Last week in a mentoring session I was offering tips to help a young writer understand a songwriter's Job #1. One of the demos had an extremely long guitar solo after the first chorus. I suggested that: #1- Guitar solos typically are after the 2nd chorus and not the first. #2- The solo was so long it pushed the song to over 4...

  Co-writing: The art of sharing your heart felt ideas with another person and trusting the two of you will create songwriting magic. This can be tremendously rewarding and often frustrating. But there are some guidelines to make this experience more often than not a great one. If Moses came down from the mountain with a tablet for his top co-writing commandments perhaps...

  There seems to be a lot of confusion out there over the question "As a songwriter, how do I submit songs to the music business?" The truth of the matter is that there is no one way to "submit" songs to the music business. When you simplify the "song submission" idea, there are basically three categories of song submissions that...

Worked 17 years for overnight songwriting success. - Tim Hicks   Several years ago, at our company Christmas dinner, I ran into an old friend, Denny Carr who told me an amazing story. Four years prior, he and I were in Hamilton, Ontario Canada for the Canadian Country Music Awards. While we were there, Neil Sanderson from the rock band "Three...

  One of the top questions I get asked as a pro songwriter is "how do I beat writer's block. For many songwriters the worst part of the whole writing experience is just getting started. Those times when we sit down to write and nothing comes out. We feel like we have nothing to say. It really is all about...

Songwriters, does this sound familiar? You start out with good intentions to write a new song today and then the phone rings, or you remember an errand you forgot to do, and there‰'s that email you need to reply to. Before you know it you have spent the whole day doing anything and everything else but writing? Here‰ are...