Music

I love attending the open mic at the Function Bar in Toronto. Every time I get there with my camera bag on my back, the host Greg shakes my hand and asks right away if I'd like to back up the next act on drums. I'm always grateful for the offer, and I always [...]

The songwriting process behind my answer to the Song Studio songwriting challenge, to write a song based on the word "Shadow"

In 2017, I wrote a song as a response to many of my female friends sharing their "Me Too" stories on social media, in the wake of powerful men in Hollywood and elsewhere behaving abhorrently. The song was called The Countless Few, and I recorded and released it on my Soundcloud page. The emotional content [...]

Why Do You Cry by Neel Modi Download the lyric / chord sheet. For the last three years on Song Talk Radio, we've taken on a songwriting challenge. This is a great way to jump start your creative juices and lend some focus to your songwriting process. For this year, we opted to write a [...]

I’m a fan of Andrew Huang, a great youTuber who talks about music theory, electronic music, and is a talented songwriter in his own right. On a recent video, Andrew expressed his long-time obsession with a rather tasty chord: A 13 chord with a sharp 11 and no 7. […]

I met Chad through the cross-pollination of our respective Meetup groups, Song Talk Meetup, and Chad's own group, At Home Songwriting. I highly recommend Chad's online workshops, he's a fantastic teacher with a great presentation style and knows how to engage his participants in a meaningful and effective way. He's also the Education Director at [...]

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 [...]

I released an EP of progressive electro-pop songs in September 2020. Ace Symmetry features odd time signatures, nonsensical lyrics, inventive beats, and catchy synth solos. It was an interesting and fun challenge to work on a focused project like this. I talked about the project and featured some of the songs twice on Song Talk [...]

The Other Side by Neel Modi In late 2020, on the Song Talk Radio podcast, we decided to do another songwriting challenge; this was our second challenge in two years. Songwriting challenges, or prompts, are a great way to jump start a song and give you focus while writing. In fact, songwriters do this all [...]