Question 1

How do beginners start songwriting?

Hugh McIntyre · Accepted Answer

This is a very vague answer, but, you just…start. You can read all the songwriting books and articles and listen to Songwriters talk about the process until the cows come home, but nothing will get written if you don’t sit down and begin. If you need a little more help than that, here are a few tips.
Some tips for beginners who want to start songwriting:

Read. Check out articles and books from those in the music industry and well-known musicians who have years of experience with songwriting.
Listen and Watch. Interviews and podcasts with Songwriters are everywhere, and each person will have a different take on how to craft a tune, and all of them are valid.
Brainstorm. Come up with some topics you’d like to write about, from a breakup to a fight with your mom.
Jot Down Ideas. From single words to complete stanzas, keep a notebook with you and write down everything that comes to mind.
Piece It All Together. Once you have some phrases or lines that are all about the same topic or theme, try putting them together in a different order to see how they work.
Sing Do these lyrics sound and feel right? If not, is it the words? The order? Maybe how you’re singing them? Take your time and play with everything!

Question 2

What are the most important aspects of songwriting?

Hugh McIntyre · Accepted Answer

There are quite a few different aspects and factors that go into penning a great song. What are they?
Here are some of the most important aspects of songwriting:

Melody: The tune of the song. It’s best if it’s something that will get lodged into a listener’s mind and never leave.
Chords: You don’t need to understand chords immediately, but if you want to progress with your songwriting, you’ll want to learn not only the names of the chords, but what they sound like. That way, you can place your words over them and make a song.
Lyrics: The words that everyone will one day be singing along to.
Sections: Every song has different parts, or sections, to it. You’ll want to read up on what an intro, verse, bridge, chorus, and outro are. Then you’ll understand how most songs are structured.
Theme: What is the song about? It can be love, loss, a party, or anything in between.

Question 3

How do you get better at songwriting?

Hugh McIntyre · Accepted Answer

Like so many other things in life, there is only one way to become better at songwriting–keep doing it. There is no way around this fact, so accept it, learn to love the process, and continue churning out those tunes!
But if you want a specific roadmap, here’s how you get better at songwriting:

Keep writing. The more songs you write, the more you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, as well as who you are as a Songwriter.
Share your work. Let others listen and ask for feedback. What do they love or what doesn’t work for them? Keep all of this in mind when you write your next song.
Continue learning. Read, listen, and watch more and more. Hear from the experts and those who have succeeded in songwriting before you.
Listen. Keep playing music! Now that you’re a Songwriter and not just a fan, you should think critically as you listen. How did a musician get a lyric stuck in your head? Why did they pick that word over another? What made someone choose one way of expressing an idea over another? Ask yourself these questions and so many more!

Question 4

How do you write a song with no experience?

Ben Johnson · Accepted Answer

Just like you start any new hobby or profession! Just start. A great way to start is to try to write a song that sounds like one of your favorite songs. Then think about what you want to say, or what emotion you want to convey, and then just start singing.
It’s amazing how many hit songs have been written just from someone sitting down and singing whatever comes to the top of their head without thinking too hard about it. Be patient with yourself and understand that it’s most likely going to take a lot of bad songs to get to the good ones.

Question 5

How long does it take to become a good Songwriter?

Cliff Goldmacher · Accepted Answer

I hope this doesn’t sound daunting, but I would say don’t even begin to think about knowing who you are as a Songwriter until you’ve written 100 songs. I think once you’ve got 100 songs under your belt, you’ll be able to look back and start to find some patterns in your writing.
You’ll start to find the beginnings of your voice as a Songwriter, and I really mean the beginnings. I’ve written over 1,000 songs. I can promise you that I really didn’t know what I was doing or understand my own process until I’d written over 100 songs.
A friend of mine said the greatest thing: “Every once in a while, you’re gonna screw up and write a great song.” That’s fine. The problem is that you might write one that’s really great, but you might not have any idea how to recreate that process.
By the time you’ve written 100 songs, you’ll understand your process enough as a Songwriter so that every time you sit down to write, you know that you’re at least going to start at a baseline level of quality. And then, every once in a while—and we don’t know why—certain songs that we write will just have that extra magic pinch of pixie dust on them.
By giving yourself permission to just write, and write, and write, and write without expecting to be great right away, you’ll start to learn what’s working and what isn’t and be able to consistently create the stuff that does work.

Question 6

Is songwriting an innate talent or a skill you can develop?

Peter Zizzo · Accepted Answer

I think both are true. There are people that have a great innate ability to do things, and then there are people that have the love for it and just want to do it. That goes for anything at all. In many cases, I’d put my money on the people that weren’t born with as much innate ability to succeed over the people that were.
When you’re born with a gift, generally what happens is you grow up and people notice you have this gift. People tell you that you’re amazing at this, you’ll be a star, you’ll be incredible, it’ll be easy for you, etc. I know that comes from the right place, but it’s fairly destructive. What happens is when you grow up and get out there in the world, you find out it’s really, really hard to be successful no matter what you’re doing and how good you are.
And you may fail a lot. You may fail for years without a single break. When someone has been groomed to think that they’re the best and that it will be easy for them, they’re not prepared for that kind of rejection. They feel like all the eyes of everyone they grew up with are on them, and they’re going to feel bad so they won’t work as hard. If they start to fail, they’ll become depressed and self-medicated. All sorts of crazy things happen to talented people.
I’ll give you an example. When you ask who the greatest inventors of the last 150 years were, the first two names that come up are Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison is known for inventing the lightbulb. The truth about Thomas Edison is that he didn’t really invent the lightbulb and he really wasn’t a super brilliant guy. He was, by all accounts, a guy that would work ten times harder than everybody else, loved science, and loved the world he got into, more than anybody.
His Teachers said he wasn’t their best student but he outworked everybody. He loved the press and self-promotion. He worked with about thirty other scientists, and a series of things were developed that eventually became the lightbulb, through trial and error, and he got himself a lot of press for it. He’s seen as a great genius, but really what his genius was was his desire and his love of what he did.
The most successful Songwriters and Singer-Songwriters, when you peek behind the curtain, these are also people that are terminators in terms of their work ethic, fearlessness, and their ability to navigate and narrate their story and their brand. You didn’t used to have to be that way. You could be a Joni Mitchell, or a Donovan, or a Laura Nyro and become a hugely successful talent. It was purely based on how good you were.
Today, you also have to have a very canny sense of the age that we live in and how to navigate it. So people like a Shawn Mendes, a Taylor Swift, or a Justin Bieber, these are talented people for sure, but they’re smart and not afraid of anything. They’ve worked harder than most people put together because it’s what they want. Maybe there are more talented people out there who haven’t gotten where they’ve gotten and that’s because of the work ethic and the fearlessness.

Question 7

Anything else you think up-and-coming Songwriters should know about?

Cliff Goldmacher · Accepted Answer

There’s something I’ve been thinking about recently as far as a career in songwriting … which is that you should be both macro-patient and micro-impatient. You need to get up every day and be hungry to do the work. Every day. You have to be impatient to do that work.
Then you have to be incredibly patient when it comes to the fruits of your labor, because it will never happen as quickly as you would like or in the way that you expect it to happen. But if you get up every day and teach yourself to do the work, the good things will happen over time.

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