3 Unexpected Songwriting Tips for Beginners

[00:01] the channel. If you are new to the channel, welcome. My name is Key and I run this channel with my friend Benny. We are both professional songwriters as well as songwriting educators. So, I've had the great privilege and honor to

[00:14] universities and colleges around the world, including the Berkeley College of Music. So, we run this channel to give songwriting education to anyone everywhere. And we also run songwriting workshops, courses, programs, as well as

[00:28] our beloved songwriting community which is available for anyone to join. You can the video notes right below. So this video is about three unexpected tips for

[00:41] beginner songwriters. These tips are unexpected because they're a little of things that might immediately or obviously occur to you at the very beginning of your kind of songwriting journey. They often take songwriters

[00:55] years and years to learn and recognize, but they don't need to take years and tip, and I'm going to briefly explain why the tip is so important, as well as

[01:07] giving you some steps and resources and guidance on how you can actually do some practical things to practice the tip and put it into action straight away. The put it into action straight away. The first tip is to finish more songs even

[01:22] when they're bad. If you have arrived at this video, I suspect it's because you have what is a very relatable frustration or struggle with your songwriting, which is that you start with a burst of inspiration, but that

[01:35] take the song from start to finish. Often what happens is it fizzles out after the first like verse or chorus. A lot of beginner songwriters will actually stop at this phase where it feels kind of awkward or uncomfortable.

[01:48] You've lost that initial burst of inspiration and it can kind of feel like, well, if not every line is something that I love, then I shouldn't be writing the song at all. Learning to actually finish a song, even when you

[02:01] get to that finish line, and the song itself does not necessarily feel like it meets your high standards or expectations for what you initially felt incredibly important. And it's incredibly important for two reasons.

[02:17] The first reason is that practicing finishing a song is a essential muscle set as a songwriter that is literally a practice just like running scales, just

[02:30] like learning chords or any other kind of practice that builds our skill set. Finishing songs itself is a skill set. It's a muscle set that we need to

[02:42] It's a muscle set that we need to practice so that we can confidently apply that muscle set to good ideas that we have. Because the reality is, if you get to the end of a 12-month period and you have 20 song snippets or song starts

[02:56] or song ideas and only one or two finished songs, you have not actually practiced songwriting. You've practiced song starting. So the actual practice of songwriting [laughter] depends on us practicing the skill of finishing even

[03:12] when the finished product is not necessarily brilliant every single time. The second really important reason why finishing more songs is really important, particularly when we are developing the art and craft and skill

[03:26] set as a songwriter is that if we write 20 songs in a year, our best four or 20 songs in a year, our best four or five songs are going to be way better

[03:38] than if we only write four or five songs. And if you are interested in writing a song from start to finish, blank page to completed first draft in the next 7 days, you can sign up to our free 7-day songwriter course at the link

[03:51] below in the show notes. When you sign up, I will send you each day's task straight to your inbox. Each task is designed to complete within 20 or 30 minutes. And in just that amount of time over the course of 7 days, you will have

[04:03] a finished song. Tip two, stop trying to be universal and start being specific. There is a very noble instinct when we start writing our songs which is that we want our songs to connect with other people. But the mistake that a lot of

[04:16] beginner songwriters make is to conflate the idea of writing something that is universally relatable with something that is general or generic. So instead of understanding that it is the specifics of your life that create

[04:32] believability and it is believability that creates authenticity and it is authenticity that creates connection with many more people. The mistake is beginning is to take their lyrics and strip the lyrics of everything that

[04:47] strip the lyrics of everything that makes them believable. Relatability is so often conveyed in the specifics of your life. That is why songwriters like Bruno Major and Lizzie McAlpine and Phoebe Bridges are such breakouts and

[05:02] songwriting scene because their lyrics are so specific. The details that they use really paint a picture of their lives and that is why such a huge audience around the world connects to

[05:16] them as people and as songwriters. I want to give you two resources that are put it into practice. The first is the book Storyworthy by Matthew Dixs. So Matthew Dixs is not a songwriter. He is a storyteller and he tells stories from

[05:31] his own life. But a lot of the exercises and principles inside this book are so so relevant for songwriters. One in particular called homework for life. This is a daily practice that can literally take between 30 seconds and 5

[05:44] minutes. And the idea with homework for life is simply that at the end of each day you ask yourself if I were at a dinner party or on the phone to a friend or something and they said tell me a story from today. What is one moment

[05:56] from today that would become a story I could tell? One of the things that is brilliant about this exercise for absolutely anyone is that very quickly it shows you that there's stuff happening in your life every single day

[06:11] that is not only story worthy but songw worthy. You don't need to have gone through a major trauma or a major life change or a major breakup to have something interesting and compelling to write about and sing about. There are

[06:25] write about and sing about. There are details of your day today that are emotionally alive and relevant to you. Often because they connect to bigger ideas or bigger themes in your life. And the practice of spending just a very

[06:39] short amount of time every day paying attention to the day that was and asking yourself what made this day different or interesting to every other day is such a great lens for collecting these moments and collecting these details and showing

[06:54] yourself that every single day you have the raw material of your life to draw on to write a song every single day. Another resource I would like to offer you if you have not checked it out yet is our video collection on lyric writing

[07:09] which you can check out right here. It's a full playlist and I would particularly point you to the videos on sense writing. Sense writing is a 10-minute freewriting practice that is only bound within the limitations of using your

[07:23] senses to paint a picture. Through this practice, you learn how to draw people in so that they are having the experience for themselves that you are singing about, not just looking at it from a distance. Tip number [music]

[07:36] three, you don't need more ideas, you need fewer decisions. So often in the live song feedback sessions that we run inside the HTWS songwriter community, songwriters will bring an idea and when I ask them, you know, what kind of

[07:51] feedback are you looking for on this song? Often I hear I'm looking to know it's really funny because my answer to that is always the same before I've even heard the song. And my answer is every idea is a good idea. It's not the idea

[08:06] that's the problem. It's what you do with the idea that determines whether or not the song is communicating effectively to a listener. Whether it's communicating an emotional idea, whether I listen to the song and I am moved,

[08:18] connected, I feel something. So it's not about the idea itself. It's so much more about what you do with the idea. Now, a lot of beginning songwriters will again kind of start a song idea based on inspiration, it fizzles out. And often

[08:31] what the problem is is there's so many options to choose from. And there can be a fear that when you choose one of those options, it's the wrong one or that you are going to ruin a good idea. Often what this is is a problem of too many

[08:46] choices, too many options and that can stall the process altogether. The solution to this is to reduce our options early. I like to think of this songwriting [laughter] because at the top of the cocktail glass, we have all

[09:00] the places that a song can begin. All the song seeds, song starters, sparks of inspiration. It might be a line of lyric. It might be an interesting metaphor. It might be a cool rhyme pair. It might be a cool melody that I hum. It

[09:13] might be a guitar riff or lick. It might be a beat that I heard or have created. A song truly can start anywhere. If I move further down the cocktail glass, I

[09:25] might slightly refine that initial song seed by saying, "All right, well, what I'm going to do some free writing or some sense writing. I generate ideas. I think about its context and its meaning. I write a little bit more. This is often

[09:39] the place that songwriters get stuck and cannot progress a song past that initial idea and that initial first verse or first chorus. This is where we get to the stem of the cocktail glass. And in reality, it's more like a funnel. Okay?

[09:54] makes it feel fun, but this is really more like a funnel. And what we're doing at this kind of pointy end of the funnel is doing what I call putting a squeeze on the song. And by squeeze, I mean we're going to make some decisions that

[10:09] create limitation. The first decision you can make is about song form. So actually deciding is this a song with a chorus or without a chorus? If there is or isn't a chorus, is there a bridge? Is there a pre chorus? I can make a

[10:24] decision about song form and commit to that. And that's going to give my song a shape that I can then fill with lyrics. The brilliant thing about that is if I bridge cuz I feel like that's what it needs. What that allows me to do is to

[10:39] needs. What that allows me to do is to not get stuck on any one line. I don't need to wait until the bridge is finished to move on to writing the final chorus or writing the chorus variation at the end. I might simply have the

[10:51] melodic shape of the bridge. And that's enough to get me to the end of the song, give the song a shape, and then what I'm going to do is come back and rewrite and going to do is come back and rewrite and revise inside those little sections of

[11:03] the song. Having actually made a decision about what that song form is going to be, I might also make a decision on the song map. So, a song map decision on the song map. So, a song map is very simply an outline or overview of

[11:17] what each section is there to do lyrically. If you'd like some specific examples of different song maps and song map templates, feel free to check out this video right here. It goes into a lot of detail about song maps there. But

[11:29] deciding on a song map is one of the ways that I can put a squeeze on an idea and commit to a direction for this song idea. Another thing I'm going to decide at this point is often the title or hook of the song. What is the one line, word,

[11:45] or phrase that is the anchor for the whole song? The one unifying line that everything is going to come back to. The really important thing about all of these decisions is that I'm making the decisions so that I can drive the

[12:03] momentum of the song forward. But I'm not contractually obliged to any of them. [laughter] And so often it's making that decision that allows me to progress. And it's in progressing that I come up with better ideas. So often it's

[12:17] only in moving forward by a step that the next step becomes clear. But we're never going to understand what the next step is unless we actually move forward. And moving forward often relies on us limiting the amount of possibility, the

[12:32] open space. We [music] need a sense of direction. And often simply making those decisions is the thing that can help drive it forward. If you are a beginner songwriter looking to not only write better [music] songs, but be a stronger

[12:45] three tips are going to help you. To recap, finish more songs, focus on specificity, and reduce decisions. And if you're looking for a little more structure and guidance, again, feel free to join the 7-day songwriter course. It

[12:59] is free. It is delivered straight to your inbox. You can join right now at the link below. Happy songwriting, guys. Bye.