Contemporary Songwriting

Additional Book Details

Contemporary Songwriting teaches you to compose and produce popular music with a Mac computer using the Apple programs GarageBand 10.2 and MainStage 3. You may also use Logic Pro X as an alternative to MainStage 3. You will need 50 GB of available space on your Mac for this software, its additional downloadable content, and several of your songs.

You need no experience with music to use this book, though any background you do have will be useful. Note that many famous songwriters began composing with no music background, and a significant number continued in their careers with little to no formal music training.

Because popular music is an innovative and rapidly evolving genre, this book makes every attempt to use current musical examples wherever possible. Less current popular music can provide a useful historical perspective and is used where it is the best available choice.

This book teaches you songwriting, production, and music theory through a basic compositional process. Once you have learned these fundamentals, you can easily modify that process to suit your artistic goals. Suggestions for how you might do so, and a discussion of the many options available to the songwriter, are at the end of the book.