Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: George Milton
You can't take someone's melody or lyrics and call them your own. Most songwriters know, though, that chord progressions aren't generally protected by copyright.
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Elephant ivory has been considered a valued luxury material across cultures and continents for millennia.
Read More »We all know that songs need to be unique. You can’t take someone’s melody or lyrics and call them your own. Most songwriters know, though, that chord progressions aren’t generally protected by copyright. So that’s certainly one element of a song that you can take and use, guilt-free. If you’re trying to develop a lyrics-first songwriting process, but aren’t having much luck, give this ebook a read: “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process.” Right now, it’s FREE with your purchase of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle.” You can also use someone else’s title — usually. Even though titles are not typically protected by copyright, I’d recommend you steer away from calling your next song “Hey Jude”, “Rolling In the Deep”, or “Blowin’ In the Wind.” Is there anything else that you can borrow or “steal” from someone else’s song that won’t get you in trouble? One of the most helpful parts of a song to take and use might be another song’s formal design. By “formal design”, we’re simply talking about the structure of a song — the arrangement of verses and choruses and any other optional bits of someone else’s song. How is borrowing a formal design helpful? In some cases, you may have snippets of musical ideas, but not be sure how to fit those ideas all together. Seeing how someone else solved that can be very helpful in your own process. If you find borrowing another songwriter’s solutions a bit restricting, you can take parts of songs that are otherwise copyright protected, and manipulate them. Here are 3 quick ideas: Take a well-known melody and play it backwards. Take bits of lyric and change certain words to create something clever, humorous or thought-provoking. Weird Al does this when he “recreates” songs, and since copyright laws allow for parody renditions of songs, you can have a lot of fun with this without worrying about being on the wrong side of the law. Borrowing the feel of a song. Sometimes you get inspired by the general performance ideas that other singer-songwriters come up with. While being mindful that there is a limit to how much you can do this (remember “Blurred Lines?”), you can certainly take the tempo and basic backing rhythm feel and see where it takes you. Generally speaking, though, the best way to keep the ideas flowing is to be listening a lot to music. The more you listen, the more your own sense of creativity and musical imagination extrapolates on those songs.
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