First blog.
This week has been show week and its been the first time I’ve performed my songs to anyone, but earlier this week I learnt some great songwriting tips off a lecturer and I thought I’d blog them with my opinion.
What makes a good song?
When writing songs it can be difficult to determine whether its a good song or a bad song especially when you’ve never performed or even written a song before.
This is a table that my lecturer showed me, it helps you to determine whether a song is good or bad. If the audience like a song you’ve written and you like the song you’ve written that makes it a good song, but if you don’t like a song you’ve written and the audience don’t like a song you’ve written it makes it a bad song.
The two most interesting and argumentative ones are the ones highlighted in red. When the audience don’t like a song but you do does that make it a bad or good song? and when the audience like a song but you don’t does it make it a good or bad song? I think that if the audience don’t like a song but you do it could be classed as a bad song because the audience don’t want to hear it but there is a reason for the audience not liking the song and it might not be because they think it is a bad song. I think once a song has been wrote you have to perform it more than once before you can make a decision on whether it is a good or bad song and all songs should be performed because they have meaning otherwise you wouldn’t have wrote them. Even once a song has been written you can still make amendments to it until you think it is right. On the other hand is if the audience do like your song but you don’t, is it a good or bad song? This one got me thinking a lot more but my opinion is if the audience like your song it is a good song because people want to here it and that is what you want to come out of your songwriting. When discussing this with a group of people earlier this week someone said ‘If you don’t like your song you shouldn’t perform it’ which I agree with because you have to have confidence in your song for somebody else to like it but I also disagree with it because I think it depends on how the song was wrote and how much thought went into the song. If you spent very little amount of time writing a song and didn’t put very much thought into it you probably wouldn’t like it when comparing it to another song you’ve wrote, which has had more time spent on it and has had more thought gone in to it. I think it all depends on how much the song means to you but I still think it should be performed.
How to write songs about specific things?
I also asked my lecturer about writing songs about specific things and what to do if someone gave you a specific topic to write about. He said if you have to write about a specific topic start by brain storming ideas that relate to that topic, because this can help you list all the things that you can write about in your song.
If you have to write a song based on a specific film or book then start by listing the characters and write the story out from their prospective but don’t use the main character. My lecturer showed me a great example of this and he used the Disney Film Snow White.
The example above shows you how the characters have been listed from the film, you would then write about the story from each of the characters point of view and start to build a song from it. I think this is a great trick because it helps you to brain storm ideas and uses a lot of creative thinking which is what songwriters use, it also makes it different from just creating a song based on the film/book because you speak from a characters point of view.
Writing songs
Another question that gets asked quite a lot is Do you come up with the chord structure or lyrics first? When I asked my lecturer he said what ever is best for you. I’ve never really thought about how I write my songs but earlier this week my lecturer helped me break down how I come up with my songs and this was the out come we got. If you are stuck and don’t know how to write your songs then this will help you.
When writing my songs I write the chorus for the song first by coming up with a chord structure and improvising a top line (melody or lyrics) over the top of a chord structure, I then develop my favourite idea by editing the lyrics to come up with a chorus for the song.
After coming up with a chorus I change some of the chords to come up a second chord structure for a verse I then repeat the same process by editing my favourite idea for the verse. I then repeat this and depending on how many verses I come up with I then write out the song structure.
During one of my classes this week we spoke about our thought process and how it might be a good idea to change the way you write songs by writing them backwards so I would write come up with the song structure first. This helps you change your thought pattern and helps you generate a different thought process, I’m considering giving this ago to see how different it will be writing out of my comfort zone.
Songwriting can be a difficult thing to do but after having a conversation with my lecturer its helped me because I now think about what I’m doing when writing my songs which I’ve never done before.
Thanks for reading and I hope these tips will be as helpful to you as they are to me.
Chloe
Chloe Pickering 