Looking for a fresh feel for your songwriting efforts? These are tried-and-true tips shared on Songwriting Scene since its debut — give ‘em a try today (or tomorrow…or the next day is fine, too)
1. Roll the dice. This one was from my talented buddy David Roth: So the story goes, says David, Mozart and his contemporaries used a dice game to create some of their concertos — they would assign random numbers between 1 and 6 to interchangeable measures of music, and roll the dice and use the numbers to put the measures in sequence. Of course, a six-sided die is limited for a Western musical scale, so David uses 8-sided dice (collected from Dungeons and Dragons games) to represent the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-da scale of any key, and rolls the dice to come up with a sequence of chords — in the key of C, for example, 1-6-2-4 would mean C-A-D-F. “You can also use 8 cards from a deck and shuffle them,” David points out.
2. Use the Random Song Generator. I learned about this great exercise a while back at songwriting camp, where the instructor basically presented us with three columns of words — in the first column was a type of person; in the second a place and the third, an action word. We had to choose one phrase randomly from each column and go forth to write! I liked my tune so much that I ended up recording a song called “Short Brown Hair” – which arose from an assignment to write a song about “siblings, ages 9 and 11,” “in a coffee shop”, “stealing something.”
3. Do some people watching. This one comes courtesy of a great songwriting teacher, Severin Browne: “I’ll go somewhere with my writing pad and watch people interact. I sometimes imagine what these people are like and what they are going through, which has yielded stories to write about. I also eavesdrop, which got me the title to one of my songs: ‘Do you think I’ll go to Heaven?’”
4. Pick a phrase out of a hat. I did this great exercise years ago while camping at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with Carolann Solebello, her husband Mark Berube, and a bunch of their pals. They had several people put a phrase into a hat and then you had to pick a phrase from the hat and write a song using that phrase — in just an hour, no less. For example, one phrase was “She swept it all behind the door,” and another that I put in was “Your gentle soul surrounds me.” Believe it or not, several fabulous songs came out of that exercise. Try doing the same, though of course you can give yourself more than an hour!
5. Turn your friends’ lives into tunes. Does your life seem too boring to crib from for your latest song? Turn to your friends…what are they going through? What challenges are they facing in their lives? Any good love/loss story, for example? You don’t have to get so detailed in the song that they feel exposed…it can just spur some good ideas that you can build on.
6. The ten minute trick. Give yourself 10 minutes to just write down any lyrics you want with no inner critic allowed — 10 crazy minutes of WHATEVER you want going from your brain to the page. Set a stove timer to make sure you don’t stop…just keep the writing going without any thought to rhyme, sense, order, or intent.
7. Try an alternate tuning. This tip came from an interview with alternate-tuning-maven Denise Jordan Finley: “Alternate tunings help to break out of the box… as songwriters, the last thing we want to do is to write songs that sound just like everybody else’s songs… and WORSE, to write song after song ourselves that ALL sound the same! Alternate tunings give you a fresh look for ways to support a melody you may have in your head already, OR the interesting chords you get with alternate tunings will offer inspiration for writing beautiful melodies.”
8. Start with a “creative brief”: This came from a great guest post by songwriter Jeff Shattuck: A brief is a one page document that tells an advertising creative team (copywriter, art director) what exactly they need to create, why and for whom. With a good, clear Key Message, the creative team can focus all their energy on how to say something, as apposed to having to split their brains between what to say and how best to say it.“This song is about…” In songwriting, you can use a similar technique. Once you have your basic idea, usually a line of some sort, write that line at the top of your page, spew out some lyrics and chords, and then stop. And before you go any further, spend a fair bit of time completing the sentence “This song is about ___________________.”
9. Lift an idea from the news. Courtesy of guest poster Kate O’Quinn: Are you stuck on a topic for your new tune? Maybe you are just sick of writing the same type of song over and over again. Whatever the case may be, if you are in search of inspiration, turn on the nightly news, open a newspaper or grab a magazine. The song ideas will leap at you immediately.You can go as deep or as shallow with this activity as you want. Look through the photographs in magazines and create a story to match. Authors do it all the time, why not songwriters?
10. Take out your thesaurus. Sometimes I’ll get song ideas just from noodling through an online thesaurus. Just seeing all the synonyms for love, guilt, light, or whatever word you’re thinking about can get your juices flowing!
Happy songwriting, Scenesters!
