Make Great Cover Song – 3 Rules is an article you must read as an upcoming,you should read this to the end. Before i proceed, How to Make Cover Songs REALLY Stand Out is an article you must check out!

After my love for Justin Bieber hit single “Love Your self”, as in i really do love the song and even attempted a cover. After i met Toluwase Moses, the current CEO of Hitlodge during our camping in Mangu, Plateau State. He discovered the love i have for the song and he then introduced some cover of the song to me. And after i listened to them all, i fell in love with covers.


Making a good cover takes more than virtuosic skill or a sense of irony. If you’re covering a song you should have a reason to be playing someone else’s song in your own style and that should come out clearly in your version of the song. Many of the covers on Cover Zen break or bend one or more of these rules but it’s a given that there are always exceptions to rules; generally speaking, these points define what I personally look for in a cover

The 3 Points On Make Great Cover Song – 3 Rules

1 – Be Original:

the Cover Artist should bring something fresh to the original song, whether it be supplanting the song into another genre or casting it in a different light through context, tempo, musical colour, etc.

Why? Why should we listen if you’re going to just remake the old song note for note? It either won’t be as good and will only serve to highlight the inadequacies in your performance via the comparison or it’ll be a carbon copy and we might as well listen to the original.

2 – Have a Point:

the Cover Artist should have a reason to cover the song – and we need to see it, whether it’s simply a love for the original or a humorous take on it; the remake should make the artist’s intention clear and convince us that they really did have to make a whole new version of an old song.

Why?

If you want to raise above the morass of people “practicing” or simply paying fan homage we need to see clearly your unique take on the song. If your cover wasn’t particularly funny or it wasn’t an unusual take that throws the original in a whole different light then why subject us to it?

How?

Well, your point may be to show how you can take something seemingly frivolous or light-hearted and make it sound meaningful and heartfelt by virtue of your soulful performance – or, you may want to show that you can give something soft a hard edge. In either of these cases, the How is in the way you arrange and perform the song.

Sometimes, if you start with your reason for liking the original song you may find a new avenue to explore the fresh perspective you want to present by a study of the lyrics and an understanding of shades of meaning that could be brought to them by presenting them in an entirely new style of music; in other cases, just liking a song and performing it in the style you are most skilled at is enough to turn our heads.

3 – Respect the Original:

“Respect” doesn’t mean that the Cover Artist can’t make fun of a song – some of my favourite covers do so, and the artists have stated their great respect for the original.

Respect in this context means that a good Cover Artist knows what worked musically in the original – whether it was the interplay of the melody over the chords or simply the swagger of the lyrics – and portrays their understanding of this fact by building off it or referencing it in some way e.g. highlighting the vocal melody by reducing the background to a sparse arrangement (particularly good if you want to highlight the qualities of your voice) or stripping all the extraneous elements from a busy pop song to showcase the simple, powerful songwriting at its core.

Usually, a Cover Artist is covering a song that’s well known and was once popular to some extent so a healthy degree of respect for the fact that the songwriter must have hit on something appealing – and that the Cover Artist has some idea of what that might be – is a crucial basis to build on.

Simply put: if you remove the elements that made the original song successful and/or were the highlight of the song you may be setting your listeners up for disappointment and calling your musical perception into question – and they will let you know.

Why?

Well, if, for example, you’re only using the lyrics from the original song – unless you’re being clever about it – then you might as well poach random poetry off the net and call it a cover. And if you’re, say, a folk musician covering a hip hop song it helps if we can see that you have a clue about the music you’re lampooning and you’re not just trying to generate a laugh with the least amount of effort. Either you’re identifying beauty in the core melody and exposing that by supplanting the song to an unexpected format or you’re lampooning the extreme nature of the lyrics by applying an incongruous style.

In summary, there’s nothing wrong with doing a cover “just because” but these are tips for making great cover songs. The ones that stand out are covers that rise above a simple rehash of the original and stamp the performer’s personal signature on the song in some way.

I think covers are a beautiful artform – the good ones allow us to hear great performances by drawing us in with something familiar presented in a fresh new way; without the lure of a familiar song, great performers can go unseen so if you believe you are a great performer and people should hear you, use the power of a known song to show us how good you are. And we at hitlodge will help you publish it where over 2K people will view and listen withing 2 weeks.

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