Producing Your Own Songs

March 12, 2010 in Songwriting Leave a reply

Have you noticed that we use the terms "Theme and Variation?" I've heard a lot of great up and coming writers who have enough excellent material in a single piece of music to build several songs. In other words they have several inspired themes going on in the same song. The problem is that these competing themes effectively cancel each other out.

The brain craves to hear the same theme patterns over and over again with brief variations for contrast.

(Please See our Ear-Opening article: Anatomy of a Hit!)

To be a real producer you have to learn to identify each distinct theme and related supporting phrases and build a separate song around each group.

If you have one good line that doesn't fit. Get together with other musicians and throw that line out there, let them take it, add something of their own, and bounce it back to you. Next thing you know a truly hot new song will be the result.

If it still seems like something is missing, just add a bridge and the whole thing should come together nicely.
 

Breaking Down Your Existing Compositions

Let's say that you have some stuff that you genuinely felt INSPIRED to put into music. You know its real, and its good, but you suspect that its not at its full potential.  

What to Do?

Go back through the piece and ONLY grab the lines which are truly awesome. This includes melodies, chord progressions, riffs, and lyrics.

Now take a deep breath and take a leap!

REBUILD the song according to the above pattern strategies in Anatomy of a Hit!  JUST USING the good stuff.

All the rest is just filler that is watering down your hit. Right now its sleeping underneath the extra junk you thought was needed.

Try this process and you will be astounded how a piece of music can come to life. You will be amazed how people want to hear it over and over to the extent that they will just go ahead and buy a copy.

People will come up to you and talk to you about how they love your music, that they heard someplace, even though they never listened to you perform in person.

You will hear over and over that your career is going places and get lots of offers. This is when it pays to know everything on this site – inside and out.

As you know, we recommend avoiding standard music recording contracts.

To understand how smart artists are going big in today's market please read our article called The New Way to go BIG!

At this point you might also want to know the process of Selling Songs to Big Names.