About
About
Songfinding is a working library of songwriting craft: what to do at each stage of a song, written so the reader can check the claim against their own draft.
Why this exists
Most songwriting advice is either a feeling or a rule, and both are hard to use. "Make the chorus hit harder" is a feeling. "Never use the same chord twice in a row" is a rule, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous.
What is missing is the middle: a decision you can make in an afternoon, with a number attached. Which line is the melodic peak of the verse? How many syllables does the hook cost? What does the bridge add that the second verse did not? Those are answerable, and answering them changes the song.
How the library is arranged
One axis only: the stage of the work. Idea, verse, chorus, bridge, demo. There are no tags, no difficulty ratings and no "beginner" shelf, because a writer who has finished forty songs still has the same problem in verse two as someone who has finished none.
Within a stage, entries come in three kinds. Technique entries are the reusable moves. Exercise entries are prompts you can finish in one sitting. Breakdown entries take one song apart and show the bar counts.
Every entry carries its own numbers
Each entry prints a key or scale, a rhyme scheme, and a section-by-section bar structure. Those three fields are not decoration: they are what the structure strip at the top of the page is drawn from, and what the rhyme and chord tables in the right-hand column are derived from.
If a page says the chorus is eight bars and the strip underneath shows a chorus that is not a quarter of the width, that is a bug worth reporting.
Bilingual, not translated
English and Chinese versions of an entry are written separately. The examples differ where the two languages handle stress, rhyme and syllable count differently — which is most of the time. Each version is a complete entry on its own, at its own address, cross-linked to its twin.
This site is written and maintained by a small editorial group. Songfinding is published at navigating.top.
Advertising
This site is supported by advertising. Ads are served by Google and are labeled as ads. They have no influence on what gets written: no entry is sponsored, and no product placement is accepted.
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