Songwriting, ep 1: How to Turn Your Ideas Into Songs

[Music] today we're talking about songwriting working with little pieces that you may have and turning them into something more before we even do that step one is whenever you play something even halfway interesting or surprising to yourself [Music] immediately grab your phone or whatever way that you capture things and get it creativity is a magical little thing and really you know it's different for everybody but i can only speak for myself you get very little sparks very lit i better grab it and so it's our job as creative people to become aware when cool stuff happens i've said that in other videos that like the more you pay attention to when cool little things happen okay guess what the more cool things happen so assuming that you've done that and maybe you have a progression here a riff there a progression there a riff there now we're going to talk about how you can work with those to get them to become complete songs i'm going to use existing songs because well that'll be just more entertaining for everybody say we wrote lou reed's perfect day [Music] which yeah it's also cat stevens wild world it's also i will survive it's several songs so that's a really cool progression that we came up with in a minor and it might just live there like that for forever we might just be stuck with that going that's cool i'm gonna use that for something neat all right store it away and who knows months later maybe you came up with this thing [Music] where's the melody if i get that a little bit which is really uh that's the chorus from uh what's that song sister golden hair by america another 70s soft rock hit i love that stuff so that chorus is let's see b a and you're like man that's a cool thing too that's neat you wouldn't think that you could put those two things together you know if you had made those little uh song parts but you can and here's the deal this is another thing i always talk about write stuff down we gotta write stuff down to like kind of think about it in front of us you're like huh okay so here's how eric does quick and simple charts talked about this in my music theory series oh by the way there's all my links my website my patreon my instagram my album my spotify my truefire me me me me there they are and you know about the inf check the description box below it's all down there too guitars amps whatever else there you go simple chart right those equal bars huh what do we got b b a e does it again b b a e then i'll let's go ahead and put the rest in f sharp minor okay e over g sharp and then a sus2 would be the complete chorus there in the key of e so if i want to move that to be copacetic with this other imaginary thing that we made up i need to understand the major scale and how that generates chords in the key so that i can analyze this as the chords in the key not just as they are so b is actually the five a is the four e is the one this is the thing that i talk about we don't need to know all the music theory in the world but we need to know enough so that we can major keys and those chords minor keys and those chords and then we can analyze things and take a look at be like okay so it's 5 4 one five four one two one four is is our chorus because that means then if the perfect day chorus or sorry perfect day section you know which we had imaginarily made up was in the key of a minor i'd be like dude let's go ahead and just move this whole section to the key of a major because that's what perfect day does um it has the verses in a minor the chorus is in a major so i'm going to keep it the same okay so let's see that means again having a note enough theory that i can be like what's my five chord in the key of a well that's e what's my four chord d and a is one it does that again what's the two chord in the key of a b minor kind of does that little inversion thing and then the four boom i just moved it to the key that's going to be copacetic with perfect day let's hear how it sounds can't get the melody in there [Music] by the way i'll tab all this stuff out put up on my patreon page for free so you can go grab that and kind of look at it and scratch your head and be like boy this is very academic eric sorry one more time [Music] so there it is sister golden hair moved to the key of a but let me go back and check uh-oh different time signature watch i'm gonna do it i'm gonna just shoehorn them together [Music] oops nope that's not going to work because perfect day that original thing we wrote is in six eight one two three four five six one two three four five six sister golden hair you know that we made up no we didn't is in four four okay that means can i put sister gold in here into six eight [Music] yes i can [Music] now let's put the two together the verse [Music] new thing [Music] back around [Music] and so it works you know again our ear it's doing you know it's like fighting against me it's going that's not the chorus that's not the chorus i know because you know we programmed to hear the song a certain way but it doesn't not work is a little bit funky because perfect day ends on an e major the new section starts on the e major so that's always a little bit of a weird thing but it's not a wrong thing to do again this is art you can do whatever you want i'm not saying this is the coolest mashup ever made but i think it illustrates the point and the point is this a good idea is a good idea regardless of key or groove that all your ideas especially because they came from you they're actually probably able to get manipulated to work with each other to create a bridge a verse to a chorus a verse to a pre-chorus to a chorus a verse to a break you know i mean these things that you've made they probably actually work together you just might not see that um because of the the the keys being different or the grooves being different and i can tell you i i mean i do this all this is how i write music a lot i'll be like i'll have a thing that was you know cool for one was like my favorite part of one thing that i made up but the rest of the song was really a throwaway i'm like well then i'll just move that to a new thing you know to a new key and be like ah it worked it it it worked so to review capture every good little idea that you ever have because yay you know the more you do that the more cool little ideas you have and then yeah no enough music theory to be able to look at things as chord changes and manipulate them through different keys because that's how you can recombine things in various ways thanks so much to everybody who supports me in all the ways that you do even if it's just clicking like and subscribe that keeps me in business with the algorithm relevancy as bill and ted would say be excellent to each other that includes yourself happy friday eat pizza [Music] chicken [Music]

Channel: Eric Haugen Guitar

Views: 224,945

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Id: eMkJZ29bEbs

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022