Proven Songwriting Tips to Make You More Effective As a Songwriter

Here are useful Songwriting tips & ideas to keep your creative juices flowing, and to add some freshness in your writing.

Songwriters usually require the following skills (irrespective of the style):

• You need to create musical and lyrical ideas
• You need to arrange these ideas into formats that best suits the style of the song

In order to write a song, you need the following:

• Lyrics for the song
• Hummable melody
• Harmony (How to bring all the instruments together)
• Play it to your friends and family for feedback

However, it can be challenge to write more, and at the same time keep the content fresh and not look repetitive.

Songwriting Tips

Here are some songwriting tips that will help you overcome this challenge:

• Write Your Experiences: This is also the comparatively easier to write, writing about your own experiences. You however need to think how to give it a global appeal.
• Use Catchy Phrases: You need to stay in tune with the times, so that you can use some of the phrases that people use every-day. For certain songs, you will need to write the lyrics the way people speak.
• Hook Your Listener: This one comes through experience and also by analyzing other works. The hook is what stays with the listener, and gets repeated over and over. So work on your hooks.

  You also need to learn how to make a good first impression with the first line of your song. Read more on how to structure a song.

• Listen More: Listen and analyze the hit songs, what are the things that make it so special? Try to incorporate the good things in your writing.
• Read More: Only then will you get more ideas. Not just newspapers, you also need to read some good song-writing books for more songwriting tips and ideas.
• Write More: That is the only way to improve, and also to make sure you have a good repository of songs ready with you.
• Rewrite your Songs: Every few months you should checkout your existing songs and try to rewrite or polish it further. With more experience, you can make these better.
• Keep a Recorder Handy: Get one if you don’t have one already. You may wake up with a brilliant, million dollar idea but could lose it if you don’t record it.
• Also Carry a Notebook: You need to note down all the ideas that you come across, and which you have decided to work on further. Some of the greatest hits have come out of a simple idea.
• Experiment: Otherwise things will get boring, and this is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t. Using the same song-writing formula over and over could suffer from over-kill!
• Avoid forcing yourself to come up with ideas; it could turn out to be uninteresting. A better approach is to write whatever comes to your mind, and edit it later, or probably just take a break.
• Learn from Others: You can also learn from the success and failure of other songwriters & musicians.

Types of Software Used by Songwriters

More and more songwriters are moving away from pen and paper, and using songwriting software to pen down their feelings and to write beautiful songs. Despite the early skepticism about these software, more and more songs get written nowadays on the laptop computer.

Not only do these software keep all your songs organized at one place, they also include several other useful tools that aid in songwriting, such as rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, chord charts, and more.

When using these software, you also get an accompaniment band, which really helps you to get an idea of what your song is going to hear like.

If you use pen, you would already know that changing the key or adding an intro means starting all over.

So if you do this day in day out, you need to use a software so that it’s easy to change the keys, add more measures, and move things around. This will save you lot of time and also let your creative juices flow when you are in the middle of the work.

The best songwriter software actually lets you do a lot more then just songwriting – You can Write, Record, Edit, Mix, Master, Notate, Compose with these software.

Music Notation Software

Music Notation software helps you easily create and print professional-quality sheet music.

Writing music is a time consuming task, especially when you are not good at it. Even if you are good at it, writing complex arrangements takes lot of time.

Besides, if you write on a piece of paper, editing becomes a problem. It is not very convenient to keep on erasing and editing as you go on to develop your final score.

You can get rid of these issues by using a music notation software.

A Music Notation software can be useful for the classically trained composer to write music in the traditional way (using standard notation). Just play around with your musical ideas, and the software will give you the notation of the song that you composed right away.

The better ones provide you with all the features to help you compose a piece of music or create your own arrangement of a favorite song. These also have features for composing, arranging and publishing.

Best Music Notation Software:

• Notion: Compose any way you like and even enter music with your own handwriting
• Finale Print music: Create Sheet music with ease.
• Sibelius: Complete toolset to write, compose and arrange music without any limits

Lyric Writing Software

There are several software programs available to help you with your lyric writing.

These come with powerful writing tools that help you leverage the English language to the fullest so that you can express yourself in a more unique and meaningful way.

These are perfect for writing songs, poems, or even novels.

The best lyric writing software are comprehensive lyric writing tools that help you streamline every aspect of the creative writing process and can be of great help to the serious amateur or professional songwriter.

These provide features such as rhyming, phrases, alliterations, content-rich pop culture dictionary, organize the lines by syllables, and basically make the song easy to read.

Music Creation Software

These help you to create the actual song with various sounds/tracks. It requires you to have a computer and other equipment such as MIDI keyboard, recording software, audio interface, microphone, and other recording gear.

Most of the recording software are simple to use, and can be used to quickly record a couple of tracks such as a guitar/piano and vocals. Perfect if you want to capture basic singer songwriter type tracks.

You can also record complex music arrangements using this setup, but that requires advanced composing and arranging skills as well.

Read more on Music Recording Software.

Song Writing Journals, Music Composition Notebooks

Song Writing Journals, Music composition notebooks (Blank Sheet Music) for song writers, teachers and musicians.

Music composition notebooks with blank papers (for notes) and music manuscript paper (for writing notes, lyrics). The blank staff paper includes the five line staff.

These lined notation papers are perfect for composing, lyrics, songwriting, ideas and inspiration.

Who can use these?

• Write down lyrics and musical notation
• Keep track of all your song ideas
• Write your own songs
• Write notes from classes or lessons

Songwriting journals are a kind of notebooks that can be used to record ideas, snippets of lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, and other songwriting-related information.

Songwriting journals come with lined pages for lyrics, staffed pages for writing melodies, and fret diagrams for writing guitar fingerings.

These journals come in various sizes and are quite convenient to use, especially when inspiration strikes (instead of starting your laptop or tablet and opening some software).

Music Composition Notebook with Blank Sheet Music and Lined Paper

So no more writing notes on the back of manuscript pages or drawing staves on notebook pages. Use one of these song-writing journals, music composition notebooks with blank sheet music.

These blank music journals can be used by band students, musicians, composers, and song writers.

Music Songwriting Journal: Music journal with 8 x 10 pages. Lined pages on one side and blank sheet music on the other, allowing you to jot down lyrics and music. Good quality pages.

Songwriting Journal: 100 pages, Left hand pages contain 24 lines per page for writing song lyrics and ideas. The right hand pages contain 12 musical staves for writing down standard music notation.