Heya! to all my fellow (amateur and professional) musicians. I noticed that there was no topic for sharing songwriting tips here yet, so I thought I'd start one. This is where we can all reveal our little songwriting secrets and benefit from learning from others, hopefully. I myself have a one-man atmospheric black metal project and while atmosphere is very important to me, I think songwriting is even more important, so let's all share some ideas, eh?

Here are some tips that I use and would like to share:


1) Take ideas from established sucessful musicians' works and twist those ideas around, making them your own. To give a few examples from my own works: I have a song called "My Bright Star", the opening chord of which is actually "stolen" from Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". Here's what I did: I took that famous 4-note guitar lick, riff, whatever and played the four notes at the same time, thus I didn't steal the actual melody, I instead turned it into a single chord, that sounded pretty interesting and unique and made for a cool way to open a song.

The opposite of that works wonders too. For example, for my song "The Song The Forest Sings" I took a very beautiful sounding (Gmaj something) chord from Placebo's song "Special Needs" and tremolo-picked the notes individually and that became part of the opening riff for that song. In all likelihood, most people would never ever guess that that's what I did in either example. As someone supposedly said: "Good composers borrow, great composers steal" "Stealing" in this manner is really just drawing inspiration from other artists and that is perfectly fine and very very useful.

2) Mess around with your already existing material. Suppose you have a song with a verse and a chorus. Try taking the lead melody from the chorus and play it over the verse's chord progression. Assuming that you weren't lazy and didn't use the same progression for both the verse and the chorus, you might discover something new and awesome.

3) Learn music theory as best as you can! This well help you break out of the overplayed chord progression trap. Yes, every chord progression can be used well, but some progressions are so overused that they bore the crap out of pretty much everyone.

4) Learn to play more than just one instrument, even if just a little bit. I am no brilliant shredder on either the keyboard or on a guitar, but I can play both instruments well enough for the type of music I want to make. What's intersting however, is just how differently I write music depending on which instrument I am playing. Sometimes I'll sit with a guitar in hand for hours and days and nothing will come to me, then I'll switch over to keyboards and voila! I feel inspired again and ideas will begin to flow.

5) Don't be afraid to start a song in a simple way. It's really great to open a song with the best riff ever, but when you're experiencing a bit of writer's block, don't shy away from simple song beginnings. Once you've got something written or better yet, recorded, the ideas on how to follow up on that material usually come more easily. And heck, if you want to, you can later completely erase the simple opening and start the song with a better melody or riff, that came to you because you didn't just sit without recording anything.

6) Speaking of recording, record everything, whether playing something you've written down or just improvising/jamming away, record as much material as you can. You might even end up playing something interesting by pure accident and unless you've recorded it, might not be able reproduce it.

7) Listen to genres that you don't necessarily like or even understand. This can give you loads of cool ideas.

8) Re-visit your own material. I have a quite a few songs that are essentially 2.0 versions of songs I wrote years ago. In the time that has passed, I have evolved and can now improve those old songs, re-write some bits, add and cut away stuff etc.


That's all the advice I've got for my fellow musicians right now. I hope to add to this topic in the future and I look forward to suggestions and tips from other songwriters. Let's all help each other improve!

Heard this track just now and it isn't half bad. With more songwriting chops and better production value, your project has some good potential.

Improvising/jamming is best. If I try too much to create/compose ''professionally'' a song, it doesn't always work. Best songs I have done has been created by improvising/jamming. When writing lyrics I try create pictures in my mind of what I'm gonna write about, then I imagine some kind of story and try to put it in lyrics.

^I always do that. Mostly improvising parts for each instrument and then putting together all the samples so it sort of fits to make a song. Problem is you end up with weird experimental shit all the time

Recently been trying to make a more "standard" song (written before playing with clear structure) and what Arcanewind says in point 1 is totally what I do. Take a riff or melody, and play it the way you think it is first. Usually it's wrong but with a few note changes you have a brand new riff that works! Must admit that writting a song the "usual way" is much more work, sometimes quite tedious and certainly not as fun....