How to Write and Record a Pop Hit

A lot of people think that it's very hard to compose and record a hit song. In this article I'll give you just a few tips anyone can follow to write a hit song which appeals to a large audience and has a fantastic commercial potential.

1. Make up a catchy tune. The easiest way to do it is to listen to a few popular songs and copy the chord progression. Change the melody and rhythm to your liking, but make sure it is simple and has a lot of repetition.

2. Your song needs to have a disco rhythm. To do this, you can use a program like Fruity Loops with the Ezdrummer plugin. In the Ezdrummer plugin, select the drum pattern to which people can actually dance. Disco usually employs a semi-quaver hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat.

3. Once your drum beat is ready, load it to ProTools or similar program.

4. Grab your electric guitar and record it over the drum track using an M-Audio Fast Track interface or similar.

5. Now connect your mike to the audio-interface. You need to have a condenser microphone for proper vocal recoding. You can use the AKG Precision microphone or similar.

6. Record you vocals over the drum and guitar tracks.

7. Now grab a bass guitar and play the bass part. Don't play a lot of notes on the bass guitar. Instead, play a repeated pattern that compliments your drum beat. They need to be in a tight grip with each other to produce that punchy sound that you can usually hear in commercial radio-friendly records.

8. Now you add some synth sounds to your record. Connect MIDI keyboard to your computer or laptop and record some sounds using the presets available in Pro Tools or similar program. Remember that the synth sounds should not stick out a lot. The keyboard part must be simple and complimentary to the song.

9. Mix your track using Pro Tools or similar program. If you are not good at mixing, you'll probably need to ask a professional sound engineer to do it for you. But you do need to understand what kind of sound you want. Choose the songs that you like and show them to your sound engineer as an example.

10. Professional records employ a lot of compression which makes them sound loud and smooth.

The overall sound of your record must be very smooth and pleasant to the ear. When mixing is done, compare the sound of your song to the songs that you hear on the radio. If your song doesn't sound up to par, you probably need to remix the song.