Nice share Mike! They referred to that book we've talked about before in this forum, "The Song Machine", in a link under the video when you hit it on You Tube. Max was talked about in a good portion of that book. I took some notes from the video and included for those interested:

1) Melody is King!
- Write melody before lyrics
- Build song around it w/o being too complicated
- Fit syllables to notes of melody
- A line has to have a certain amount of syllables and the next line has to be the mirror image

Chorus pattern example, # of syllables:
Line 1 - 5 6 8 <--A B C
Line 2 - 5 6 12 <--A B D
Line 3 - 5 6 8 <--A B C
Line 4 - 5 5 12 <--A B D

2) Chorus within 50 seconds of song start

3) No more than 3 or 4 melodic parts per song
- Only introduced one part at a time

4) Recycle melodic parts
- Using them repeatedly gets the listener used to the song
- You can also use parts of the melody in both verse and chorus
- Katy Perry - ET - Had the same 8 bar melody in verse and chorus

5) Create balance
- Ying Yang
- If verse is sloppy, make chorus a little neater

Previous thread on this:
How Taylor Swift Writes her 1989 album Melodies



Steve

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