Everyone’s heard thousands of songs.  If a songwriter isn’t on her or his game, even an ‘unsophisticated’ listener (who’s actually pretty sophisticated these days) will know what’s going to happen next before it happens.  For me, everything on this list connects to one of two ideas – Avoiding Predictability and Bringing the Listener’s Attention to Where We Want It.

Today’s Top 10 Songwriting Mistakes, in no particular order:

1)  Putting the Title In the Wrong Place.  There’s usually a sweet spot in a melody, a place that’s begging for the Title.  Don’t fight it; put it there!

2)  A Weak Title (in a title-focused song).  If it’s dull, unexciting, not resonant to the writer… it’ll be even worse for the listener.

3)  A Boring Melody.  Melody is, generally speaking, by far the most neglected and underserved aspect of contemporary songwriting.  Many writers who’ll spend weeks honing a lyric just take the first melody that occurs to them and never even consider that it could be made better – just like a lyric – by time, attention, and work.

One tip here: If the melody is all in one scale, sometimes using just one note from out of the scale can make a melody a lot more lively.

4) Not Repeating important lines and/or sections (such as the Title and/or Chorus) enough.  This usually happens as a result of the fear of too much repeating.

5)  Rhymes Not Being In the Most Effective Places in the Melody.  As Stephen Sondheim has said, by definition words that rhyme will always be the most important words in a line – the rhyme brings that special attention to the words, whatever they are.  So the rhyming words should be carefully chosen and placed in the melody to use that emphasis in a way that the writer chooses.

6) Rhymes Not Carefully Considered.  For a particular song, how much rhyming is best?  Where should the rhymes go?  Should they be ‘perfect’ rhymes… or looser ones?  Or none at all?  Don’t go on automatic pilot when rhyming (or not).  Consider your options.

7)  Repeating The Same Rhythm In The Melody.  In many songs, as soon as you hear the first line… and then the second line has the same rhythm (even if the notes vary)… You know what’s coming.  That’s not good.  Mix up the rhythms!

Two easy ways to start doing this:  One – Don’t begin your melody for multiple lines in the same place in the bar every time.  Change it up; start one line a little earlier, one a little later.  Two – Look at your lyric.  If all the lines have the same or similar amount of syllables, your melody is much more likely to be predictable.

A subset of this is the Modular Melody.  Let’s say we’re talking about a song with 4 lines in the Verse.  It’s very common for writers to just repeat the melody of the first line, or something very close to it, four times.  Try thinking of your melody as a longer thought – an 8 bar phrase, say, not four 2 bar phrases.  A paragraph, not just four repeated sentences.

8)  Underutilizing Harmony.  Among other things, harmony is a way to add color and subtext to melody and words.  As with melody, it’s not a union regulation to loyally stick with the first chords that crossed your mind (or your fingers).  Once you have some focus in your melody, try some variations in the chords and see if something else works better.  Listen to the difference a new chord makes to the word or note… and what it feels like to you.  Sometimes a single surprising chord change can ‘wake up’ a whole song.

9)  The Melody Note Changes Only When the Chord Changes.  A very common problem, particularly among less-experienced songwriters (although not exclusive to them).  Songs written on guitar are particularly prone to this.  Melodies usually need to move around within each chord.  If your melody stays on one or two notes for the first chord, then changes to another one or two notes for the next chord, and so on… that’s probably not good (for an example of this, see the video below).

10)  When I told my friend, the excellent songwriter Matt Keating, about the topic for this post, he said, “Well, the worst mistake is Not Writing a Song!”  And I’ll leave it at that.