Songwriting Tips Thread
 

k, people post whatever & we can argue out certain things.

1. Repeatin words

Its not really that bad I suppose, but if I see one word multiple times in a poem/song when another word can replace it, it just makes it sound less pretty. It works sometimes, (for instance in the goo goo dolls name "a tired song keeps playing on a tired radio) but alot of the times, it doesn't.

2. Revising

Alot of people don't do this, but typically after I write something I let it sit for a day then I go back and make notes on random verses "change word, make this flow etc..). Then I go back the next day and fix it, just so it can be more finished when i posted. I don't always do this, but it typically makes the lyrics better.

3. Writers Block

If i'm in a writers block, I don't just stop writing till I feel like im out of it. I try and write a bunch of things every day even if they suck just to keep in practice and to have some things to look back on.

I also try and get inspired, after reading a book I typically have something to write or if I walk through nature and take in the trees and the water and other such things. 'Cause alot of times, at least for me its not so much a writers block as a lack of inspiration.

4. Influenced

Alot of people draw influences from certain writers (I do), and I use to just draw influence from writers in certain genres. Like, you can be ignorant of being influenced by a songwriter that you listen to alot, just cause you don't see it, it still could be there and if you just keep that to one genre, your writing is most likely just going to read like lyrics from that one genre. Which is why you should broaden your horizons.

5. Writing About Your Feelings

Something that I do myself sometimes, & kind of annoys me. Is when you just say your sad over something, and don't really go into it. Explain why your sad, what made you sad and stuff. Actually get into and let the reader expierence what your feeling.

6. Originality

First of all, you wanna avoid cliche lines, and to be honest just nu-metal lyrics for the most part to see cliche lines. Linkin Park, KoRn, Slipknot and all that. Like, "walls are closing in", "im falling" and pretty much any metaphors where you use the word 'darkness' are cheesy and cliche. Being cliche can work, but most of the time it just doesn't.

If you wanna be original, don't describe the way someone else would describe a certain emotion. Write about how you feel about a certain thing, like how would you describe being sad or being dumped or something? Not how Green Day would describe it.

7. Language

Swearing for swearings sake, is kind of weak. It can really add feel/emotion to a song if used right 'cause whenever I read a swear word I attack it to a feeling, anger or something.

When you write, you don't have to use big words, 'cause they don't automaticaly mean intelligence. If they're used wrong, then it just looks out of place and with small words, its kind of bland to read just words you hear frequently or are just well your typical words. You can still use little words and stray from every day words. Like, instead of saying "the chair broke" say "the chair splintered" or shattered or something. Its not some complicated rare word, but its not so overused.





I'll add more laterr, I didn't touch on lyrics/flow 'cause I have a warped opinion on that and I could easily see hobo writing something way better on it.

8. Know exactly what the song is about

When compared to most poetry and other creative forms of language, songs are short and sweet. As lyrics must be singable and need to leave space for the music, a song will typically contain no more than a couple of hundred words (I would estimate my songs have about 150 words on average, some maybe reach about 300, but not much more).

This limit benefits the musical side of the song and it means that there is very little room for faffing about when it comes to getting your point across. You have a few hundred words to tell your story, or to convey your emotion, or to paint whatever picture you want the listener to get.

Thus it is vital that you know exactly what you're going to write about before you start writing the lyrics, so that you're well prepare to communicate the message you want within the short time available. If you have a clear idea of what you want to say, then all you need to do is render this idea into the form of a song. Plus, if you have a clear idea of what you're saying, the listener will be more likely to have a clear idea of what is being said to them. If you aren't sure what your song is about, the listener has no chance.


9. Choose a worthwhile subject

Is there a topic you genuinely want to sing about and which you would really, truly want to hear a song about?
No? Then give up songwriting right now.
Yes? Then write a song about that subject.


10. Don't just write lyrics

We write lyrics with the intention of singing them, or maybe getting somebody else to sing them. It can be helpful to try singing, or at least reading aloud, lyrics while writing them. How good a phrase looks on a page often has no relation to how it sounds when read aloud. Many lines which look poetic when written down become clumsy within a song. A lot of lines which look too basic in text can be very well suited to being sung (this is particularly true to words with a lot of vowel sounds). A good guideline here is "if it doesn't trip nicely off the tongue, ditch it". If its difficult to read aloud, its going to be a nightmare to sing. And if its a nightmare to sing, its not a particularly good song (unless you really like Gilbert and Sullivan)...

I'm not very good at writing rules but I'll take a shot at it.

11. Trust yourself

Pretty simple. If you think something looks bad, then it probably is bad. BE hard on yourself. Know what your style is and go at it. Don't try to copy someone elses style, allow your own style to manifest through your writings. Allow influences to open your creativity... don't allow yourself to "take things" from another artist. By take things I don't mean plagiarize *which you shouldn't do* I mean, don't take their style... it's not YOURS! Trust that you can make something on your own... trust yourself.

12. Experiment

I know this helps me when I'm in a writer's block, which I get... this also kind of goes with Crowquill's "broaden your horizon" statement. Look at music that you just don't hear a lot of... that is culturally different... I really like a group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo... an african choir. Now, I have to translate their stuff - but it really is beautiful and it gets my creative juices flowing like no other. Read/listen to OPERA! Magnificent stuff! A lot of my writings are influenced by part of plots I hear in an opera... better yet, listen to classical music. What does it make you think of? Go at it!

13. DON'T SETTLE

FFS, I have seen many songwriters settle with a line because it fits... or settle with a line because it helps move the story of the lyrics along. If you don't like a line but you like the stuff around it, you need to fix that line, you might need to change the form of your song. Settling drives me nuts. I know songwriters on this forum settle, because you say, "I don't like this line" or "I might need to change this" - if your original post has that sentiment included in it... you need to change the song then. Unless you are asking for help, of course. Every line of your song should be your best work. Every line is like a puzzle piece, and to make that piece fit, it needs to be shaped accordingly. Love your lines.

14. Don't be LAZY

This kind of goes with my above rule... if you need to change your song, just get on with the change. Don't piss and moan because you worked so long on it... don't you want your work to be the best? Do you have an AWESOME line, or stanza that is surrounded by ****e? But you don't want to change the song because, yes, that part is awesome... the whole song needs to be awesome. Don't be afraid to scrap something... you don't have to pay to write new songs... unlike most things, the only thing that limits you from writing is yourself. Otherwise... you are in the business that deals with infinite possiblities. Hurray.

15. Be a gracious critic, recieve criticism with grace.

Self explanatory, but I'll elaborate. Don't go into a thread, or tell a person or whatever... YOU SUCK. Try and help them. If you are too lazy (read rule 14 for this) to help someone, don't write anything at all. Changing someones line for them is generally a no no.... but even I do it sometimes. If you disagree with someones critique... don't be afraid to tell them... on the otherside of that, if someone doesn't agree with you... don't take it to heart, don't stop trying to help them, etc etc. Be a good person. This is kind of like the golden rule, treat others how you wanna be treated and all that jazz.

Another thing to add to "Broaden your Horizon"

Try listening to Comedy and as practice, write your interpretation of what the Comic is talking about.


For Example, Mitch Hedburg is a great one to try. He is very clever how he places words. He talks about everyday Thoughts and Situations.

Don't be sacred about lines
Basically sometimes I write a line that I really like the sound of but I can't develop the idea beyond it. Its usually because the whole meaning of the song is in that one line. Sometimes you have to put a line aside before you can make up the rest of the lyrics. Don't worry about this.

1millionSixHundredand2. Don't post it on MusicBanter.
Nobody cares...jk.

haha. nice.

Fair enough.

4. Why Teh Hate??

4.5. the world got to have haterz if it gonna have playerz

yin and yang son, yin and yang

Urban...mods. Please clean the thread up for the resident poets.

Apologies for spoiling it. :)

4.6. Apology accepted.

4.7. Don't call me a poet. Poets wear cravats and sit outside french style cafes, sipping coffee from small cups... wistfully. I'm a rock star.

Rock stars take drugs, write great lyrics, smash up hotel rooms and shag loads of woman...you're a Mock Star.

Lmfao. Mock star. good stuff.

4.8 Genius!

4.9. Nevertheless, somebody clean this mess up. We have guests.

Just made me think, there's room in the market P!ATD or My Chemical Romance cover of Oasis' "Rock'n'Roll Star". It could be retitled "Mock'n'Kohl Star".

A tip for the ignorant who keep on using 'emo' as a criticism in these song writing threads, the term your looking for is 'romanticism', a movement which has spawned some of the greatest poets and writers in history. keats, wordsworth, blake, shelley, astille, poe, coleridge - yes, all your run of the mill emo poets.

I think I'm related to Blake. I am related to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which, I think, is pretty awesome.

This has been surprisingly helpfull, especially crowes advice but still after a year i don't think i'm ready to post anything up. (i still think i'd just be burdening you with poor writing skills)

If anyone wants to sell their soul to the devil, and make a lot of $ this is how u do it. You revert back to an earlier, more juvenile state of mind, and put ur self in the place u were in back in junior high school or high school, and then u write music that corresponds to that state of mind. Talking about clothes and relationships that last one week is a good start. U will b very successful, as there r a lot of people who do it. U can c how a highly impressionable group of people such as teens who usually don't get exposed to a wider array of music, and will buy just about any prepackaged crap, that looks good on the outside and is empty on the inside, would make u a very rich person. So, u can c how it relates to selling ur soul to the devil. But couldn't u make the $, and then progress back to ur original state of mind? u might ask Oh, yes u could, but u would lose all the money u made in the process of doing so. Ur innermost being would know that the real u didn't earn it, so if u want to be the real u, u hav to lose the $. The point of the post is this: I've heard a lot of people say-all rich people r bad, and I've heard people say-rich people r good. Well, it's just not that simple, not everything is in black & white. But here's a little black & white, IMO people who r rich r able to stay that way, bcuz they r the same person they were when they were in the process of earning that $. If they were very shallow when they earned it, they will probably b very shallow in order to keep it. So very rare is the rich person who is a very deep person, simply bcuz our society puts so much economic value on extremely shallow things.

Learn to spell this isn't an AIM chatroom, that was painful to read.

All rich people are bad? Drop the idiotic stereotyping

All right idiot
 

Well, there r 2 ways of making money
1. Providing Goods
2. Providing Services
Generally people who provide services, such as doctors, hav to work very hard to get into that profession, and will feel good about the $ they've made. I should hav said that generally people who provide goods r more likely to b more shallow people, materialistic people bcuz thats generally what society deems as worthy products, really shallow, mindless products, or at least the producers become very shallow in the process of marketing that product-which is to stoop to that level of big business idealogy and make people feel like an outsider if they don't hav this product, or make u believe that life doesn't hav very deep meaning, so it's okay to b defined by what u hav rather than what u are. Also Crowquill, if u had read my entire post, u would have noticed that my post was saying that stereotyping was wrong. However I did go into specifics when it came to how people felt about the way they made their money. I.E.-if u use a shallow big business marketing strategy to get a lot of $, u will probably hav to stay a shallow person to keep that $.

Using a shallow marketing stragey that sells doesn't make you shallow, it makes you a smart business man. You're stereotyping again.

yes, that's true, and same w/ all the tyrants the world has ever seen. You can help yourself by hurting others. Leading in a way that helps yourself and hurts others isn't really leading. In fact, the only way to help people who are so misguided is for people like me to be very brash w/ them and brutally honest. I go far out of my way to point out things about people I don't like, before I go and try to fool them into buying something of mine that isn't worth a damn.

I have no idea what you're even talking about.

Dude, get off your pedestal, and by off I mean out and by pedestal I mean hole, and read what you just said with a straight face.

I read it w/ a straight face, and I hav to admit I don't always go out of my way to point out people's faults. That would result in me getting beaten up a lot. However, I would like to point out that way too often in society, people are telling people what they want to hear instead of giving them the truth. Hey, I've learned through experience the hard way that you can't change others. I just find it hard to believe that so many people don't realize the harm that all of the dishonesty and deceitfulness in our society causes. But, like I said I'm through trying to help and change others, and the more this country goes down in ruins, the more I'm just going to b sitting around laughing @ everyone for their inability to admit to mistakes and narrow-mindedness. I could see here and tell you about anything from my past, and I sure as heck wouldn't be proud of it, but that is how valuable I deem honesty. Now tell me w/ a straight face that u r willing to do the same.

Yeah but are you a good songwriter?

ZANG!

I like how he tries to justify all the heh's. IT'S CAUSE PEOPLE LAUGH WHEN THEY TALK OMG THIS IS HIGH BROW ART YOU GUYS JUST DON'T GET IT

He also admitted to finding incest pleasing.

Your point, little brother?

Hes very lame.

I was making an incest joke stoooooooopid!

I'm so slow sometimes D=

Thanks for the tips im definantly going to use them!!!!!!!!!

This is the problem I have. How do you know what words or phrases are cliche? I mean, you've given a few examples, but how do you determine what's cliche and what's not in order to avoid writing them?

Sorry I never got back to you in your thread about this. As previously mentioned, unless used very carefully, phrases about "darkness", "shadows" or other "evil" concepts are incredibly cliche. In general, many destructive themes, such as flames, fire, and the like can also appeared cliched. What I would do is think about the basic ideas and feelings those concepts represent, and instead of using that word which is cliched, think of another one that represents similar feelings or concepts.

Thesauruses can work wonders if you're stuck on words.

Hope this helps.