In our Songwriting material inside Musical U we teach a couple of different step-by-step approaches to writing a song. Here, we’ll leave the exact 1-2-3 sequence fuzzy. Some musicians will want to start with an idea, emotions, and lyrics—and set their lyrics to music after, figuring out the form as they go. Others may prefer to start with the form and a musical idea, and see how the music inspires emotion and lyrics. And many experienced and successful songwriters and composers would tell you that their own sequencing of tackling each element varies from song to song.
So you can think of what’s presented in this chapter as a set of techniques and ways to approach each element of writing a song, and use your own inspiration and preference to draw on each at the best time, and in the order which seems best to you. To put it another way: there’s no wrong way to write a song!
As always, our approach will be informed by the H4 Model of Complete Musicality:
- Head: understanding the relevant theory, thinking up ideas for lyrics, planning your next songwriting session, etc.
- Hearing: using Audiation and Singing, leveraging Ear Training and its building blocks, etc.
- Hands: experimenting with ideas, arranging using instruments, expressing demo versions of a work-in-progress or recording the finished version, etc.
- Heart: connecting with emotion, intuition, inspiration, creative choices, aesthetic judgement, etc.
We encourage a Singing-based approach, because it’s the most direct way to express your musical ideas, and helps to distinguish the idea itself from the particular way it’s expressed on a specific instrument. You don’t need any ability more advanced than what’s covered in Chapter 4: Singing to make full use of singing in your Songwriting.
We will make use of the Expansive Creativity framework (Chapter 15: Improvisation), especially the techniques of Constraints and Dimensions, and Playgrounds. These provide an ideal way to gradually develop your Songwriting chops while eliminating “writer’s block” or the need to “wait for inspiration to strike”. You can make use of this chapter without having read that one, but it’s well worth being aware of the whole framework and activities covered there.
We will use Improvisation for easy idea generation, experimentation, and exploration. Again, that dedicated chapter isn’t a strict prerequisite, we’ll explain as we go—but the more you practice Improvisation in its own right, the more useful it will be to you in Songwriting.
Any experience and ability you have with the building blocks of Part II will be hugely useful for you. Even just the intellectual understanding from reading through those chapters will give you a much clearer perspective on how to tackle Pitch and Rhythm in your writing. And if you are actively working on Ear Training to develop the ability to recognise and express those building blocks instinctively, it will be transformative for your writing.
Arguably there’s no better way to learn how to write songs than by studying songs you love and admire. So the “listen with a question in mind” approach in Chapter 5: Active Listening will be a great asset to you. When Benny Romalis of How To Write Songs presented a masterclass for us at Musical U he described this as taking a “car mechanic’s” approach: by dissecting and analysing popular songs or those we personally prefer (i.e. taking songs apart, like a mechanic takes apart an engine), we can discover the best elements and techniques to construct our own songs from. We’ll learn as much about Songwriting in this chapter by listening as we will by writing!