A Simple Songwriting Tip for Coming Up With Chord Progressions for Your Songs

One way to come up with a chord progression is to take a chord progression from a song we like and change the length of each chord, independent of its strumming pattern, tempo or anything else.

We'll do this in one of two ways:

Lengthening each chord (doubling each one is usually easiest to apply)

Shortening each chord (halving each one is usually easiest to apply)

Or you can use a combination of the above. Shorten some chords, and lengthen others. You can even keep one or two chords the same length as they were in the original song.

Let's use the chorus of "American Pie" by Don McLean as an example. The chords in the chorus where the lyrics are "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie" are G-C-G-D. The song is in 4/4 time and each one of those chords is played for about 2 beats.

A Songwriting Trick - How to Write More Emotional Songs

A lot of times when we're writing music, we write based on our own life experiences. When you do that, it's usually pretty easy to jump into the right mindset and emotions of a song, because you know what they are since they happened to you.

But sometimes you'll come up with a great song idea that didn't happen to you, specifically (or maybe only a small part of it did). In that case, it can be more difficult to get into and deliver the appropriate emotions that would occur in that situation.

In business, there's a concept called the Customer Avatar, which I learned about from Eben Pagan, who's a well respected marketer. The idea being, when you're marketing your products, you need to envision a very specific person, and write to him, only.Doing this will help you focus your ideas. Don't think about the masses.

I'll elaborate more on this concept as it applies to writing songs from ideas you may not have experienced yourself. For songwriters, I've modified this concept so that instead of a "customer" avatar, we're coming up with a character avatar.