Top 10 Lyric Writing Insights

*Before I continue, and I’ll say this many times, I operate under the assumption that the opposite of everything I say is equally true. Including the opposite of what I just said.
Here’s my top 10 lyric writing insights:
1. The rhythm of your melody and the rhythm of your lyrics should match.
Rhythm has *strong [...]