Songwriting and Composition primer

Before I launch into this I should explain that although I’m not an expert I do have a small amount of critical success with my own songwriting.

Success in songwriting for me is not represented by how much a song makes in monetary returns or how many back slaps I get.

Success for me is in how honestly I feel about the song – I love all my songs – there’s something about everyone of them that I personally enjoy.

Success for me is being able to smile when I hear my songs finished and enjoy them.

Writing music is easy, writing songs presents much more of a problem.

Lyrics can for some be painfully slow in working out, whilst the melody is easy to come by.

For some though it’s the other way around.

Some find the idea of both nearly impossible to comprehend.

But with time, patience and practice writing music and songs can come.

I’ll be honest there’s no science to it, it just takes a lot of practice a bit of grimmacing and an awful lot of self editing.

Structure, dynamics and arangement are all important factors in songwriting.

Alongside melody and lyrics they can be what grabs the attention – the style in which you perform the song is also a huge factor.

Imagine a disco song performed by a death metal band – um probaly not the best example as that would probably work on some level, but you get the drift.

Once you’ve got a song together you may be looking at recording it, now how you record your song depends on your arrangement.

I’ll be writing about each component in songwriting and composition over the next few weeks.

I’ll be talking about structure, arrangement, chord progressions, key changes, lrics, melody, dynamics, style and ideas.

There’s a whole lot more but I’ll hit those as I go.

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