It doesn’t matter if you are writing an instrumental; as a segway piece on your album, for a soundtrack, or just as an expression. Instrumentals require a lot of attention to detail. without a vocalist, all the attention is now on the music you create.

Creating atmosphere is one of the most important parts of writing an effective instrumental. This can be done with a catchy rhythm section, as is the case with many jazz songs, or it can be done with a effects to make a great soundscape, as with many soundtracks. Regardless of what genre you are writing in, you will need to have a great sense of atmosphere in order to retain your listeners attention.

The other factor in writing a great instrumental is… the melody. Yes, the melody. Even Though you have no singer, you are still going to need a melody that takes the listener on a journey. In the case of a soundtrack this can be a subtle moving note in the effects, or it can be a pronounced and well defined instrument melody. Either Way, your instrumental needs to go somewhere, and the vehicle for that motion is the melody you write.    

I used to think that sing-alongs were all about campfire hangouts… then I realized that the lessons learned when writing a campfire song can be applied to writing songs in any genre. It doesn’t matter if you are writing for contemporary Christian, heavy metal, hip-hop, or any other genre of music, if people can sing your song they will most likely like it.

One of the most important factors in writing the sing-along is the melody range. If you are writing a melody that is too high or too low, then folks just won’t sing your song. In general, if you want to stay within the D-D range on the treble clef. This gives you an octave range of comfortable singing. Additionally, you want the majority of your notes to remain around the B note on the staff. This will sit the melody in a comfortable range for male singers, and will put all your harmonies in an easy range for both male & female singers.

The other factor of writing an easy sing-along is the rhythm of your melody. In general, I try to not write anything faster than an eighth note when writing my chorus lines. That may seem slow, but it does make the songs more intelligible to listen to and easier to sing. If you’re going to put cool swing rhythms into the song, you may want to put them in there a lot… repetition is a teacher’s best friend;)

Check back next week on Monday for our Making the Instrumental blog.

Ok, well we won’t get into all the intricacies of what is involved in making a hit song. However, there is something that is of great importance in making a hit song that most songwriters overlook. That is how marketable is your song? Sometimes you have the luck of writing a song that is just soooo great that everyone will love it, but most of the time a song is made into a hit by how well it is pushed into the market.

This can be done by writing songs that are on topics that have great marketing capabilities. Find themes for your songs that everyone identifies with; love, hate, loss, success, friends, and so on. The theme of your song is probably one of the most important parts of writing a hit song.
Another great way to make your song more marketable is to include content into your song that is searchable. I’m not saying that you have to hashtag lyrics IN you song… but you should be able to pull hashtags out of your song, for marketing. Make sure the lyric content includes content people are already searching for.

Check back next week on Monday for our Tips for writing the Sing-Along blog.

It is easy to write any song… but who are you writing for? If you want to be successful at songwriting, it helps to have a target in mind. You certainly can just write random songs and throw them out there for anyone to listen… or you can have a target to aim toward. If you want to make songwriting a career, you are going to want to have a target. Here are 3 common targets for your songwriting.

1. Making a hit song. Get ready to spend some money… yep, I didn’t start off with anything having to do with songwriting. Making a hit is more about marketing than songwriting (sorry to say). However, you’re going to need a catchy hook for this to happen.
2. Making the sing-along. Depending on what genre of music you’re writing for, you may want to make sure people can sing along with your song. In most genre’s this is one of the most important parts of a song. you will need to consider things like; melody range, rhythm, and song structure for this to work.
3. Making the instrumental. There are a lot of factors that go into making a great instrumental segment or album. Just like making a sing-along, you’re going to need to have a great melody that is going to get stuck in people’s heads. Additionally, now that there are no words to take the attention, your also going to need to create a great sense of atmosphere… get ready for some serious production.

Check back next week on Monday for our How to make a hit song blog post.