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Fascinating Wiki article. ☺️ Thank you for sharing. This is why I got those "little fat" notebooks. Never know when inspiration will strike, whether that's a full song, lyric snippets, song titles, "blueprinting", etc.
I plan to see my local singer-songwriter friends John Plankenhorn and Carole Ferrara perform live tomorrow by the way. I may "pick their brains" afterwards or email Carole afterwards to see if she has any songwriting advice.
If so, I'll share it here.
So today's helping of songwriting advice - things to avoid when songwriting/dealing with the songwriting world. Not technical stuff but more like super helpful advice when writing songs and dealing with others.
If you can read my sloppy handwriting, you got this!
Songtown really is a treasure trove. Fun fact: Clay Mills was a student of Sheila Davis . I think even one of his lyrics is used as an example in one of her books
That's pretty f--king cool! I may get the three books they penned together sometime next month (as I've already enough books to last me a long while at this time). Meanwhile mate, thanks to Youtube's algorithm I discovered a new-to-me channel called Music By Mattie, and the first video, while 15 minutes in length, was a treasure trove of basic-but-important information! Check these notes out!
All marked down in what is becoming my "sacred songwriting notebook". 😂 I call it that since I'm gathering a lot of info into this one book that's most helpful for me, and hopefully is helpful for you lot as well.
I'm still looking forward to our collaboration someday @Butterfrog
Looks like a guide how to NOT write a Taylor Swift song. 😆
😂🤣🤣 That is the funniest shit I've heard all day. Facts are, Taylor Swift must be doing something right to appeal to so many folks out there (whether it's relatable songs or ritualistic sacrificing of animals 🤣 ). And hell, even I enjoy some of her songs unironically (with "Blank Space" being my favorite). I'm not a fan of her more recent work, but I do enjoy her new song "I Knew It, I Knew You"...
However, as far as my own songwriting is concerned, I'm far more inspired by the 60s and 70s (and even some 80s) eras of songwriting (with the exception of HipHop, where I'm inspired by many MCs from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s). From Bob Dylan, to Roger Waters, to Glenn Frey, to Jim Croce, to the Beatles (which includes John Lennon mind you, and even John Lennon's solo work is phenomenal), to f--king Jim Peterik, to Brian Wilson, to Dolly Parton, to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, to Diane Warren, to Prince, to 2Pac, to Dre, to Eminem...and as I think I said above, I could spend all day listing out every last one of my songwriting inspirations.
A lot of these inspirations were "before my time" as it were. Yes, I'm in my early 40s, an "elder millennial" as it were, but I grew up with a lot of my parents' music. You ever listen to the original pressing of "Dark Side of the Moon"? My dad had that on "vinyl" (what the kids these days call "a record"). My parents were great music connoisseurs.
Anyways, getting back to Taylor Swift and the "7 Sins" list. Sometimes, songwriting "rules" are meant to be broken, and break them she did, and she makes it sound good. In my opinion, she's one of the top modern songwriters out there. A lot of what I write down in my "sacred songwriting journal" and share here are more like guidelines than hard-and-fast rules.
Honestly, one book a year is more the rate you want to go at with this stuff.
There are 4 aspects to mastering any skill:
Input
Analysis
Output
Fluency
If you get too many books, you're doing too much input and not enough of the other stages. One a year, max, would be the right speed! Most of the work should be done writing and analyzing.
Taylorswift is isn’t just a songwriter. She is a singer-songwriter wich gives her greater liberties. She doesn’t have to tailor (pun intended) every part of her song to get picked up by a publisher or recording artist. She can decide to break a rule because she is defining her own brand. That gives her a lot of creative freedom to experiment with things. Besides that her output is insane wich gives her more chances at hits or at least consistently good, listenable songs.
Looking forward to it too buddy
Good points made.
Right now, I'm in "absorption" mode, but will soon try out the various exercises and such. 
This is so true to be honest.
From this morning's SongTown video I watched...
Very good insights as to the songwriting pitfalls to avoid.
I think this one was mentioned but there are so many sites called “how to write song/s.” This one was very useful to me when starting out. Keppie Coutts and Ben Romalis:
https://youtube.com/@htws?si=8zjgeOKqbZnL6X6b
A really valuable thread you’ve started here Jim.
Mainly due to my butterfly attention span and not having bought a browsable physical copy, I’m slowly absorbing Jeremy Siskind’s new book ‘The Fundamentals of Songwriting’ https://a.co/d/0aCBAheD . Its 363 pages seem to cover much of the ground discussed in this thread with exercises and online sample answers plus YouTube links to the songs mentioned. I rate Jeremy as a pianist / educator and getting his unexpected songwriting book was a no brainer.
From what I have read and observed, we all have an innate ability to create at a certain level but then, driven to improve, we go on a learning journey where temporarily our abilities may even get worse as our brains struggle to make sense of the often conflicting ‘rules’ we pick up. Finally, through practice we emerge having packed all that learning into our subconscious and we can just ‘do it’. So, I’m with @gavinski in suggesting that it’s important to keep the learning stage in balance.
I’m hoping that now with a vocal synthesiser, it might spur me to write songs again. I’m told my voice is musical enough but I hate the sound of it and know how demanding it would be to train it with all the daily exercises and practices necessary. Also there’s something vulnerable about singing a self-penned lyric which while perhaps being a plus for the listener is not something I want to expose. My recent song post https://forum.loopypro.com/discussion/68633/hammering-past-the-stop-omnivocal-swam-staffpad-cubasis-cubase features the Yamaha Omnivocal plugin that suits my aesthetic but I appreciate it’s not for everyone.
Good luck in finding the answers you’re looking for.
What an excellent find! Thank you.
@AndyHoneybone Looks like a great book, but as @Gavinski said, I gotta cool off on purchasing new books. So will put this on a wish list for now and consider purchasing it once I digest the other books first.
I also know the vulnerability that comes with singing a song oneself penned. I'll check your song out.
I’m pretty sure rap and hip-hop artists would disagree with every rule on this list lol. So many folk songs of revenge or outlaws are classics. Maybe it’s the 90s kid attitude in me but I like my songs to have a bit of an edge to them. Given, one could make an argument for emo being the defining genre of rock for my generation.
Totally haha,. Earlier in this thread I wanted to write, rules are made to be broken. The film Adaptation by Spike Jonze jumped to mind. In it, a screenwriting guru tells his students never to use voiceover narration. The joke is that the film itself makes great use of voiceover.
In fact that list reminds me that most of these books will be full of filler. I’d say: take a lyric you really like. Analyse it line by line, the things you like, the things that don’t work. Notice the way the rhythm works, and how the writer plays with rhythm and rhyme. Write a few lines of your own in that vein, maybe just change the topic but take a bit of inspiration from the lyrics you just analysed. Rinse and repeat!
Hahaha. So true @FizzyLizzy27 , lol. I also like music with edge. I think I said it to someone else, but rules are meant to be broken. And I agree with @Gavinski that "rules" are meant to be broken.
Gav, that's an interesting way to look at things. I'll try that lyric analysis method and figure these things out.
Piggybacking on the “hip hop artists world disagree” - a rapper's notebook would probably have a very different set of rules. I’ll do a little thought exercise and guess something like:
That’s not a great list, but I think my point is recognize the genre you’re writing in and for. Making it personal is even better, so I wouldn’t disagree with your list at all.
Some good points raised here.
Found a goldmine playlist!
you've reminded me of this, gav. it's about a different kind of writing but there's crossover.
tl;dr - the only thing we can really offer is ourselves. be brave.
personally, i'm inclined to leave algorithmic "doing it right" methodologies to a.i. and that norwegian pop music factory.
hang on, the thing i was thinking of is one man and he's called max martin*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
anyway, i think @jwmmakerofmusic will be fine, as he's sincere, humble and unrelenting.
hope it's a fun ride.
*i got mixed up and smooshed him into stargate who are norwegians, who produced a ton of rhianna's stuff, including diamonds
Thanks mate. So far, it is a fun ride. And it's true, I am unrelenting when it comes to learning things and soaking up info in my brain like a sponge. 😌 Cheers mate.
If you don’t sing, then the closest you’re gonna come is that new Yamaha voice app that’s available on Cubase 15
That sounds like a cool app to be honest.
Well, I don't have a desktop nor a few hundred to part with to get Cubase 15 going for me. Just my iPad and Cubase.
Anyways, for my purposes, I got my voice and the dreaded autotune to record reference vocals with. This way an actual talented singer I hire knows when to come in and all that. (Or if I'm writing EDM/Pop music, I can just get away with my own autotuned vocals period, lol.) I also know how to notate music just in case a singer needs sheet music of a song I write.
I agree that most books are full of filler. That is why I hammered on about the craft of lyric writing. Most books are derivatives of that one with a lot of fluff and personal anecdotes.
Oh really? I thought you were an ex Ableton user for some reason..or maybe that’s accurate and you just ditched the computer at some point.. I too am all iOS though I’m thinking of going laptop. I like that new Reason 14..
The book is ginormous, but from skimming it, seems to have all the info needed. I may go with Pat Pattison's books next. I'm getting distracted by studying Youtube videos though which is taking away from reading time. 🫣 Gotta wrangle in my brain.
I ditched the computer around 9 years ago and never looked back. Simply because Apple computers were more expensive than Windows, and Windows comes with a whole slew of digital aches and pains. 😂 The Macbook Neo would be my laptop of choice if I were in the market for one. FL Studio is what I used to use on computer, and once Nanostudio 2 bit the dust, a combination of FL Studio Mobile (music creation and production) and Cubasis 3 (mastering, vocal recording and processing) has become my main staple workflow.
It's called OmniVocal and are still in beta as far as I can see. Emvoice does pretty much the same thing in the same manner but have switched to subscription so that's not ideal. I had Emvoice for quite some time (before subscription) but never befriended it (thinking of selling the licence, if doable)
It's rather lousy when developers force a user who paid a one-time fee into a subscription just to continue using a product they already paid for. Take Flip-A-Clip as an example (I used to dabble with that before the developers forced paid users into an unwanted subscription).