• Neel Modi - Ace Beats banner

    I’m inviting rap artists to collaborate on a new project. I created these beats for my progressive electro-pop EP, Ace Symmetry. I challenged myself to only use odd time signatures, so every beat is 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, or 13 beats to a bar. If you’re up to the task, I’d love to hear [...]

  • Jellyfish Interrupted band photo, L to R: Neel, Nabil, Sherry, and Paul

    I first met Paul Vos at the Song Talk Meetup, and always dug his approach to writing funky songs with catchy hooks, complex rhythms, and interesting lyrics. Soon afterwards, Paul began collaborating with Sherry Jacoby, another regular member (and now co-host) of the meetup and a fine singer-songwriter in her own right. They recorded several [...]

  • I'd Still Choose You cover art with young woman alone outdoors on a balcony, facing outwards

    This song was the result of a collaboration between Melanie Peterson and I. We wrote the song together fairly easily, and recently recorded it in my home studio. I came up with a chord progression on the piano (I was going through a Dorian phase at the time). Melanie started with singing a melody with [...]

  • No Good at Goodbye cover art

    I was privileged to work with singer-songwriter Melanie Peterson on producing a song for her Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. One of Melanie's perk offerings was to write a song for a contributor. Melanie wrote a delicate love song with a healthy melancholy. I'm always impressed at how Melanie employs clever wordplay without sounding clever (the double [...]

  • Anatomy of a Song book cover with Neel reading

    I recently finished reading a great book by Marc Myers entitled Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits that Changed Rock, R&B, and Pop. Myers interviewed the people involved in historically significant songs from the 1940s to the 1990s. He ended his examination in 1991 because, as he explains it, you [...]

  • Liar cover art

    Liar is the third song I've worked on with dance-pop music singer-songwriter Dokter Nomi. I first met Nomi at the Song Talk Meetup group in Toronto. He has a unique approach to songwriting, compared to myself and most of the singer-songwriters I know. Nomi comes up with melodies and lyrics, but doesn't play any instruments. [...]

  • Rock band Beige Shelter at the Rivoli in Toronto

    As part of the indie rock band Beige Shelter, I collaborated with our lead singer Adi Aman on a song encouraging men to be more open about their feeling and issues. The song was inspired by Movember’s tagline for their 2018 campaign. The movement asked all men to be “A Man of More Words.” Their [...]

  • I was privileged to work with Ashley Braga on her debut album of children's music, Ladder to the Moon. Ashley is a talented singer-songwriter and music educator with an incredible gift for melody and a beautiful voice. Ashley wrote several original songs for the album, and put her own special twists on classic children's song [...]

  • queen and two knights on chessboard

    This song is a test case for the distance between an initial idea for a song and its execution. Through two completely different drafts, the idea remained the same, but the execution and treatment went on a twisted journey. A bad first draft The original idea was to write a song about the pervasive vocabulary [...]