We all love songwriting tips, even when most songwriting tips don’t help!
Learn to actually improve your songwriting and manage that songwriting tips addiction.
They feel good, but songwriting tips are mostly a waste of your time.
Hey, we all love songwriting tips, you get a jolt of endorphins and you feel like you learned something, but let’s be honest… songwriting tips are the junk food of songwriting, you can try to fill up on them but you end up feeling empty. If you want to build your songwriting muscles, you need protein. Songwriting advice with actual substance.
Think about it… of the dozens or hundreds of songwriting tips you’re read about in blogs, books and magazines or watched on YouTube. ..
How many did you actually try? Be honest. (10 fingers)
And how many actually worked for you? (1 finger) Right… is that the best use of your time?
In this article, you’ll learn
- Why we love songwriting tips.
- Why most songwriting tips don’t help you write better songs.
- What you actually need instead of songwriting tips.
- How to productively use songwriting tips and manage your songwriting tips addiction, and
- How to take control of your songwriting so you actually improve your songwriting skills and results!
Below the video lesson is a written summary, with bonus ideas and links to other songwriting resources to improve your songwriting skills and solve your songwriting tips addition!
Why We Love Songwriting Tips
Songwriting tips are fun, let’s say you’re on YouTube and you binge watch songwriting tips videos. You get an endorphin rush and you feel good about being a songwriter. You’re passively sitting , imagining being a songwriter without doing any work to earn it. You’re afraid of missing out on some magic bullet solution for songwriting that will help you write that one in a million hit that will bring you fame and fortune…
Let’s get honest for a minute… most songwriting tips sound great when you hear them. When you try them out, either it’s something you can already do, or you try it and it makes no sense… it doesn’t really work for you.
The truth is most songwriters write using their musical intuition, subconsciously making musical decisions. But until you’ve developed those intuitions you can’t can’t depend on them. Because they can’t explain songwriting in a way that you can copy them, they tell you to “write from the heart” or some other great sounding but meaningless saying.
Why Songwriting Tips Don’t Help
A songwriting tip is a little piece of the puzzle. But songs aren’t little pieces, they are a big puzzle, and you need more than one piece to solve it.
To get from the first inspiration to a finished song there are countless steps as you decide what to write about, craft a story and create an emotional journey. Then you write the lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, arrangement. Then edit it and improve your first draft so you eventually end up with a finished song you’re satisfied with. Make sense so far?
What Your Actually Need is a Songwriting Process
You don’t need songwriting tips… what you actually need is a songwriting process! All the steps. Now if you’ve written more than a few songs, you already have some kind of songwriting process. The trick is finding ways to improve your songwriting process so you write better songs, faster. Still with me?
Good, because half of the people still watching have skipped through parts of this video. You’re already ahead of most other songwriters.
How to Use Songwriting Tips
Now there can be some value in songwriting tips, if you make them work for you. Understand that there’s no magic solution. When it comes to songwriting tips, you need to
1 Remember it
2 Try it, then
3 Fit it into your songwriting process
So when you come across an interesting tip, advice or songwriting quotes, write them down in your songwriting notebook. Just writing it down will help you remember to apply it later. Then, you need to actually try it out a few times to discover if it’s helpful.
So, remember it, try it and then integrate it into your songwriting process.
How to Get Proactive and Take Control
If you want to take it to the next level, get proactive. Take some time to write about your usual songwriting process. Where do you usually get inspiration? What do you do next? Do you write the lyrics and then add a melody or write the melody first. There’s no right or wrong, just jot down the steps you usually take as you write songs.
The next level or step is to identify where you could improve your songwriting process.
- Are there bottlenecks where your writing slows down?
- Do you have failure points where you often abandon songs?
- How can you streamline your songwriting process to finish songs faster?
- What songwriting skills do you need to improve? Are your rhymes too predictable or your melodies not memorable enough?
- Do you have weaknesses in your instrumental or vocal skills limiting your songwriting?
- Are there weaknesses in your music theory or songwriting knowledge that you need to develop?
- How could you create time to write more often?
- How could you make your writing time more productive?
Be honest with yourself and you can identify where you might improve. Then you can stop searching for songwriting tips, and look for specific advice to help you improve your songwriting process and the songs you write! Instead of searching randomly, you can take control and build on what you already know.
Keep in Mind:
- Creating a songwriting process takes time and experimentation.
- Songwriting is experimenting, some experiments (songs) fail.
- Write a draft of a song and improve it, don’t try to write a final draft on the first try, this is a great way to block yourself up.
- The fastest way to improve your songwriting is to finish songs, not just mess around with songwriting tips.
- Finish your songs, even when they don’t feel like the best ever. Does this make sense? Good.
- If you click on the first description link you can read a written summary of this entire video and these action steps you actually follow them.
If you learned something, share this article with a songwriter it could help and check out this playlist of more songwriting videos.
Thanks for watching, I’m Trevor Dimoff, I transform musicians into songwriters at epicsongwriting.com. Now go figure out your songwriting strengths and weaknesses and use them to write and finish songs.
Additional Songwriting Resources
How to Write a Song Chorus
Learn to write the lyrics and music to a song chorus!
Click and enter your email address to get it straight to your inbox…
Online Songwriting Courses on EpicSongWriting
It’s faster to get songwriting training from someone who knows how to teach it, than endlessly questing on Google or YouTube
https://epicsongwriting.com/songwriting-courses/
