I’ve used this technique constantly in my creative pursuits. Whether it be composing, arranging, or songwriting, the Oblique Strategies have helped to keep me in a state of creative flow.

I wanted to create a mobile version since I find myself sans computer a lot now that I have my iPhone. This online version of the Oblique Strategies will work on any browser even though it’s optimized for iPhone.

Check it out and bookmark it if you like it: Oblique Strategies

Table of contents for Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast

1. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-03-06
2. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-09-06
3. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-22-06
4. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 09-29-06
5. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 10-13-06
6. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 04-17-07
7. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 05-20-07
8. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 06-21-07

Topics covered:
Chord progressions, I-IV-V, The blues, classical music, mashups, melody, modal progressions, music software, rhythm…

Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-22-06

Subscribe with iTunes here:

Subscribe with Odeo here:

Subscribe with Podnova here:

Subscribe by RSS here:

Subscribe by email here:

Table of contents for Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast

1. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-03-06
2. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-09-06
3. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-22-06
4. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 09-29-06
5. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 10-13-06
6. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 04-17-07
7. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 05-20-07
8. Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 06-21-07

Topics covered:
Top 10 Lyric Writing Insights, line length, contrasting ideas, melody, metaphor, prosody, rhyme schemes, rhythm, song forms, spotlights…

Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-09-06

Subscribe with iTunes here:

Subscribe with Odeo here:

Subscribe with Podnova here:

Subscribe by RSS here:

Subscribe by email here:

• Your best stuff
  It’s easy to argue that you should hold back the best song, make people pay for that. Until you realize that the >>> button on my CD player works great.
  (tags: musicpromotion)
• Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
  Give me 5 minutes and I’ll show you how to instantly find unique and interesting details to put into your lyrics.
  (tags: creativity howto lyricwriting songwriters songwriting songwritinghacks writesongs writing)
• Huge list of music databases
  Some of my favorites include free sheet music archives, stations accepting indie artists, notation and melody search, database of Hip-Hop samples, encyclopedia of microtonal music theory…
  (tags: audio lists music archives database)

The technique is called Object Writing and it’s so ridiculously easy that you’ll be pissed you didn’t know about it sooner. I learned it from Pat Pattison.

Here’s how it works:

First, gather your materials. You’ll need tools for writing like a computer or pen and paper. You’ll want a thesaurus or dictionary or any book that you have lying around. Object Writing works best when you have a timer.

Second, open the book you chose earlier and randomly pick any word. Alternatively, you could write about any object you see around you.

Finally, write about the word you picked using the following guidelines.

• Write from your senses (touch, taste, sound, smell, sight). In other words, avoid abstract ideas. Keep it real.
• Write with a timer. Keep the time short. 2 to 5 minutes is best. 10 minutes max.
• Don’t stop writing. It doesn’t have to rhyme or be in complete sentences. Keep writing rapid-fire.

That’s it. It’s simple. Now here’s why it works.

Sensory language is what connects the listeners to your writing. It follows the writing principle “show, don’t tell.” If you want your song to speak to your listener’s emotions, then you have to use language that resonates in the body. Emotions are embodied. You feel emotions. Emotions aren’t ideas that you think about. They are experiences. And experiences are real. So keep your language real and concrete. This is especially true for verses. Choruses can be meta to your verses. They can talk about the verse or the idea of the song. But your verses are the blood of the song. They live and breathe and the language should reflect that.

Object writing is the tool to develop your unique perspective. Only you can make the connection between an orange maple leaf and the smell of your lover’s wool sweater. With object writing, you tap into your personal experiences and memories and find your own unique perspective about life and the meaning of things. Object writing comes from your heart.

When you need quick stimulation, object writing allows you to dive in to the depths of your experience and pull out the relevant details that will make your writing interesting. It’s instant. And it gives you more choice because you have a vault of wonderful details to consider on the other side of your 5 minutes.

Here’s what an object writing session could look like:

Object: Leaves
Crunching under my feet I look down and see leaves of gold, burnt orange, and blood red. I imagine nostalgic moments of youth in the fall – argyle sweaters and jean jackets. Walks meant to soak up the last of the luke-warm sun and to hold hands with a young girl. Football and underage drinking. Parties too cold to be outside but too much in love to care. The leaves fall from the trees and they seem to stop in mid air as I imagine a September wedding…time stood still…I look around at the guests and they’re motionless, smiling, frozen in a conversation, and I feel blessed to be alive witnessing this moment of wonder and awe at the gifts of the heart. It’s my wedding day and the woman who these people are here to help me celebrate with is hiding in the house. Perhaps she’s peaking out of a window and maybe time is standing still for her too. And I wonder if she was the girl that some lucky boy held hands with in the fall of her youth. I can see them happy walking among the leaves on the sidewalk. The air is crisp and fresh. The sun falls to the west and my heart rises in the east. The past is romantic and the future is hopeful. The present is transfixed in an absolute moment of this – a celebration of love and happiness. A union of leaves to ground and separation from the tree. The aging bark is flexible and sways in the breeze and the scene begins to move again…leaves slowly falling, voices laughing, glasses clink and hearts open to the possibility of forever and ever.

See how simple it is?

Object Writing Hacks:

• Start your day with 5 minutes of object writing. Once your inner writer is awake, it stays with you all day.
• Object write from all parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
• Whenever you get stuck in a song, stop what you are doing and object write for a couple of minutes.
• The more specific the picture, the more emotion it creates.
• Before you begin, write your senses across the top of the page: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, body, motion.
• Ignore rhyme, rhythm, and sentence structure. Your writing doesn’t have to be polished at this stage. Let it be ugly.
• Let the object take you wherever it wants. You don’t have to stay focused on the object. Follow the thoughts that arise.

Go ahead and take 2 minutes to do some quick object writing right here in the comments section. I’ll even get it started.

Because you’re going to help me write them…you’ll see why soon

Did you know that you can keep up to date on music news and music websites by subscribing to the music tag at del.icio.us? I do this and I bookmark all the important music sites right here on this blog. So I’ll do all the work for you.

But I thought you would want to know, because when I found it out, I also subscribed to the ear training and songwriting del.icio.us tags. Now I’m up-to-date on what all del.icio.us users think is relevant and important when it comes to ear training and songwriting. And since del.icio.us users are all “early adopters,” they tend to be pretty hip. If you need help subscribing, ask in the comments area below.

If you don’t know what del.icio.us is, it’s a social bookmarking website. It’s social because you can view other people’s bookmarks and they can view yours. I try not to bookmark anything embarrassing–but sometimes it’s a fine line You can also sort bookmarks marks by tags. Tags are descriptive keywords. One of the coolest things you can do with tags right now is view them as a “tag cloud“. Check my tag cloud out on my home page.

You gain much more insight when you view your information with tags. Why? Because it gives you a value-based visual representation of all your information plus it shows how many people have bookmarked the same information. It’s like getting a second opinion. Social proof. Because now you know what bookmarks are most popular and generally agreed upon. And when you know what tags you’ve used the most, you start to see trends in your very own values. Currently my number 1 tag is music and my second is eartraining… that’s how you tag keyword phrases–mash the words together without spaces.

del.icio.us works like this, after you’ve signed up (it’s free), you find a site that you like and then you bookmark it by using a special “del.icio.us button” right on your browser tool bar. Then you can tag it. Add descriptive keywords so you can find it later. If it’s a guitar site, tag it with “guitar”, “music”, “reference” and any other keywords that you may use to find this bookmark again. The more tags, the better.

To me, it’s a mind blowing way of organizing all my “stuff“. I wish I could tag my physical “stuff” with keywords for easy finding–like my wallet and car keys. And it’s fast becoming my search engine of choice when I need a solution to a problem–a hack. A lot of pains-taking research is done for you by other users who have had similar problems and bookmarked their solutions.

The first thing to do is go to del.icio.us and create an account. Then start bookmarking sites when you visit webpages that you like. It’s pretty intiutive and it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to smash all of your bookmarks within several folders on your browser bookmark menu or side bar. What if a bookmark could go into two folders? Then you’d need to bookmark it twice or copy and paste it. But when you tag a bookmark with as many relevant tags as you want, then it’s pretty easy to find again by searching in your “vacation” tag and/or your “websiteswhilesurfingatwork” tag

Wow, this turned into a long post. I had only meant to announce my MusicHacks, not evangelize. I guess I really did get excited

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, eartraining, music, songwriting, www.grahamenglish.net

Here’s a handful of my top techniques that I use to develop new and interesting chord changes.

1. Stick with I-IV-V
I know, it’s not new, but I-IV-V doesn’t have to be uninteresting. There’s a reason why these chords are so fundamental to our harmony. So master them. Use their constraints to challenge your songwriting ability.

2. Copy another song’s chord changes
Just take a look at the top 10 in the past 10 years and you’ll find a long list of songs that use the same chord progressions. The chord changes to Prince’s Purple Rain have been used before that song and after that song many, many times. The challenge then becomes how to write a unique melody over those chord changes.

3. Copy another song’s chord changes and modify them
One of my favorite techniques to come up with chord changes is to simply copy another song and then modify it. You can modify the color of the chords (major/minor/dominant 7/major 7/etc.). You can modify the rhythm of the chord changes by making them change faster or slower or syncopate them. You can play the chords backwards or start in the middle. You get the idea.

4. Create a chord progression mashup
You can follow the popular mashup trend right now. Take two or more songs and then combine their chord progressions. You can cut them up, play them simultaneously or play them sequentially. I haven’t done this yet, but it sounds fun

5. Write a modal progression
Modal progressions–made popular by Miles Davis (Kind of Blue)–are a very easy place to start. The best modes to begin with are mixolydian and dorian. If you’re going to stay in a single mode throughout your song section, the challenge becomes making the melody interesting enough to sustain the listeners interest. And if all of your song sections are going to be in the same mode, then the challenge is to make each section contrast.

6. Write a blues
The blues doesn’t have to sound like the blues. There’s no point in trying to be another Robert Johnson. Just listen to Prince’s Kiss or U2′s When Love Comes To Town.

7. Dig into other genres
Classical music is an endless supply of time-tested music to recycle. Sting’s Russians is a great example of a song that is based on Prokofiev’s “Lieutenant Kije” Suite.

8. Use music software
I’ve used Band in a Box to inspire me and I’ve messed around with other music software that’s resulted in a few keepers. Check out the del.icio.us musicsoftware tag for the latest releases.

That’s it for now. I’m sure you have some chord progression shortcuts that I haven’t thought of yet. Please share them.

Here’s my top 10 lyric writing insights:

1. The rhythm of your melody and the rhythm of your lyrics should match.
Rhythm has *strong and week beats. So do words. When you speak to someone, you use conventional stresses–found in the dictionary–to communicate your ideas as efficiently as possible. If you spoke with the ac-CENT on the wrong syl-LA-ble, people would have a hard time understanding you. Yet this happens over and over again in lyric writing. Match your stresses and your listeners will get what you mean.

2. Show, don’t tell.
Compare “I was nervous” with “My palms were sweaty” and you’ll get the picture. The first example is about the experience while the second example is from the experience. The easiest way to do this is to stimulate your listener’s senses by using sense-bound language. Write from the 5 senses and you’ll find interesting details that will keep your listeners captivated and emotionally involved.

3. Use prosody. Support your meaning with your lyrics.
How you put your lyric together should support what you have to say. You can create prosody with:

Form: Organize your song functions into effective song forms, e.g. verse/chorus, AABA, and verse/prechorus/chorus, etc.
Musical Stress: Put words in relation to each other according to its relative stress in the bar and its relation to surrounding notes. Put the most important word in the most important stress, beat 1 of bar 1.
Line Length and Number of Lines: You can balance or unbalance a section accordance to its meaning by having an even (balanced, stable) or odd (unbalanced, unstable) number of lines. You can also match line lengths perfectly (balanced, stable) or match lines imperfectly (unbalanced, unstable).
Rhyme: Perfect rhyme and Family rhyme will support a stable or resolved meaning. The more remote rhyme types (assonance rhyme, consonance rhyme, etc.) will support an unstable or unresolved meaning.

4. Create contrasting sections.
Lyrically, line length is one of the most effective tools to create contrast. Create contrasting sections using one or more structural elements, i.e. contrasting ideas, number of lines, rhyme schemes, etc. Ask yourself, “What have I got? What’s different than that?”

5. Consider when to balance and unbalance your lyric.
The main point of balancing and unbalancing is, again, prosody: supporting your meaning with your structures. Do you need stability or instability to support your meaning? Combine all four structural elements–number of lines, line length, line rhythm, and rhyme scheme–to balance and unbalance sections.

6. Use fresh metaphor.
To see one thing as though it is something else is your unique ability. To make sure your metaphors aren’t cliche, use the “duh” method (I got this from Shane Adams). You start with your first object, cake. Think of the most obvious characteristic of the object, as in the cake is round. These are called the “duh” descriptions. Now take the “duh” description and think of something else that has that quality or characteristic. The cake is round…duh…what else is round? The moon. Now think of a “duh” characteristic of the second object, the moon glows, the moon is distant. Now plug those new traits into the original, the cake glowed like a distant moon. Now that’s original.

7. Develop your verses.
Develop your song idea from verse to verse making sure the chorus gains meaning and interest each time it is repeated. Give your final verse a “pay off” that rewards your listener for their attention. Think of how you tell stories to your friends. Usually, the point of the entire story comes at the very end. Where you begin your story and how much you share depends on what material is relevant to the understanding of the song’s climax.

8. Control the song’s point of view and verb tense.
Discuss a song’s story-line from the singer’s point of view. This solves a lot of problems: verb tense, setting, point of view, gender, etc. Write from the perspective of the singer of the song.

9. Use fresh rhymes.
Rhymes occur at the ends of lines. These positions are natural spotlights. Since your listener has time to consider what you just said before the next line begins, make it worthy of the spotlight. Avoid cliche rhymes and boring rhyme schemes. Learn how to find fresh rhymes that stick in the mind of the listener and that help you say what you mean in a unique way.

10. Spotlight important ideas.
Certain positions in a song spotlight important ideas. These power positions get special attention:

Opening lines
Balancing lines
Unbalancing positions

When you have something important to say, these techniques can help emphasize the point:

Shorten lines to spotlight important ideas
Lengthen lines to spotlight important ideas
Put your important ideas in opening lines, balancing lines and unbalancing positionsAnd use power words (action verbs, sensual adjectives, unique words, etc.) in your power positions.

Rules are definitely meant to be broken. But please learn the rules first.

*This relative pattern of strong and weak beats, from strongest to weakest:
In 4/4: Beat 1, Beat 3, Beat 4, Beat 2, Beat 4&, Beat 2&, Beat 3&, Beat 1&
In 3/4: The only strong beat in a bar of 3/4 is the downbeat. The second and third beats are weak. In order of strength, the beats line up like this: Bar 1, Bar 3, Bar 2, Beat 1, Beat 2, Beat 3, Beat 2&, Beat 3&, Beat 1&
In 6/8: Think of it as two quick bars of 3/4. In order of strength, the beats of 6/8 line up like this: Beat 1, Beat 4, Beat 6, Beat 3, Beat 2, Beat 5

Why almost everyone is completely wrong about what makes a good song title… and why this is a tremendous advantage for anyone who knows the secrets.

Most people – and shamefully, most so-called experts in songwriting – wouldn’t know a good song title if it bit them on the ass. The fact is, there is more incompetence in songwriting than any other field except, perhaps, advertising.

Lesson number one: Great songwriting – the kind that will grab your listener by the throat and force them to give you every ounce of their attention – has more in common with…

P.T. Barnum And The National Enquirer
Than With Britney Spears and Ashley Simpson

Barnum was the circus man (Barnum & Bailey’s “The Greatest Show On Earth”) who made a fortune by never underestimating the allure of sensationalism. A genius at marketing impossible-to-ignore sideshows – the one-horned goat billed as a unicorn… the bearded lady… the human pretzel. He was a man of the people, and knew what punched their buttons. He created such an urgent sense of curiosity that crowds fought to get into his shows.

And did you know that more people read the National Enquirer every week than read Time, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal all put together? That raunchy little checkout-stand weekly sells out across the land… and yes, even people you know read it.

The hook is the headlines on the cover. The guys who come up with them are among the highest-paid writers in the world. When they hit a nerve, the publication flies off the shelves. (My favorite headlines are “Preacher Explodes On Pulpit“ and “Boy Eats Own Head“.)

Barnum and the writers at the National Enquirer understand human psychology. The unrelenting power of curiosity to pull us in. The sheer pleasure in being shocked and titillated. How to create…

An Itch
That Has To Be Scratched!

I’m assuming that you’re somewhat tech-savvy. You are reading a blog, aren’t you? You might even be reading this blog in your RSS reader. And if you’ve read this far, I can tell you why. It’s because of my title – the headline.

And if you’re one of the many songwriting underdogs (translated: you don’t have a major label deal) and you’re actively marketing your music on the internet, then what’s the first thing people see when they’re poking around iTunes looking for some new music?

Exactly. Your headline – Your Master Salesman-In-Print – Your Title.

A master salesman has a solution to the most pressing problems in your life. He possesses secrets that will make you richer, or happier, or better looking. He knows how to tease your “hot buttons” to just the right level of distress… and only then offer you sweet release through the wonders of what he is selling.

Then how, you ask, can you apply this to songwriting? Well, it’s simple, really.

What direct response song titles have in common… is that they grab the attention of their target audience (California Girls – actually, guys interested in girls)… make an irresistible offer (Please, Please, Please)… and then ask for action (I Want To Hold Your Hand). For a listen. A download. They invite you to click on the link, listen to a free sample, download a 99 cent song. And do it…

Right Now!

They ask for a response from the listener. That’s where the term “direct response” comes from.

This request for action is what sets effective, money-making songwriting apart from the glut of mediocre songwriting out there. If the appeal works, people download the song and the song is a measurable success.

One final thought: Rejoice in the fact that most people haven’t got a clue about what makes a good song title (let alone how to write a direct response song title). This puts you in rare company when you finally do understand the secrets to getting your song played in this blood-thirsty competitive market. Let the rest of the world go about their foolish ways. You’re about to be very busy keeping track of your increasing song downloads

More titles to get your creative juices flowing. Think of who the target audience is and the action involved:
Pump It Up
Gimme Some Lovin’
Baby I Need Your Loving
Let’s Stay Together
Beat It
Rock and Roll All Nite
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Lively Up Yourself
Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)

There’s many time-tested techniques for writing song titles – and some of them are great – but I’m giving you a technique to put in your arsenal that will help at least some of your songs grab people’s attention (especially useful for the internet). Use it with taste.

First of all, I give MasterWriter two big thumbs up. It has been an invaluable songwriting tool for me since the day I bought just over a year ago.

MasterWriter is a powerful Windows and Mac compatible suite of songwriting tools. MasterWriter is an educational, creative and organizational powerhouse for the professional songwriter and songwriting hobbiest.

When you open MasterWriter, you’re presented with a database of your songs. There’s a robust search engine with filters and grouping capabilities – I’ll be extremely happy if they add Mac OSX Spotlight support. A simple double-click on the song title and you’re in the Lyric area – a fully-functional word processor. You can see your completed lyric sheet or go straight to the Sketches area where you can write and store bits and pieces of your lyric. You can screen-split the completed lyric and the lyric sketches for better editing.

But what I like most about MasterWriter is the Collected Area. Here is a special window that shows your completed lyric or lyric sketch and all of the rhymes and words you’ve collected in MasterWriter’s thesaurus and many dictionaries. The Collected area is where most of your writing will be done. It’s laid out well visually. All of your lyrical choices are right before your eyes.

The rhyme dictionaries are fantastic and thorough. I still pull out my trusted Roget’s Thesaurus from time to time though. There’s something about looking through classes of intellectual thought and the kinesthetic feeling of paper under my fingers that stimulates my creativity. With MasterWriter, you can search rhymes for any word in a number of categories. MasterWriter filters rhymes by Primary, Secondary, Pop-Culture, and a list of your favorite rhymes. It even gives you alternate pronunciations for even more rhyme choices. MasterWriter’s unique rhyming feature is “Sound-Alikes” – a family rhyme tool. MasterWriter also includes rhymed-phrases, an alliteration dictionary (the only one in existence), a pop-culture dictionary, a thesaurus and more.

I also use the stereo hard disk recorder to capture ideas. Unfortunately, you’re limited to 5 minutes of audio at a time but you can record multiple takes. It’s great if you don’t feel like booting up another program and you need to capture an idea fast. Plus, it keeps all of your audio within your song file which is nice for organization. You can even set audio markers for quick location and there’s a MIDI drum loop player with quite a few useful loops (over 250) to keep you inspired.

Another unique feature of MasterWriter is Songuard, their online date-of-creation song registration service. You can keep track of all your song publishing and copyright information in one place and feel secure that you have a solid record of creation.

If you’re serious about becoming a better songwriter, MasterWriter can definitely help. The flash tutorial that comes with MasterWriter is very inspiring and will get you using the program in only minutes.

Best of all, I’ve negotiated a $70 discount for you when you use discount number 2070. Download a free 30-Day Trial at http://www.masterwriter.com or call Toll Free 1-866-892-8844. Remember to use discount number 2070.