Essentials of Songwriting
by Richey McCourt
1. Give yourself as many opportunities to be creative as possible.
In doing this, you’ll identify obstacles in your way in any given week.
What is getting in the way of you sitting down and being creative? Once you identify these obstacles, they’ll become easier to manage and overcome.
2. Always have your antennae out for new ideas.
Be open-minded when you’re watching films, TV, or during conversations. You never know when a great concept, melody or lyric idea will strike you.
3. Being time efficient & organised, leaves more room for creativity.
Consider using new tools to make your more menial tasks quicker to complete.
Voicenotes
Voicenotes are great, now start rating each recording. Each time you record a musical idea to your phone, rate it: 1 star for good, 3 stars for great. This will save you time when you go back through your voicenotes.
RhymeBrain
This is one of many rhyming resources available. Cole Porter is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He used to carry rhyming dictionaries around with him. If it’s alright for Cole to use them, it’s alright for us.
Splice: a large catalogue of royalty-free samples.
Suggester: a phone app to help you find chords that work well together.
Samply: great for producers when sending mixes and songs to clients.
Session Studio
By Max Martin, Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA, and Niclas Molinder. This helps you clear your songwriting splits more efficiently. It makes it easy to send metadata to labels, such as the key, BPM, lyrics.
Disco
Great if you have a catalogue of songs you want to get in front of music supervisors in a professional setting. It’s standard amongst the TV/Film syncing industry. It also makes it easy to send playlists to A&R people.
Soundflow
For producers, this streamlines a lot of the menial tasks in your Digital Audio Workstation. If something repeatedly takes you 10 clicks, Soundflow enables you to do it in one. This will help you get the time-wasting tasks out of the way.
4. Ask yourself what kind of songwriter you want to be.
If you had a magic wand and you could get your dream record deal or publishing deal, what does that look like?
A lot of people know they want to be a songwriter but haven’t asked themselves that practical question. If you’re taking time out of the week to hone your craft, you can’t be wishy-washy about your objective. Consider the below questions:
- Are you an artist-songwriter singing your own songs?
- A songwriter for hire?
- Both the above?
- What does your market look like?
If you figure this out, the path will be clearer.
5. Rewrite & be a good editor.
Often you need to be bold and say, “we need new lyrics”, or “we just need to start again.”
Your first draft is the first step. In a writing session you have to leave no stone unturned. Refine, refine, refine, refine. Draw every ounce out of a melody. Don’t settle for OK.
If you feel like you’re internally coming up with excuses for why a certain section isn’t right, you need to go back and work on it. Maybe the first half of the song needs to be repeated? 90% of the time asking yourself questions like this results in a better song.
6. Don’t be afraid of repetition.
Carly Rae Jepson’s hit, I really like you is a great example of how repetition surprisingly works really well:
“I really, really, really, really, really, really like you
I really really really like you”
7. Let a song marinate.
Give it a break for a few weeks and when you go back, you’ll hear straight away what you need to do to it.
8. The most simple melody or riff is often the best.
Example: The Weekend – Blinding Lights riff
Think of ways to create something to anchor your song around, perhaps a lyrical phrase or a riff. You want to grab the listener with a simple hook.
As Sinéad O’Connor said about songwriting:
“It’s much harder to be simple than
it is to be complicated.”
9. Get in the room with good songwriters.
This will push you in your game. Collaborating will make you consider things you haven’t considered before.
10. Define what your song is about.
Perhaps it’s about the split second you meet someone on the dancefloor. Everything in the song should lead up to, and emphasise, that moment. Create a world around that moment.
By keeping the lyrics focused you’ll make it easier to lock in the listener.
11. Consider song themes that everyone can relate to.
For example, break-ups.
12. Networking is important.
Even the most established songwriters still knock on doors emailing artists, managers, & publishers. Use every opportunity to make and build relationships in this industry.
13. Everyone gets rejected probably 90% of the time.
Google search big bands and artists who got rejected before they become successful.
You have to strike a balance of both internal self esteem to enable you to get back in the studio, as well as being self-critical to keep pushing yourself to do better.
Try to learn from rejection, don’t take it to heart. Songwriting is subjective.
14. Be a Jack-of-all-trades.
It’s rare that songwriters stick to just songwriting all of the time. Remain open-minded and consider what other, related pies you could have your finger in.