Graham English
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition.
At this moment, you’re just a $20 click away from discovering the Hit Songwriting Secrets of John Lennon… even if you’re starting from scratch.
Wanna hear something provocative? Check out this quote from an old issue of keyboard magazine.
“On this experimental record, I’ve been trying to explore more jazz harmonies. The thing is — and I’m gonna piss off a lot of people here — the II-V-I hits my barf button like nothing else. It’s the most horrible cadence [...]
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. [...]
Counterpoint: a composition which is written strictly according to technical rules. In earlier times, instead of our modern notes, dots or points were used. Thus one used to call a composition in which point was set against or counter to point, counterpoint; this usage is still followed today, even though the form of the notes [...]
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 [...]
THE GEOMETRY OF MUSICAL CHORDS
Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University
Musical chords have a non-Euclidean geometry that has been exploited by Western composers in many different styles. A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of another. Composers [...]
If you can do a good job identifying your basic diatonic intervals (unison, major 2nd, major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, major 6th, major 7th, perfect octave), the next logical step is to move on to hearing the distinctions between the different interval qualities:
major/minor 2nd
major/minor 3rd
perfect/augmented 4th and perfect/diminished 5th
major/minor 6th
major/minor 7th
In the beginning of [...]
Tritones: The Devil’s musical interval:
If you look at the relative stability of each scale degree in Western harmony you’ll see that the 4th and 7th are the most instable. In order of stability to instability it looks like this:
1, 5, 3, 6, 2, 4, 7
So 4 and 7 provide the most tension as 4 wants [...]
Mind Hacks posted how choice is demotivating when there are too many options.
“Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles – and, what is more, they write better essays.”
And if you have 45 song ideas [...]
If you ride chaos all the way out to its edge, you find beauty and order… and the Blues
Chaos: complete disorder and confusion; behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions; the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.
Chaos theory: The branch [...]
about grahamI'm a songwriter and recording artist who sings, plays keyboards, and explores the vast world of sound hoping to find some magical moments along the way. I'm also a Mac geek.
If Heroes needed a new superhero, it would be Montage Man. He can speed things up and add a catchy tune. 1 day ago
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