Hello again. I hope you’ve had a great past few days. This week we’re going to talk about how to write a Ska song. I’ve made a very simple example that we’re going to dive into right away then discuss. Here’s the song and the lyrics: Blog Songs Month 4 by Matt Whitehead Music ComplicationTaking …
Hello everyone. This past week has been full of a combination of comedy and nostalgia. While discussing typical chord progressions used in various levels of pop music, a few students and I ended up taking a little trip down into early 2000’s emo and pop punk territory. We ended up listening to and playing some …
Hey everyone. This past week has been filled with questions about how to use autotune in songs and where to get inspiration for material that uses autotune as an effect/instrument rather than as a tool to edit vocals. To answer the inspiration side: find some material and listen to it. The way I found material …
Hey everyone. There seems to be a lot of heavy hearts and existentialism leading into the new school year. Quite a few discussions with friends, family members, and students alike have all been related to our existence, how difficult things are, and how much harder they seem to be getting. I decided to take those …
Hey everyone. I hope you had a great weekend. There’s been quite a few students asking about where to get inspiration from for writing songs and lyrics. This is something for everyone, because we all stumble into the proverbial writer’s block from time to time. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just start …
Hello again and thanks for taking the time to pop in today. A topic of late has been on how to construct our own Jazz songs/tunes. This is a fun topic and one that has many possibilities. We’ll mention a few, then construct our own and use some typical compositional devices that are employed in …
Hello everyone. This week we’re going to discuss a question some of you have asked about writing a song using just riffs you’ve made. We’ll make this even more simple by using just one little riff/segment to make an entire song. Before we go on, let’s define a riff. If you google it, you’ll see …
In the past few weeks, I’ve have a few people come to me asking about how to make a song with two chords. There are many ways to do this, of course, so we’ll list a few examples and then we’ll write a song with two chords that we choose. The advantage of two chord …
I’ve had quite a few people ask me about iv/4/four minor and what can be done with it. That’s quite a loaded question: so we’re just going to answer it as easily as possible and then put it into action. Four minor is just as it sounds, it’s the 4 chord that is substituted …
People often come to me with the question, “How do I change chords quickly and clearly?” There is, of course, more than one answer to this question. As always, there’s no trick to it aside from time doing it. We’re going to go through a few different methods of approach to getting chord changes …