Songwriting Strategies is a podcast that lets songwriters share their strategies, tips and tricks for songwriting with each other.

Each week an indepedent songwriter shares with you a strategy that they use in their songwriting. It could be a way of writing lyrics, a method for choosing chords, and way of shaping your melodies, a recording technique, or the secret of how a common household appliance could revolutionise your songwriting.Whatever it is, they’ll share it with you, and one of their songs as well, and hopefully you’ll learn something new to apply to your own songwriting.

Get Involved

I’ll be recording a lot of these podcasts, but I’d like to open the floor up to others as well.

If you:

• Have a songwriting idea you’d like to share
• Have the means to record yourself telling us about it
• Would like to share one of your songs with the subscribers of this site

Please drop me an email at tomslattermusic AT gmail.com

In short, it’s the best song ever. It will take you on a musical journey you’ve never ever been on before. It’s the song I’ll be known for – people will sing its praises for decades.

The problem is, I can’t write it. I’ve been trying every day since I was ten to write this song, and I still haven’t got there.

I’m nearer now than I was 18 years ago, ten years ago, five years ago. I’m nearer than I was last week, and there’s a song brewing at the back of my head right now that might just be it.

Or might not.

Do I hate eveything else I’ve written? No, I certainly don’t. In particular I’m very proud of the music I’ve produced in the last year. But I haven’t written that song yet.

Maybe next year. Or the one after.

Yes, I’m changing the name of this site to Indiesongwriter.net after four years under the old name.

There are a couple of reasons.

Spelling

‘Songwright’ looks quite good on paper, but when you try and tell people the name of the site verbally, things can get very confusing.

“It’s songwright, but spelled like ‘shipwright’ or ‘playwright’. Get it?”

IndieSongwriter.net, on the other hand, isn’t in any way ambiguous.

You

The second reason is while ‘songwright’ encapsulates something of what this blog is about – the craft of songwriting – it says nothing about you, the audience.

Now, I’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of songwriter I’m aiming for with this blog, and hopefully you’ll recognise yourself in this description.

I’m writing, as the new name suggests, for indepedent songwriters.

As an indie songwriter, you mostly perform your own songs.
You put creativity before commercial potential.
You write to express yourself, for the joy of writing.
You aren’t interested in writing for the top-40.
You wouldn’t be at home in Nashville.
You are equally interested in the craft and art of songwriting
You don’t want your songwriting now to be the same as you songwriting in six months’, a year’s, or a decade’s time.

That isn’t an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you the idea. This blog has always been for songwriters outside the mainstream, who don’t just want to write a clone of whatever this week’s number 1 hit is. It’s for songwriters who care about the craft and art of what they do.

Now, the name fits with that too.

This is a piece composed and recorded by Matt Stevens for a friend of his. A wonderful piece, and a reminder of how powerful this artform of ours can be.

From the description of the piece:

This is a song for our friend Dan Wilson, who was a lovely,inspirational,kind man,a wonderful film maker,friend, and musician and missed by us all. He passed away last Sunday. Played live and improvised to digital tape 7/8/2010.

So if you’ve any songwriting related questions, feel free to ask them.

Here’s one that’s already been asked, and my initial reponse. If you have any more answers, please chip in in the comments:

Q: Hi!! I’m a songwriter from Peru. Quick question: when do you use an aug chord and when do you use a diminished chord to spice a chord progression? all the best.

A: Quick answer – When they sound good!

That’s a little facetious though, so here’ a longer answer:-

Diminished chords are useful as a substitute for Don7 chords. So instead of playing a G7 I might play Dbdiminished. This potentially lets me change key easily because there are lots of keys that could be related to this chord.

Augmented chords again can sound good in lots of contexts, but one way of using them is in a minor key as a substitute for the dom7. Eg: in A minor, instead of playing E7 Am you might play Eaug Am, or even Eaug/G# Am.

There are other possibilities – my song ‘Measure of a Man’ ha sa 2 chord verse that goes Eb major – B Augmented.

I’d say try things out and see what you get.

I hope that helps!

Sitting down with my acoustic guitar, I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was going to play except that I wanted to write something new.

Lately my fingers have been finding E lydian rather too easily, so I started with an E major 7 chord and a few twiddlings with the scale – not enough to be called a melody, just a bit of noodling.

I carried on playing, entirely aimlessly…

Alun Vaughun a fantastic solo bass player had recently turned me onto the music of Mike Kineally. His songs use lots of complicated chords, I decided I wanted something harmonically lush – so some 9th chords worked their way into my guitar part. Nothing like Kineally really, but that memory triggered the chords.

A few more moments noodling…

The last big gig I went to was Opeth at the Royal Albert hall – some Opeth-like chords appeared under my fingers – but I remembered Kineally and for some reason that meant I had to play a little melodic run that didn’t sound like Opeth at all.

I had been reading PZ Myers over at science blogs – he likes Cephalopods. This combined with my recent obsession with Steampunk and suddenly the song was about hunting Sky-kraken in an Airship.

Steampunk led to memories of Radiohead’s video for There There, which led to a chorus ripping that off – and now the Kraken was winning because the chorus melody was about the bewitching power of it’s ink and tentacles.

All of this occurred at a far less conscious level than I’m making it appear, and it resulted in this song (which isn’t finished yet, but you get the idea):

The Beast of the Air

Divergent Thinking

Divergent, unrelated solutions to the problem of how to write a song making their way in from the outskirts of my mind, unleashed by the practice of jamming without any structure.

I’ve been writing, reading and thinking about creativity a lot recently. Divergent thinking, the ability to find lots of of unrelated possibilities from different disciplines is very important to creativity. What I was doing when I sat down with no idea other than to play and see what happened was the musical equivalent of the free writing a novelist might do to get the brain working – it’s also similar to brainstorming or mind mapping – letting the brain run and sifting through what turns up.

Divergent thinking has been shown to be a skill that musicians are particularly good at, but I’m aware that I don’t make as much effort at it as I could. Too often I try to structure my composition, rather than making time for exploring possibilities and creating the circumstances in which the mind can find these possibilities.

What can you do to encourage divergent thinking?

• Mind-map – sit down with pen and paper, write down a central idea then surround it with related ideas…
• Free write – Just start writing prose and see what turns up.
• List possiblities – what are all the possible ways of startign a song? What are all the possible chord sequences, or lyrical subjects that you could write about?
• Just play – sit down with your instrument and start playing with no aim except to see what happens. You never know, you might end up with a song about hunting Sky-Kraken too.

How to Harmonize

How to Harmonize is a collection of 5 primer lessons aimed at Songwriters who are just starting out and want to know more about how to harmonize their songs – how chords and harmonies work.

Lesson 1: What Does’Harmonize’ Mean?
Aim:    To explain how the two meanings of ‘harmonize’ are really one.

Lesson 2:
Some Questions About Intervals
Aim:    To explain which intervals are found in the major scale

Lesson 3: Some Questions About Chords
Aim:    To explain what a chord is and show you which chords are found in each of the major keys

Lesson 4: How to Harmonize a Melody Using Primary Chords
Aim:     To explain how the 1st, 4th and 5th chords of a key can be used to harmonize a melody

Lesson 5: Harmonizing a Melody – Beyond the Primary Chords
Aim: To explain how chords other than the 1st 4th and 5th can be used

Why do I have to give my email address?

Members of the mailing list recieve the ebooks and a monthly newsletter telling you what’s been going on on songwright.co.uk. During the next year I’ll also be releasing a paid-for ebook which I’ll email you about nearer the time.

You can opt out of the mailing list at any point, no questions asked.

A few posts ago I wrote about creativity, and decided the definition of creativity I liked best was Ken Russell’s: ‘The process of having original ideas that have value’

I also listed a few of the characteristics of a creative songwriter (Take a look at the post for more detail):

You’re not afraid to fail
You make unexpected connections
You challenge the listener
You have a wide musical pallette
Your style changes
You’re childish

This post is going to look at how you might use your skills of creativity to find inspiration from a given source. It takes inspiration from a teaching exercise I’ll tell you about below, but also from this blog post about creativity and how limitations can help.

Starry Starry Night

The Vincent Van Gogh picture at the top of the post famously provided inspiration for Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’. It was also used by my head of department at work to challenge us to be creative. We were shown the picture and asked to come up with teaching tasks, for any subject, based on the picture.

There are lots of obvious tasks – in music or art you could use the picture for inspiration as McLean did, painting in the same style, or writing a piece inspired by the scene or painter.

Once we’d exhausted the obvious list we were challenged to go further. Ideas we came up with included:

Music – split the piece into horizontal strips and play it like a graphic score.

- You could plot the stars and other points onto a score and use those points for the contour of a melody or rhythm.

Maths – Draw triangles between the stars and use them to teach about triangle theory

Science – Astronomy of course, but also something about colour perception or synesthesia

PE – the shapes could be used to plot an obstacle course

Food Tech – Design and cook the menu that Van Gogh might have eaten while looking out at that scene

Now to Songwriting

How could we apply this exercise to songwriting? As we sat staring at the picture I found myself doing some very clear and simply things: I systematically went through the possible subjects we teach at our school, attempting to find an activity for each of them. I also turned the picture round to see it from different angles, treating it sometimes as abstract shapes, sometimes making use of it’s possible meanings.

To generalise that to music, rather than subjects we might use different elements of the song and ask, how can we get a melody from the picture? A chord sequence? A structure? A lyric? A rhythm? An arrangement?

As well as the musical ideas I’ve already mentioned, here are some more ideas:

You could have a musical idea to represent different parts of the picture. So a regular, structured back beat or riff could represent the buildings, a swirling melody could represent the swirls of colour in the sky and lush unexpected chords could punctuate that melody as the stars do. If I was to compose that I’d probably produce a loop based piece with different layers appearing to represent the different parts of the picture.

Moving left to right the stars follow this sequence – 1 low, 1 high, I low, 2 high, 3 at the same time, 1 high, pause…. high low high. That could easily be turned into a loop or melodic idea that could be developed.

Chords? Rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise and take just the top portion – there are five patches of colour, the third and fourth of which are a very similar shade of blue. Perhaps each patch of colour is a different chord, darker shades minor and light shades major, with the two similar sections representing the same chord?

Lyrics? Of course there are all sorts of characters who might be looking out at this scene – Van Gogh might be well known but you could always imagine another character and tell their story. You could describe the scene, or get more creative and take inspiration from the names of the things painted: Building, sky, star, blue, tree, hill, church, spire.

The possibilities are endless, and will be coloured by the attitude you have to music. For me, being as far from a visual thinker as one can get, this was a real challenge but a rewarding one. It forced me to think and to find ideas in places I usually wouldn’t look.

How would you use this picture to inspire you?

They don’t go into the sort of detail on theory that I might write about on songwright.co.uk, but they do have some snippets about how they were inspired. Most also contain demo recordings so you can hear how the songs changed between my writing them and recording a finished version of them.

How I wrote ‘Mechanism’
How I wrote ‘I Still Smile’
How I wrote ‘Home’
How I wrote ‘Bad Dreams’
How I wrote ‘Lines Overheard at a Séance’