Songwriting

Speakers are kind of like a pair of new shoes.

Level isn’t the most important element in your mix.

You had a great session.

This morning in gym we took a look at this song and one of the things we discussed was what key is it in?

The best mixes are crafted by the top mix engineers, but that’s not why they’re the best mixes.

A chord has a root of a third and a fifth, but the fifth, it’s in there, whether you play it or not.

A really common misconception about mixing is that your job is to make everything even.

Tuesday’s Music Theory Gym and its Stevie Wonder adds where we find a convergence of ascending and descending movement.

This is a story about perfection.

One thing most pianists understand intuitively is that you can freely fill the gap between the bottom two notes of any root position triad, as long as that note isn’t an F.

It’s only a matter of time before you’re humbled by someone with far less resources than you creating at a very high level.

Being unobjectionable doesn’t really sound like a compliment, but there is a beautiful ambiguity to a suspended chord that makes it fit in pretty much anywhere.

I don’t give a rat’s ass if you use presets or not.

The color tones in a chord tend to be the ones that create a little friction.

Here are 10 things that are more important than your vocal chain.

Every day, thousands of potentially great songs are abandoned and left to wither away, unappreciated and unloved.

When we think of Key Center, we’re often thinking of harmonies that revolve around a single chord, or a note that feels like home.

If you’ve played Fallout, you recognize this immediately.

Whether you call it a bus or whether you call it a send and a return, the utility of running effects like reverbs and delays in parallel rather than in series is more than just a matter of resource management.

These are the chords from Brad Wilson’s "God Only Knows." The song’s originally an E, but we’ve moved it to C to conform to our ten chord toolkit.

What’s a chordal? It’s a little game and you can play it with yourself. But every week we put them in our story to help you practice music theory. It’s…

Those of you who are making risers in your music are going to want to have a listen to this.

When you sign on to go on a roller coaster and they buckle you in that chair, you’re signing up for a thrilling ride knowing full well you’re going to be returned back in one piece.

Major 7th chords and minor 7th chords aren’t unique.

Do you think there’s a difference between a hook and a chorus?

I want to accomplish two things with this video.

If you are using the term "gained staging" as a verb, you might be overthinking it.

It’s producer malpractice if you don’t do a quick gut check on the key of your song before you record that awesome vocal.

When you’re working in the box, you enjoy a luxury, which is that all of your plugins and settings snap to attention as soon as you open your session.

Folders and Logic, underrated.

There will come a point in your career where you will need to deliver stems.

The EQ in your DAW may have an edge over even some of the most coveted recording discs, but only if you know how to take advantage of it.

They’re going to tell you that this is not a minor chord.

Welcome to today’s first and possibly only episode of Stupid Logic Tricks, where I share things I almost never need to do, but I’m glad I know how to.

There’s no such thing as a bad note, but you may find that some notes give you trouble.

Some people don’t like getting syrup on their bacon.

We talked about secondary dominance in theory class, and in this song most of the chords are functioning like five chords.

I’m going to show you a really rare chord progression.

I want to introduce you to a sweet little chord with an intimidating name.

I think it would be useful to start a thread about things that made you a better mixing engineer.

When you first begin to learn about rhythm, you’re taught to think like a metronome.

You’re setting yourself up for disappointment if every time you sit down to make something, you expect to make something great.

I want you to meet Rich Crocenti.

Raise your hand if you get stuck finishing a song.

Producers have this habit of trying to understand music theory without understanding one really basic thing, which is form.

Welcome to a ton of new followers and I figured I’d introduce myself.

I favor chord thinking over key thinking, and here’s what I mean.

I’m going to play an F in every chord of the opening of "I Love Zupor" I’m playing an F and the droning pedal tone of the tonic note is going to ground the song What makes this feel so hopeful?

Just tell your stories.

What makes music tick?

Let me share with you the steps I take to teach harmony to our students.

This shape... It’s really handy. You’ve heard it in countless songs. It’s a 6 to a 2 to a 5 to a 1. Look at it in C. It’s an…

You may have heard of the four chord progression, but think of it more like a family of chord conversions, one of which you may actually know really, really well.

Once upon a time, there was a kid, and that kid was you.

You can’t learn how to be lucky, but you can learn a lot from failure.

Like most things, fixing a subtle clash in logic is pretty much the same as it was in Ableton.

A clashing note is one that doesn’t fit with your existing harmony.

Okay, fair question. Beat building jams are an opportunity for a variety of instructors to identify inefficiencies in your workflow. They’re one-hour morning gym workouts in which each week a…

Pretty much any experienced producer will understand the value of editing.

Sometimes we can easily explain the relationship between two chords using an established music theory device.

If you’re like me, you’re always working and you’re always coming up with song ideas.

How do you actually know what key something’s in?

If you want to get better at finishing your songs, here’s the TL;DR.

The song "Something" by The Beatles uses a very common device to move between chords.

It’s only fair that I tell you what I mean when I say bottom up or top down songwriting.

I actually reject this idea that anybody’s becoming a better producer because of posts that they’re reading, because everybody’s really teaching from the same pool of facts.

There are 12 keys. Does it matter which one you pick? As musicians, we’re taught early and often that we should be proficient in all keys and while that’s true,…

Is the circle of fifths overrated?

Logic has this secret automation folder.

You know that frequency response chart that came with your nice set of speakers?

Here are three unexpected ways to end a song in a minor key.

The canvas for sound and music is neither digital nor analog.

One of the most effective ways to learn to identify intervals and chords is to associate those with songs that you know.

Markers and Logic are great for labeling sections of your song, but did you know they can also contain lots of extra text?

Somebody told you the attack and release time on a compressor is the amount of time it takes for the compressor to kick in, which impacts the transient or the sidechain or blah blah blah.

You should no more put a chord in the middle of a chord sequence because you think it is supposed to be there.

Were you considering following us on our other social media accounts?

Music doesn’t have to be complicated to be good.

(water splashing) - Teaching songwriting is a little like teaching someone how to ride a bike.

A music production environment is a complex one.

I think I know a lot about music and I consider myself a pretty decent engineer and producer.

This morning in the region we looked at Stevie Wonder "Isn’t She Lovely?" There’s a lot this song can teach us, but we have time to talk about the first four chords.

We’ll talk about these chords another day, because right now there are two things you need to understand about working with audio and working with loops.

Okay, in 60 seconds, what do I mean when I say something sounds modal?

Hey, I want to apologize to the person who kind of ambushed me on Discord the other day and asked me to listen to their song.

There’s nothing more fun than walking our students through the songs they love.

There is a story, and I’ve heard it attributed to a saxophone player named Phil Woods.

Take a song in a minor key and end unexpectedly on a major chord.

The other day I made a post about how you should always run tape, which you should.

What’s a 2-5-1 progression got to do with baseball?

So the song "Just the Two of Us" has a lot of opportunity for things like passing chords.

Sometimes the name of a thing will tell you what’s inside of it.

A producer today is like an island and to me nothing epitomizes that more than the topic of automation.

Every chord has a parent and a child, and every chord is a parent and a child.

I understand things on levels that you can’t even fathom yet.

Someone asked me yesterday if I had played any interesting chord progressions recently, and I said, "Yeah, here’s one." Did you ever stop and think that this song has this wonderful Lydian moment in it, and not to mention a fermata, which is arguably a bar of five before the last happy birthday?

Learn the difference between hooks and choruses in music arrangement. Discover how memorable elements create a song's "theme song" and craft catchy arrangements without traditional choruses.

So I get this weird message from my friend.

I have a lot to say about perfect pitch, but let’s talk about something that’s ostensibly a little easier.

Chords like these allow for an internal melody to thread itself, weaving its way through the chord structure.

Hey everybody, you may be aware of our songwriting incubator, but we’ve got some new classes coming up in a new format and I wanted to tell you about it.

Creating an EP is a fabulous goal, but it’s not necessarily a great goal for a class.

Complicated doesn’t mean better.

Yesterday, during lab hours, one of our members shared a story about a challenging situation that came up in the industry because they’re a woman.

I’ve gotten some interesting questions people asking me to clarify what do I mean by an arrangement?

The first time I heard Imogen Heaps hide and seek, I was driving and I literally had to pull the car over.

I’m super excited to announce the launch of a new Beat Kitchen elective, Songwriting Incubator.

Welcome everybody. This is Mark Jaffe from Five Bridges. Mark is a wonderful attorney who really takes a focus on creative stuff and he’s agreed to come in and talk…

Feeling stuck when you’re working on melodies and phrases, there are lots of home remedies for this, but they usually involve the same thing, which is to somehow kickstart your process and get you doing something new.

If you’ve been scrolling around here long enough, you’ve certainly found somebody telling you that you’re supposed to tune your kick to the key of your song.

Creating a healthy collaborative space means setting up some best practices.

In the time it takes for you to watch this post, most people will decide whether or not they like your song.

If you go to school to be an audio engineer, you may discover that people don’t actually pay much attention to your degree.

It may look like it to you right now, but my musician Basics Elective is not all math.

I was thinking about the word practice today, which just really means to do, right?

There are some lessons that come up over and over again and they’re so meaningful you realize you can apply them in almost every discipline.

What makes a great melody?

Beat Kitchen landmarks are something reserved for things that you go back to over and over again.

I shared a toolkit with you yesterday.

In the time it takes for you to watch this post, most people will decide whether or not they like your song.

If you’re writing lyrics and melodies and having trouble setting them to chords, this video is for you.

Whoever told you you can sample five seconds of a song and not have to get clearance is conflating that with one of two legal concepts the first being fair use and the second being incidental use Incident use is easy if I’m doing a documentary and that guy drives by blasting a song out of his window I don’t have to pay for it.

Yesterday in class one of the students brought in a sweet Thundercat song called Dragon Ball Durag and it’s a great example of chords that are just stacked in thirds moving right up through the diatonic scale.