A lot of songwriters I know are working on some serious songwriting deadlines — 28 songs in a month, a song a week for a year, a song a day, and the like.
So…is songwriting best when done in quantity, with lots of crumpled up pieces of paper as songs get thrown aside, or by spending time carefully perfecting one song at a time — perhaps only finishing a few songs over a long period?
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.
I sing. I write songs. I post bloggy stuff about songwriting. I wish Paul Simon would speak to me. If I had time, I'd learn to play the banjo. Find out more about moi!