Can anyone recommend me a great book about songwriting? Not necessarily a "how-to" guide but one that talks about various methods people use to create songs, maybe with some non-fiction storytelling incorporated. Thoughts?
What's your level? What instruments do you play? I rented several songwriting books and I was usually pretty disappointed by them. They introduce the basics : chords, notation, melody, which I already know. I must say that they usually get interesting in the later chapters.
Guitar (pretty good), drums (pretty good), keyboard (terrible). I know chords and how to make chord progressions. I'm not very advanced at theory so I could use some of that. Yeah, the books I saw online look really boring and mostly about stuff I'm already pretty aware of. I'm looking for something that describes the artistic process mostly if you know what I mean. Maybe not so much a guidebook but a songwriting-based memoir?
What do you plan to write? Once, my music teacher at the Conservatory mentioned that you could filter 99 percent of music, thanks to Shenkerian reduction as follows: I - V - I (or i - V - i/I) which you could even reduce to V - I (or V - i) If, for example, you take Pachelbel's Canon in D, you have this progression: I V vi iii IV I IV V This whole progression has a very smooth, sequential movement, but you could reduce it to I [V vi iii IV I] IV V : I IV V to I V. As the progression repeats, you'll get I V | I V | etc. so, you get I V I. Now, what has this to do with songwriting? I feel that it is important to understand that music is about tension and release. You build up to a climax and release all the tension. If you finish a song without release (usually ending on V), you'll get this open ending, unfinished sound, like the ending of Queen's We Are the Champions. However in between the beginning and the ending there needs to be some back and forth of tension and release to make a song interesting. If you make a model of a song, it usually has these parts in its construction: Intro Verse Pre-Chorus (sometimes) Chorus Bridge Solo Outro (a different part to finalize the song, a fade-out or a 'simple' cadence) What you often see in pop music is the half-step modulation or what I call the Michael Jackson modulation, a modulation that comes out of nowhere harmonically, but that works all the time; its purpose is to make the (repeated) chorus stronger. Obviously, lyrics are involved (or you get an instrumental song). I'm pretty new to that part of making a song (although I'm a singer myself), but I think that if you just try to start making a pretty simple song, you'll understand the process a bit, getting better and better, step by step. If you think it will only lead to a bad song, well, try to write a terrible, terrible song. You'll notice that you'll free up your mind, and that it will lead to an interesting song.
