The Addiction Formula: A Holistic Approach to Writing Captivating, Memorable Hit Songs. With 317 Proven Commercial Techniques & 331 Examples

Presents a workable metadata framework for creating interest in musical structures. The work summarizes cause and effect but it struggles to maintain consistency. There are several strong contradictions throughout the material (eg: initially stating energy curves are relative and show no reference to dynamics— while then stating in a later chapter that energy curves show a deep linkage to dynamics). Close reading will uncover these inconsistencies— with the risk of confusing someone without grounding in theory.Overall, the author and reader would have been better served by more rigorous proofreading. The departure from standard music terminology places the reader on something of an island which just adds unnecessary additional layers to comprehension. While this book is not a formal summary of theory— an editor grounded in theory would have spotted some of these issues and driven to a better conclusion for the reader.The sum total here is the author does a workable job at presenting an encapsulation of many useful techniques while struggling somewhat to maintain focus and consistency. This is clouded by the informal presentation and in some ways arbitrary use of new terminology.The keen reader would be well advised to extract the useful points into learnings they can port into their own compositions. In short, don’t take the issues too seriously. Reading between the lines and reformatting these learnings into your own conceptual framework will probably generate the best results.

Totally lacking in anything but a few very basic concepts. Not even really about songwriting. I wasn't necessarily looking for a "secret formula," but this is certainly not it. The free content that he offers elsewhere is decent, but I felt almost scammed by this book. Wish I could get my money (and time) back.

I've read a few books over the years on song writing with very mixed results . I've won Grammys and other awards as well. I picked up this book hoping to use it's ideas to write even one song with a new approach but this fell very flat for me. I wonder if the writer has ever actually written a good song. He uses many references to many of today's hits with breakdown techniques that I doubt the writers of those songs ever thought about. I'd say save your money and spend a few days picking apart a bunch of your favorite tunes then buy your partner some flowers.

I have stayed up late several nights in a row reading this book and do not regret it. I have been working on arranging a new original song for a while now and this book has given me a lot of great ideas that I can't wait to put into practice. It has also given me insight into why my favorite songs are so catchy. Pretty much all of my favorite songs are applying the principles in this book. To be clear, even though there is a decent amount of pop song references, a lot of the rock,alternative, and metal songs have elements of the formula. Some of the ideas are intuitive to me, but I still think there is some value in consciously acknowledging the ideas and metaphorically adding them to your "toolbox" so that you can remember these techniques long after you've read the book. Definitely worth $10 if my songs turn out even slightly better than they would have had I not read this book! The automation ideas alone are worth 10 bucks... Now I just have figure out how to do some of that stuff in my DAW.

In an era of the home studio, where the role of the songwriter has expanded to vocalist, instrumentalist, recording engineer, producer, mixer, mastering engineer (I'm using the "term" engineer loosely, for those out there who have specialized in the field), and publicist, Friedemann Findeisen takes a fresh approach that treats music production (essentially, music composition in the pop music genre) as essential to this process. I found Findeisen's experience to match very well with my own, but as a Music Composition major in college, I love fleshing out the vision of my songs through music production. Findeisen lays out a path for developing musical intensity to create an emotional map for a song, with excellent graphs for every instrument, like using a brassier timbre in the vocals, moving from fingers to pick for the guitar, or expanding to include extreme lows and highs in the keys. I read through the book in under a week, and I'm not fond of reading books. This was a captivating and highly valuable read for me as a developing singer-songwriter and music producer. If you're not invested in the entire process from song idea to mastering and publication (with the greatest emphasis on production), this book might not be for you. If your a home studio kind of guy/gal with a burning desire to do it all, then pick this one up. I loved it. And yes, English isn't Findeisen's first language. There were some times in which that was apparent, but those times were fairly endearing. His command of the english language (or lack thereof) does not take away from this book one bit. He really knows his stuff.

Its a good book. However, here are my critques:1. The typos are very known in this book. Not that I'm a grammer nazi, but things like "tachnique" and other words were misspelled. I get he's german so Ich verstehe. Although I can't complain since I always mispell words or forget my punctuation.2. A big chunk of the book was pretty much fluff in my opinion.3. Some things you have to look up yourself because he didn't give enough information on some of the words he ment. For example, he said that everyone knows & even his dentist knows, what groove and rhythm is. I sorta know what rhythm is, but I do not know what's the difference between groove and rhythm was. So it's like whaatt?4. It would be nice to have a cd with some clips of the music that he is referring to on the bottom. However, I didn't mark any stars off of that simply because I don't know what the regualtions are to copy parts of some music for education purposes. It's probably a lawsuit waiting to happen so, I won't count that against him.Overall a good book to read :)

It's an interesting perspective on how to approach songwriting including arrangement and production. The author focuses on how to apply levels of energy in your song structure. Describes how to use simple ways to micro manage those energy levels. It doesn't reinvent the wheel and doesn't give you the key to hit success and doesn't claim doing that. It's not technical or difficult to understand what the author is describing.Could be half the pages to deliver the message but oh well sometimes it's better to have that extra in order to grasp the big picture.Knowledge is power. I did learn something from that book. I recommend -

Nothing groundbreaking. Those of us that have been writing songs and producing music for years already know about the control of tension. However, the organisation of my implicit knowledge into an explicit theory is very useful for structuring my songwriting.

Much better books on songwriting out there save your money

Excellent

Some say there is no formula but trends do speak from measurement.An awesome book,Thank you Findersen!