As one of the world’s most renowned harp soloists and a passionate champion of new music for her instrument, Yolanda Kondonassis presents a comprehensive guide and conversational text on composing idiomatically for the harp in her work, The Composers Guide to Writing Well for the Modern Harp. The book features 22 detailed chapters on a […]
of the music. You need great timing, feel, pocket, and technique to play it well. Here are six video lessons that will get you grooving in no time….
The battle between what matters the most in songwriting never ends. Is it the lyrics, or melody? Both of these elements matter, but if you’re a songwriting guitarist there’s one more important thing you should be aware of. It’s the thing that takes your songs to the next level. . . Voicing! Many songwriting guitarists […]
Writing good lyrical hooks takes a lot more than just a good sense of melody. One of the most common reasons a song becomes a hit is that the lyrics get stuck in the mind of the listener. Hence, incorporating rhythmic and stimulating lyrical hooks is vital to the success or popularity of any song. […]
A huge part of writing a hit song is coming up with great lyrics. Here, we give you ten steps to follow to find the perfect words for your song.
Not every bar in an 8- or 16-bar progression needs a different chord; it’s about balancing variety (things that are different) with unity (things that repeat).
A great tool for adding a different color in a chord progression is to include one or more half-diminished seventh chords (sometimes just called half-diminished chords).
Another common way to create more interesting chords by altering the notes of the basic triad is to form what are called suspended fourth chords.
When first learning piano, or any instrument for that matter, you want to learn the names of the notes on the staff. Knowing the note names will allow you to further your skills with music theory, sight reading, analysis, and so on.
The most common and most useful of these chords is the seventh, which you can use pretty much anywhere just to add a slightly different color to a chord, or in some types of progression to give the sequence of chords some extra thrust, because the added seventh is a mild dissonance, or clash, that makes the chord sound like it wants to move somewhere.