3 Bad Songwriting Habits You Need to STOP!

if you are genuinely trying to get better at writing songs or even serious about a career in songwriting getting over these three bad habits could be the difference between success and failure in this video we're going to share three bad habits with you that you really need to stop right now if you want to stop feeling frustrated and stuck with your songwriting and really take it to the next level Benny and I are both working composers and songwriters and between the music industry so we have experience grappling with these habits figuring out how to get Beyond them as well as seeing how a career can grow and flourish once you do so let's get straight into it talk about what these three habits are talk about some strategies for overcoming them and later on in the video we're going to show you some mind-blowing free production resources that will inspire you endlessly but also help you really deal with habit number two bad habit number one is writing only when inspired no there is a strong and pervasive cultural mythology around songwriting specifically that songs are just channeled by The Muse they just flow out of you and spill onto the page and that they shouldn't be written unless they're written that way the reason this mythology exists is because the media is very drawn to dramatic stories of torture Geniuses it's a really sexy interesting dramatic story to tell and so it's told over and over again the problem with this is that though some songs do happen that way it is the rare fraction of songs that actually come out like that and this mythology makes beginner songwriters think that if a song doesn't feel like that that if the songwriting process doesn't resemble that moment of inspiration that it's not worth writing the song at all the reality for professional songwriters and people who build careers in music and songwriting is that they apply a lot of discipline and craft to the process they are not merely waiting for inspiration to strike they are sitting down down almost every day and working on their craft working on their work regardless of how inspired they feel and a champion of this concept really is Nick Cave Nick Cave is very public about his work process he's committed to the craft of daily writing to get that small fraction that worked out well for him but you don't you don't need to be doing it for 8 30 minutes 60 minutes I think as creative people we tend to underestimate the value of minutes and overestimate the value of hours we think that if we don't have two hours three hours to sit down and work on our craft that it's not worth it but if you actually know what you're working on and are working on multiple things at the same time you can write three or four great lines of lyric or even just possibly decent workable lines of lyric that are going to help you progress in your project you can do that in 10 or 15 minutes we don't need hours we just need to be doing something on the daily to get progress happening if we actually put our bums on the seat and work regardless of whether we're inspired or not it turns out that inspiration happens to visit more frequently to the people who are willing to put themselves in the way of inspiration as writer and artist Austin Cleon says inspiration may be like a wave but we have to be out there paddling to catch it and there's an analogy we can make here with learning or playing in instrument if you only picked up an instrument and played it when you were inspired or once a month you wouldn't expect to play it very well or to show any kind of improvement and an athlete doesn't expect to show any kind of improvement or compete if they're just practicing whenever they feel like it either so why do we put those activities on one side and songwriting on the other why do we say that's just how songwriting works because it's really not but we need to get real here for a second Benny okay I've got some real talk to do to our people Okay the reason I think that songwriters persist in this bad habit is not just because of the media It's really because of a fear of failure we are scared that the songs we're gonna write are going to be bad we are scared of writing something mediocre we're scared of writing something that doesn't actually meet our standards and so often what we do is we prefer not to write anything at all there is another analogy from sports that I think is really important for us to remember and that analogy is Michael Jordan Michael Jordan was famously cut from his varsity basketball team in grade nine because he simply wasn't good enough now does that mean that Michael Jordan was actually a brilliant basketball player and it was a short-sighted coach that didn't actually perceive his Brilliance or was it actually possible and the answer is yes that Michael Jordan actually just wasn't good enough at that moment what he did was he continued to play he continued to practice he got better by starting out bad and getting good day by day so we as artists need to embrace a similar Spirit we need to be okay and in fact not just okay but joyful and embracing of making some bad and in fact possibly terrible things on the road to creating something good so I hereby give you permission to make some terrible things because that is truly the only way to reliably and repeatably make something good so let's talk about some strategies for dealing with this habit or overcoming this habit and we're going to lean into some James Clear Atomic habits kind of thinking here and make these changes small because small is achievable we can do them daily what's the first one so the first thing that we can Embrace is the idea of actually doing something in five minutes or ten minutes and one of the best writing exercises that I know that I do all the time is a writing exercise called sense writing I'm not going to describe it in detail here because we've made a few other videos about this which you can go and check out and learn how to do sense writing yourself but this is an exercise that takes no more than five or ten minutes and you can do it daily and it's a great Habit to get into and what you find is if you actually do it daily for two weeks or a month is you are overflowing with ideas and material for song ideas and lyric ideas so it's a great practice that will give you heaps and heaps of material to work with another great Habit to start forming is to do it early in the day the longer the day goes on the busier it becomes it fills up with things that you have to get done other commitments other responsibilities and we tend to push our creative practice you know kind of out of the picture it's the thing we can let go at the expense of other things so do it early do it quickly and start to develop a habit of really feeling good about getting it done before the rest of your day unfolds another really important Discovery from the recent science of good habit formation is the concept of designing your time in a way that reduce juices your Reliance on will power because actually turns out that every human being alive for the most part has terrible willpower so the less we need to rely on our willpower to get something done the better so when it comes to songwriting and creative productivity the more that we can set up systems of accountability and deadlines that is highly motivating so some examples of ways that we can do that is to enroll in a songwriting class join a course or join a songwriting group that has a deadline maybe has some external prompts that give you the initial idea but more than that having the soft accountability of a community of people who are waiting for you to submit your work and also having people to give you feedback is a highly highly motivating element in Creative productivity so we run some songwriting groups which you're welcome to join I will include a link in the show notes but you don't have to join mine you can seek them out Google it wherever you're going to find it but the key here is seeking out a structured system in which you have the accountability of a group of people at a deadline that is really really effective and the last way to really hold yourself accountable is to schedule your writing or your creative practice into the calendar pretend that you are your own boss and that you have to turn up for work whenever you have scheduled that meeting that's in the calendar when the notification goes off you have to be there you have to turn up you have to do it just like you would if you were turning up for another job so if we can start to use the Calendar app use the scheduling to help us you know reduce this Reliance on Willpower we start to form some great habits around our creative practice bad habit number two starting your songs the same way every time and by that I mean always starting with a melody or always starting with a chord progression and the same instrument or perhaps always fleshing out the lyrics completely before you bring music into the equation the reason this is a problem is because if you have one way to write your songs and that way doesn't feel like it's working you really have nowhere to go and we find that writer's block arises when people feel stuck or they feel trapped or they feel uninspired and this is a result really a feeling like your method is just not working for you so finding new ways to write songs is not only a beautiful creative act it also helps you deal with those situations when you're not feeling it and then you can switch to another way of writing if we do anything the same way for a period of time we actually start to get a lower dopamine response to that activity and dopamine is really important for helping us learn new things and helping us be drawn towards something in the first place so the thing here is that we actually need to inject change and Novelty into our process in order to recreate that dopamine response and keep ourselves interested and engaged in the process itself the tension here is that while we need novelty and change we do also need processes we need a repeatable series of actions or steps that will reliably result in a desired outcome so the thing for Creative work is that we need to find a way to balance the need for process with the need for novelty and change and in this way it's really like music itself which is fundamentally built on this idea of repetition and variation we need repetition so that we can lock into a Groove so that we can identify a section of a song but too much repetition and we get bored and so we're always trying to find that balance of how much repetition is enough so that it's something for us to lock onto but when do we introduce the variation so that it's then creating a bit of a journey for the listener did you just use music as a metaphor for making music I think I did so the way to do this is to actually make changing your process part of the process itself and we're about to give you some really practical strategies to do just that so here is a list of different ways that you can start a song and one or some of these might actually be your default tendency but it's really important that we don't always just rely on our tendency but that we seek other strategies and methods for starting songs so as I mentioned before that daily practice of sense writing can be super beneficial to generating lots of ideas we can also look for titles in our sense writing but also out in the world we can find great interesting memorable catchy titles listening to people talk on the street reading news headlines looking up at a billboard reading a passage of a book some phrase or idea might simply jump out at us and inside that phrase is the DNA of a story or a song concept so actually collecting a list of titles separately to any of your other lyric writing is really really helpful we can also approach songwriting by writing a song map which in essence is almost like an essay plan for your song It's a way to write lyrics from a meta perspective not line by line what happens next but actually really thinking about the big picture of your song where is this going to start how is it going to escalate or develop and what is the final point of intensification of this song so we can approach songwriting through the door of lyrics in a variety of different ways I've actually created a free pdf It's actually an ebook it's pretty fancy so you can get for free by clicking on the link in the show notes and that little ebook is a collection of the five best exercises for coming up with song lyric ideas another great way to start songs is Melody first and there's a few different ways we can do this but some of the most effective ways are to hum or whistle certain melodic fragments and that's really impactful when it comes from within when it comes from this internal place and you find yourself you know kind of developing that internally before you then take it to an instrument or we can certainly find Melodies on instruments and this can be done a few different ways but one of the best ways is to modify scales so whatever instrument you play and no matter what level you play at taking a scale and kind of messing with it you know chopping it up playing it in a funny order just deviating slightly from what the scale pattern is will start to give you a sense of certain melodic possibilities and melodic options and this works beautifully on piano and guitar so you might be someone who naturally starts with lyrics or Melody and of course if you are another way to start a song is to start with chords first and even if you are a chords first kind of person there are a few different ways that we can actually start with chords that can freshen up the process and change it up a bit and give us that lovely little dopamine hit that makes the process new and fresh and exciting again so of course we can just pick some some chords from a key for example and put them together feel how it sounds on a cycle but another great way to freshen up that process is to learn a chord progression from a different song and of course there's some pretty high profile cases happening right now about not just maybe like stealing a chord progression but even when we are lifting a chord progression from another song we can cycle it through a series of things that will change it and alter it from the original context so we can change the key we can change the tempo we can change the time signature we can change the feel groove or style and end up with something that sounds totally different to the original chord progression that we learned but learning chord progressions from songs that we love and really taking those chord progressions and working them through our own filters to sound interesting and original is a really important way to freshen up your songwriting process and add to your chord library and another thing that can really freshen up the songwriting process is learning new ways to play the chords you already know how to play so in this video here I show 10 of the most beautiful chords on guitar and really the point of that video was to show all these beautiful and unusual ways to play some traditional sounding chords and sometimes you find one new way to play an old chord and it becomes the basis for a whole song so it's always worth learning new ways to play Old material and on that note let's talk about another way to start which is with loops or external stimuli and kep and I have experimented with this and had a great time doing it but the real thing that you notice when you do this is that you're not coming up with the prompt The Prompt is coming from outside of you it's coming from an external source and this can feel very liberating when you just respond to something you hear rather than put yourself under pressure to come up with something original another great and very fresh and different way to start a song is using a drum Groove first so we can just pull something from Apple Loops if you use logic you could use splice you could use an instrument chromatic that's made by Lander all of these will provide you with so many different rhythmic ideas and that's really important because everyone actually has a default BPM that if we don't think about it we will just inherently start writing songs at that Tempo and for me it's definitely like between 80 to 90 BPM if I don't think about changing the tempo of a song all my songs will end up being the same tempo and for the most part I have like two or three internalized grooves that again unless I am really actively and consciously trying to break out of them will just kind of happen again and again and again so starting with a drum Groove is a really wonderful way to write a different type of song one of the lovely things about working with drum Loops is it feels like you've actually got a band member to work with you know sometimes songwriting can feel a little bit lonely when it's just you and your instrument you pull up a drum groove it feels like you've got a drummer sitting right there in the room and this leads us to our last way you can start a song with which is through production actually using your Daw as an instrument experimenting with recording your own sounds perhaps looping your own instruments or slicing things up production can be a very creative act and often inspire you to write very different songs that you wouldn't have come up with sitting at your instrument or humming a melody and there are some incredible free resources of sample packs with no affiliation with these people they just sound incredible and these instruments are Handmade by people who contribute their time and their effort to these communities and those communities are piano book piano book is affiliated with Spitfire audio and the other great resource we want to talk about from Spitfire audio is the labs series and what you find when you experiment with these tools is that they are so beautiful and they're so high-end they will elevate your production to the next level but they also are incredibly creative and just Inspire endless songwriting possibilities and we've got links to those resources in the show it's bad habit number three neglecting to edit and revise your songs the first big problem with this habit is it puts unnecessary pressure on your songwriting process and makes you feel like you really have to nail it first time which means you end up writing and editing at the same time which is a Surefire way to get writer's block it also of course and logically and by Common Sense does not lead to the best results for your work there's actually no other profession I can think of where there is such a strong idea that the way it comes out the first time is just the way that it should be 19 out of 20 songs that you will write will simply require hard work discipline craft and editing and revising if you want the song to be as good as it can be which hopefully you do and some songs absolutely fall out and that's the way they were but like we've been saying most songs Don't and a beautiful example of a song that took years of painstaking work is Alleluia and there's a beautiful podcast that you can listen to with Malcolm Gladwell explaining the history of alleluia but Leonard Cohen Grappa with that song five years there were 60 verses he just kept working out and working it went through iteration after iteration and eventually through the help of John Cale and then the interpretation of a few other artists we got the final version so there's a song that you would think is just this beautiful gift from the heavens and yet it went through a grueling process of 10 years of refinement and nearly never saw the light of day doesn't mean that you need to work on your songs for 10 years honestly just trying out two or three different ideas will often result in something better than how it started the problem is also that people don't necessarily know how to edit they don't know how to refine their work they don't know how to revisit it and to think about Alternatives and these are tools that you can absolutely acquire as part of your songwriting practice so let's show you a few of them and one of the first big Concepts that can really help take a draft of a song and work it to the next level is to cut out any lyrics that don't serve the core concept so this relies on your song having a hook or a title or a core concept a central image a central message or a key idea or metaphor that is really the driving heart of your song and once you have that thing you can then go back through your song's lyric and really figure out if there are lines in there that are not directly leading straight to that hook and a good example of this from personal experience is when I was lucky enough to work with John Mayer for a week many years ago when I was a student at the Berkeley College of Music we worked on a song that he ended up recording in the studio and in the process of working on that song before going into the studio we looked at the lyrics and he suggested and I agreed to cut out a whole section of lyric which was funny because that's actually where this whole song started this whole song Started in this lyric and was built around it but once the song was written and it had developed and become something else it turned out that that first line that I had written was no longer as tightly connected to where the song had ended up so editing out that line which was a beautiful line and I really liked it but it comes back to that idea of like you know sometimes you have to Kill Your Darlings in order to make the thing work but we did it and absolutely the song was so much better for getting rid of that thing that no longer served the core concept of the song This by the way is such a common thing you hear about in other forms of writing you hear novelists and playwrights talk about this all the time that their favorite scene or the scene that was the inspiration behind the whole idea is often the one that gets cut by the editors and so this reminds us that we're often emotionally attached to some of our material but that doesn't mean it's serving The Narrative that doesn't mean it's helping push the story forward so going back and reviewing your work and cutting out some of that stuff really can help strengthen the song even though it's hard to let go and if there's one thing that you do with your lyrics and you do nothing else look at your verbs in your song and here's my challenge to you in every section of your song underline each verb and change one verbs are the PowerHouse of the English language and if you can upgrade your verbs your whole song's lyrics will Elevate to the next level it is so much less impactful to say I held my head in my hands and so much more Visual and emotional to say I cradled my head in my hands so upgrade your verbs and we're not just talking about reviewing your lyrics look at your Melodies think about how impactful they are could they be a little more interesting could there be a little more movement a little more up and down motion could you spend just five or ten minutes taking the melody throughout your whole song breaking it into little sections and just trying out little variations on each of those sections another thing I think about constant with Melody is is there sufficient contrast between the sections and there are actual tools and techniques and methods and strategies that we can draw on to create effective contrast as well as creating neon lights around the most important parts of our song which very frequently is the hook or title so I think about things like the distance between notes am I creating a variety of note distances that's going to create contrast between sections I think of things like note duration is the melody just coming out at the same Pace in the verse and the chorus or can I use how long I hold a note to create contrast and also to create spotlighting on important words and meanings even having your melody in one section of the song down in a lower register and maybe higher in the chorus and another way to create interest for The Listener is to change your chords and what's amazing is that you can often take just a four chord sequence that's repeated throughout the whole song and change one of those chords in the right moment under the right to the lyrics and everything about that song changes so you don't have to go and learn a whole new bunch of chords you don't have to go and complicate the song you just have to examine the chords you're using and think about how you might either change one chord or maybe play one of those chords in a slightly different way and a quick caveat to this whole idea of editing and revising it's very possible and I hear this all the time for people saying yes but when I get into the flow of editing and revising how do I know when something's finished I could edit and revise endlessly when do you stop when do you stop and that is a genuinely excellent question what were you really trying to encourage is a middle ground it's the middle ground between not editing and revising at all and editing endlessly the middle ground is saying it is possible to try out two or three different things to find out which one works the best so those are three bad habits and a variety of strategies to deal with them if you want a list of good habits that are going to help you write great songs sooner and faster check out this video video Happy writing bye [Music]

Channel: How To Write Songs

Views: 31,283

Keywords: how to write a song, how to write songs, songwriting, songwriting exercises, songwriting habits, bad habits, good habits, song writing, songwriting for beginners, how to write lyrics, lyric writing

Id: nLvBbAj7E_k

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023