song writing tips

[Dmoney]

whos go em?
seriously, i must have brought this up.
ive had writers block for 2 years. dunno how i do ANYTHING!

[murraymurray]

listen to bands like brokencyde until you're so angry at the current state of music that you unleash all your fury into some mean riffage

[Dmoney]

hahaha

not a bad idea.

i need to get my bands LP done.
im also starting a new thing... kinda like Orange 9mm hopefully, that'll push me a but more and get me out the rut.
gonna jam that kinda thing tomorrow and work on my band in practice tomorrow.


blegh

[Dmoney]

OH MY GOD!


dude,


If i EVER see those dudes im beating them up in the street.

[38thBeatle]

A little thing I have often done is set myself a target of X number of songs in X number of hours with the proviso that they don't have to be great or ultimately usable. It gets the juices flowing and I don't evaluate or criticise anything I just use it to get ideas.Sooner or later an idea comes that I like. Works for me every time.

[darcym]

I find it a very personal thing and a lot of factors influence it.

for example, I always found the music started off a song, then a concept came, then lyrics followed.
Occasionally a concept came, I'd write music and the lyrics would then be written.

recently, the last two songs I've been working in I've made a real forced effort to write lyrics with no instrument, then work out a melody, then fit music to it. I should point out how much of a forced effort this has been and I did it to try different approaches and see the pros/cons of it, plus I thought doing something different may open my options/styles for me (it has).
..
Other factors that influence me are the guitar I'm playing on when I'm writing, same for the amp.

That's part one - how a song grows can be influenced also, eg: write on an acoustic guitar, play it on an electric the song concept is the same but the feel changes, vice versa too, etc.

My only generic tip is "write the truth" it doesn't have to be real as in something that happened to you, but make it real, eg: if you know something, or think something or feel something, write about it honeslty rather than what you think you should say, it comes across in the finished song, and later in the performance.

It's a personal thing what works for people on writing.everyone is different. Experiment.

[murraymurray]

its often just a matter of finding at least one awesome riff and then from there you can get the general feel of where to go next. the problem is sometimes you sit there jamming for about an hour, come up with nothing that cool and then give up.
I havent been doing much writing of full songs lately, luckily our other guitarist is pretty proficient but sometimes the overall structure just lacks a few things so I just help fill in the gaps and change certain bits around, much easier than starting the song from scratch.
it also very much depends on style, in my case, with 80s metal you can write a lot based around vocals, so if you know whats going to be sung in the chorus or bridge etc you can try and wrtie a riff that compliments the vocals. doesnt apply so much with hardcore though.

OH MY GOD!

dude,

If i EVER see those dudes im beating them up in the street.

Im pretty sure we if we could get every actual self respecting musician on forums around the world to chip in 1 dollar we could get a fund of a few million and hire some hitmen to get rid of brokencyde and hopefully that would then scare any similar bands into stopping what theyre doing, there would still be plenty of money left over for an amazing legal team to help with the ineviatable courtcase for conspiracy to commit murder too

[Dmoney]

this time round i laid out the whole record.

i got an idea starting around song structure or just a general feel for each track.
I want it to be a bit more progressive than what we've done already, which isn't a hard thing to do within our genre.
The main problem is its all down to me and our bassist really and finding time is hard enough without trying to be focussed and motivated also.

i just need to get excited about it. but then thats hard to. i find it more frustrating than anything else. not the song writing process, but thinking about everything involved pre and post that stage. its not a good thing.

anyway. I have 2 sure fire things to work on tomorrow, and im hoping to get something before practice tomorrow night. even if its a two minute jam.

i dont write lyrics, im not so good at that. I imagine vocal rhythms when im playing though, which helps me write. i just try to direct musically, but i always have to compromise on something within the music, and i HATE that.

its often just a matter of finding at least one awesome riff and then from there you can get the general feel of where to go next. the problem is sometimes you sit there jamming for about an hour, come up with nothing that cool and then give up.

this is exactly my problem

[CodeName]

whos go em?
seriously, i must have brought this up.
ive had writers block for 2 years. dunno how i do ANYTHING!

From the looks of your site, looks like you're doing alright :) What helps me is when I watch old vintage foreign films. It doesn't matter what year.. make sure it's no later than 1985. Films from all over the world. And keep your mind open to hearing non-musical daily things like the washing machine, the outside traffic, etc. Then reconstruct the pattern, feel or rhythm of what you hear non-musically into your songs. Or, maybe you could actually even use the actual sound of what you heard and put that in your song. When your car door opens and if it makes a chime, use that sound, or add to it into your song. The airport is good to hear all sorts of dings and chimes. Just listening to life could teach us a lot.

If you want a good book on writing poetry (can be used for songwriting as well), get "How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry" by Edward Hirsch. I know it's not the most manly-sounding title, but you will be ahead of the game if you get this book. You'll get a depth for writing that you never knew was there.

[nfe]

My only tip for folks writing tunes is that generally, if you don't have the solid bones of a tune in half an hour, it's probably best binning and starting on something new.

[Johnny Mac]

There's a great book called "How To Write Songs On Guitar' By Rikky Rooksby that covers so many different ideas. Start with a melody or a chord sequence, lyrics ect and gives examples, its really interesting. He had a column in Guitarist a while back.

[Will]

My only tip for folks writing tunes is that generally, if you don't have the solid bones of a tune in half an hour, it's probably best binning and starting on something new.

Good idea, it retains focus. There is just ONE song which I seem to keep coming back to, a little part here, maybe this instead etc.
Something I find useful is to focus on one particular chord, and get the feel of the song from expression of your playing / how you play the chord / where on the neck. When you get something you like, add another note to the chord or change the chord, if it doesn't work, take a step back and continue messing around.
The worst thing that may happen is a few to many options :P