Do you find it easy to write songs? Too easy? Well, I at least have had a problem with this.

If you would visit our home and my garage you would find a lot of unfinished songs and a lot of manuscript paper with some notes on them showing that I wanted to say something with music but never finished it.

Maybe you always finish your songs, record them or have well documented lists with your songs for easy access. That’s the way I work now but obviously didn’t work before.

Nowadays I have started to realize the importance of finishing songs that I have found enough important to start writing in the first place.

I think it is important for you and me to complete songs we have started to write for the following reasons:

1. It is when songs are complete that other people can benefit from them and you can feel that you have contributed something to the benefit of others and to yourself.

2. It has a positive effect on your subconsious mind to take your composition the whole way to completion. It will give you the realization that you can write songs. It’s that simple!

3. As I mentioned before you will avoid having a lot of unfinished songs hanging around. It can be unfinished recordings or pieces of paper with a few words on them indicating an attempt to create something that probably meant a lot then but now is just words.

If you are signed to a recording company you will be more or less forced to produce things. The product will hopefully be a CD with maybe twelve songs on it and a show for your promotion tour.

It seems like slavery to be forced to produce a product like a CD. But having this obvious goal to work towards and the pressure involved can actually promote creativity.

If you are not signed to a record label you can benefit from working with your songs in a similar way.

1. Set a goal to produce for example three songs and set the prerequisites like writing one love ballad, one uptempo song and a waltz.

2. When you have made the songs record them and burn them on a CD.

3. Learn the songs by heart and sing and play them for your friends.

Doing this will increase your faith in your ability to produce songs and I think you will feel a greater joy and satisfaction in your great enterprise to write songs for the benefit of mankind and, of course, yourself.

Peter Edvinsson is a musician, composer and music teacher. Visit his site Capotasto Music and download your free sheet music and learn to play resources at CapotastoMusic.com

Article Source: Artipot

- TipsForTheBand.com

By Jan Durrant

Hello! Welcome to the wonderful world of music.

Have you always dreamed of being able to learn how to play the piano, keyboard, guitar or any other instrument?

This dream of yours is not something so far away that it cannot become a reality in a very short while.

Did you know that pianos in some form have been around for over 500 years?

Some of the first instruments of this kind were called clavichords. They had a very light, metallic sound because the small hand-pounded ‘hammers’ were made of very lightweight metal-like material. These hammers struck strings of varying lengths to create different tones or pitches.

The next cousin to the clavichord was the harpsichord invented by Cristofori in Italy around 1450 A.D. This keyboard instrument had a mechanism in it called the plecktrum which ‘plucked’ the strings and produced a slightly stronger sound than its predecessor.

Whether you are playing an acoustic instrument, which is the closest relative to the history just mentioned, or an electronic keyboard, you are now participating in a centuries old musical art form.

In the next few posts of this series, we’ll be taking a look at the basics of these topics:

• Musical Terms
• Introduction to the White Keys
• Treble Clef and Bass Clef Note Names
• Basics of Rhythm
• Chords
• All About Intervals
• Dynamic Markings

Article source: GoArticles.com    About the author: Jan Durrant holds a Master’s Degree in Music from the University of Texas at San Antonio in Texas. She has over 25 years experience in both public and private school music teaching.