It’s been awhile since I talked songwriting. I spent the past few days working on a Good Friday song. It’s getting harder and harder to write a new Good Friday song each year. I think this is the fourth Good Friday song I’m attempting to write in as many years, and after awhile you start [...]
Archive for the ‘Songwriting’ Category
Writing A Good Friday Song
Saturday, 11 February, 2012
Songwriting vs Film Scoring
Tuesday, 20 December, 2011
Recently in Life! there was an article about local film composer Ricky Ho, who had won a Golden Horse award for “Best Original Film Score” for the film “Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale”. This was indeed a remarkable achievement, and the article basically chronicled his life and described how he got to where he [...]
Multi-Disciplinary Artistry
Monday, 17 October, 2011
Lately I’ve been fascinated with the issue of multi-disciplinary artistry. I think it’s human nature to want to label a person as a “writer”, or a “musician”, or an “artist”, or a “photographer”. It’s human nature. We’d all like to think that every person is very good at one thing only, if he is good [...]
Songwriting And Playwriting
Thursday, 29 September, 2011
Haven’t really had the time or resolve to blog much lately. Plus the fact that I’ve discovered my new love Twitter, which means I’ve been wanting to blog less. I suppose in the past few years I’ve paid my fair share of dues in learning as much as I possibly can about the art and [...]
Sondheim On Lyrics
Monday, 22 August, 2011
Over the past year, I have been consuming a lot of podcasts from the American Theatre Wing because they have an entire range of free and highly valuable interviews with some of the greatest practitioners ever on Broadway. It’s an incredible learning experience just hearing these masters of Broadway dispense their pearls of wisdom. I [...]
The Unfinished Song (Psalm 23)
Wednesday, 6 July, 2011
I’ve always had this idea for a song based on the entire Psalm 23. The first melodic seeds were planted way back in 2007 (back in the Songcraft heyday), and in 2008 I made another serious attempt to complete the song, but somehow it never saw the light of day. All these years the melody [...]
Scoring For Piano
Monday, 20 June, 2011
Writing out the full piano score of your songs is kinda like seeing yourself running on film – most of us have no idea how we look like when we run. In the same way, I have no idea how my piano playing actually looks like on paper until I try to score it out [...]
In Their Own Words
Monday, 28 March, 2011
Yes, I’m still very interested in songwriting and have been rather heavily involved in songwriting this year. It’s still a huge passion of mine. Anyway, I recently borrowed a book from the library called “In Their Own Words” by Bill DeMain. It’s a collection of interviews with renown songwriters such as Billy Joel, David Bowie, [...]
Songwriting Stuff
Tuesday, 25 January, 2011
Haven’t been talking about songwriting for quite awhile. Here are some random thoughts… … The Special One Ever met a special someone whom you felt was probably going to be the most beautiful person you’d ever meet in your life? As in, for the rest of your life, you can’t imagine how you’d ever meet [...]
Nifty Little Device
Tuesday, 30 November, 2010
The more songs you write, the more likely it is that you might discover some nifty little songwriting devices for yourself. Lately I realised that I have been subconsciously using the Chord I to Chord IV/I(bass) transition quite a bit. For example, F to Bb/F(bass). I have encountered this little sequence in a number of [...]
