The Inherent Difficulties of Songwriting and How To Best Deal With Them: Part 1

Songwriter Theory Podcast: Learn Songwriting And Write Meaningful Lyrics and Songs

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In our second installment of the Small Business Starter Kit series - we’re tackling a topic that’s sometimes tricky, sometimes confusing, but ever-present: taxes. Hosts Austin and Jannese have an insightful conversation with entrepreneur Isabella Rosal who started 7th Sky Ventures , an exporter and distributor of craft spirits, beer, and wine. Having lived and worked in two different countries and started a company in a heavily-regulated field, Isabella is no stranger to navigating the paperwork-laden and jargon-infused maze of properly understanding taxes for a newly formed small business. Join us as she shares her story and provides valuable insight into how to tackle your business’ taxes - so they don’t tackle you. Learn more about how QuickBooks can help you grow your business: QuickBooks.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…

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Joseph talks about some of the inherent difficulties of songwriting and how to best deal with them.

268 episodios

#Podcasting Education #Music #Joseph Vadala

The Inherent Difficulties of Songwriting and How To Best Deal With Them: Part 1

Songwriter Theory Podcast: Learn Songwriting And Write Meaningful Lyrics and Songs

19 subscribers

published hace 2 años

MP3•Episodio en casa

10 Ways To Start Writing A Song Free Guide Link: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/

Music Theory Free Guide Link: http://songwritertheory.com/musictheoryguide/

Love the content and want to support Songwriter Theory? Feel free to buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/josephvadala

Joseph talks about some of the inherent difficulties of songwriting and how to best deal with them.

268 episodios

#Podcasting Education #Music #Joseph Vadala

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►► Download the Musical Keys Cheat Sheet here: https://songwritertheory.com/keys/ In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about how learning chord types just got easier... because I'm going to tell you exactly what chords to learn in what order to be most effective at writing chord progressions for your songs. The way songwriters should look at chords should be significantly different than how musicians often look at chords. So let's talk about how to learn chord types for songwriters! Transcript: If you have wanted a roadmap to know what chords to learn when along your songwriting journey, then this is the episode for you, because we are talking about what chords you should learn in what order as a songwriter. Let's talk about it. (upbeat music) Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I honor that you'll take some time out of your busy day and be here with me talking about songwriting. You could be listening to any podcast right now, which I probably shouldn't remind you of, like Rogan or whatever your favorite podcast is. But instead, you are here wanting to learn about songwriting. And hey, I get it, but I also appreciate it, because there's a lot of entertaining podcasts out there. And the fact that you are choosing one where you would learn something about songwriting, about the craft of songwriting, I'm glad you care enough about the craft of songwriting to, well, be listening to any songwriting podcast much more even so that you chose this one. I was about to say much less this one, but that wouldn't make sense, now would it? If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free Keys Cheat Sheet, a lot of what we're talking about today with chords. There's gonna be my first point before we dive into the chords, but you have to understand the chords within the context of keys. Because as long as your understanding is just, oh, G major to C major sounds good with quotation marks around it, for those of you who aren't watching the video, you're just, you're not really gonna understand chords. The only context where chords have any meaning at all, in chord progressions have any meaning, is within the context of keys. So a C major chord in the key of C major has a totally different sound and a totally different job than a C major chord in the key of G major. Because in C major, a C major chord is a one chord. In G major, it's a four chord, which sounds different. So context matters. So it's really important to understand that, again, that you don't wanna learn super complex theory. So I made it super easy. This Keys Cheat Sheet just breaks down every single one of the main triads, AKA main, major, and minor, as well as diminished chords in every single key. So no matter what your favorite keys are, it will give you exactly all the notes in the keys, which will help you with melody writing and making your own chords, but also all of the main triads, all the main, major, and minor chords. So that's at songwritertheory.com slash keys. Super easy to remember. Link will be in the description down below or in the show notes, depending on whether you are listening via podcast or watching on YouTube. So we're gonna dive into the chords that you should learn in what order. But again, just to reiterate, it's really important to understand chords in context of keys. Yes, you need to know the notes within C major. Let's say you're playing on a keyboard or a piano. Of course, it's important to know, oh, C major is C, E, and G. Yes, great. But the most important way to understand chords as a songwriter is not just C major and G major, and, you know, oh, it's a common chord progression to have a C major, G major, A minor, F major. Yes, that's true, but it's not just that chord progression. Really that chord progression is a 1, 5, 6, 4, and you just happen to say what a 1, 5, 6, 4 chord progression is in the context of C major. So the chord progression G major, D major, E minor, C major is actually the exact same chord progression as C major, G major, A minor, and F major, just for frame of reference, here's your, let me find my pedal here. Here's your C major, G major, A minor, F major, and then if we have instead the G major version of it, so that was a 1, 5, 6, 4 in C major, and then if we have it in G major, then we would have this. (drumming) So that would be the same exact chord progression, and you probably can hear that. It's just in a different key, right, but the chord progression sounds the same. So it's most important to understand chords in that context. In this episode, we're going to be talking about things like major and minor chords, inversions and things like that, but that is only gonna be helpful, or is mostly gonna be helpful if first you understand that just getting an understanding of that Roman numeral notation for chords, and knowing that a C major chord in the context of G major is the same as a D major chord in the context of A major, because they're both four chords in that context, that that's the most important way to understand chords. Because as a songwriter, you need to know that if you're writing a song in G major, a C major to G major chord transition is gonna sound very different than even what it would sound like in the context of a song in C major. Same exact chords, but it's gonna sound different because of the context. So that being said, let's talk about the specific chords to learn in what order. And the first chords to learn are major and minor triads. And that's because no matter what the genre, key, style, whatever it is, major and minor chords are foundational. They're foundational to everything. I don't care what music you listen to, major and minor triads are at the foundation of it. And you may have noticed that I just, I believe, interchanged between using major and minor triad and major and minor chord. And that's because it's the exact same thing. So a chord is really just any combination of two or more notes. So a chord could be this, even though it's just two notes, or a chord could be this, which is four notes, or this, which is five notes. All of those are chords. A triad is a specific type of chord. And by the way, is the most foundational type of chord there is. In fact, all major and minor chords, as well as diminished chords and augmented chords, are triads. There's no such thing as a C major chord or G major. There's no such thing as a major or minor chord that is not a triad. And all a triad is, is a chord that's made up of specifically three notes, and they are stacked in thirds. It's not super important that you understand what thirds are for most of this episode, but we'll go over it really quick. So a first or unison is just the same note. So C to C would be a first or unison. C to D would be a second. C going past D to E would be a third. So basically, if you just include the note that you're starting on as the one, you just move up more notes. So a third is not moving up once to a second, but moving up again to a third. So a triad is a chord that is made up of three notes stacked in thirds. So let's take a C major triad as an easy example of this. So a C major triad starts with a C. That's why it's called C major, because that's the root of the chord. So then we have a third on top of that. So we skip over the D and go to an E. So the first two notes of a C major chord are C, skipping over D, and then E. And then we skip over F and go to G for another third, a third on top of that E, because a second on top of E would be the F. A third is going up to the G. So C, E, G. That's your C major chord. And that is basically how you build all major and minor triads, because, well, they're triads, also augmented and diminished would also be made in that same way. Now, the only difference is that a major triad has a major third, and a minor triad has a minor third. The only difference there is a major third is four semitones up. So we have C, C sharp, D, D sharp, and then E. All right, so one, two, three, four, four semitones up. And then if we just go three semitones up instead, that's where you get minor. That's the only difference. Major chord has a major third between the root and the third. Minor has a minor third in between the root and the third. And going with my initial point about understanding chords in context of keys is going to be most important. What's important to know, I think, is that in any key, any major key, any major key, you're going to have chords built off of all the scale degrees. So we'll stick with C major to keep it really simple. So C major is made up of seven notes, just like every other major and minor key. So we have C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. No sharps or flats. This is why it's a super common key because it's super easy. So each of those seven were called scale degrees, C being the first, D being the second, E being third, F4, G5, A6, and B7. Each of those scale degrees, we can build a triad off of those scale degrees. And those are foundational chords. And in every major key, the triad built off of the first, fourth, and fifth scale degrees are all major triads or major chords. So in C major, the one is C, so we have a major chord built off of that. The four is an F because C, one, D, two, E, three, F is four, so we have an F major chord in C major. And then if F is the four, we know G is the five, fifth scale degree. And the five chord is also in every major key going to be a major chord. And then the two, three, and six in any major key are going to be minor triads. So in the context of C major, we know that our two is D because C, one, D, two is going to be minor. And then if D is two, we know E is three, so we have an E minor. And then six is going to be A, so we have an A minor. And then the chord built off of the seventh scale degree is a diminished chord, which is not as useful as major and minor chords, or at least not as important. In fact, in this video where I'm breaking down what chords to learn in what order, we're not even going to talk about diminished chords because I think they are, they can be useful, but they're not as useful as the other chords that we're going to talk about, in my opinion. So the important thing to understand is in any major key, if you lay out the notes in order, starting with the name of your key, so let's take G major, your one would be G and G major, your one would be A and A major, F and F major, etc. And then you just lay out all the notes in that scale or in that key and assign them numbers. The triads that you have built off of the first, fourth and fifth scale degree in every major key is going to be major. And two, three and six is going to be minor. So if we do the same thing in G major, we have a G major chord, one, an A minor chord, two because we said two is always minor. And then, oops, that's diminished. And then we have a B minor chord off of the three because every time a three is going to be minor. And then we have C major and D major because four and five are always going to be major. And then E minor, and then we're going to have an F sharp diminished as a seven. This is going to be true in literally every major or minor key. So once you know your key, you know that, okay, what's built off the one, four and five is going to be major. And those are going to be my foundational chords. And then the two, three and six are going to be minor. And those are also very, very, very important chords. For the record, six is maybe most important because it's certainly the most used of the minor chords by a pretty wide margin. If you look at how popular chords are, the one, four and five are the most used. They're just used constantly. Probably rarely would you even write a song where you're not using the one, four and the five. The six is by far the most common minor chord. The two is the second most common. And then the three is the forgotten minor chord that is not used nearly enough because I love three chords. I think they're beautiful. Like if you have a one and then a five and then you go, this is something about that three to four that just, I love that. But anyway, my personal opinions aside, major and minor triads. First thing to learn. First thing to make sure you know. They're foundational chords. They're foundational to every key, especially major and minor keys, which, you know, that's every key basically. They're even foundational to modes, by the way. So even when we're in major and minor modes, rather than just a regular major and natural minor key, they're still foundational. No matter what the music is, they are foundational. So having a firm grasp of major and minor triads, the difference between them, where they occur in the context of your key is all going to be very important. Which also, by the way, just really quickly. In natural minor, the one, four and five, if the one, four and five were major in major keys, what do you think the one, four and five are in minor keys? Natural minor specifically. If you said minor, you'd be correct. And then the seven, the three and the six are going to be major in the context of natural minor. So let's take A minor, for instance. We're going to have a C major and we're going to have an F major and a G major, which is going to be our three, six and seven in the context of A minor. And then your two chords are going to be diminished. So in major keys, one, four and five are major. In minor keys, natural minor specifically, one, four and five are going to be minor. And the only difference is with major, the diminished is at seven and with minor, it's at two. But otherwise, if you take the other ones, two, three and six, those are going to be minor when it comes to major keys. And in minor keys, the three, six and seven are going to be major. And then the two is diminished instead. So it's a little swap there. Now for the most part, the most important thing to remember is one, four and five and any natural minor key is going to be minor and in any major key is going to be major. Enough about that. Let's talk about step two. So now you have a pretty firm grasp of your major and minor chords. Great. Foundational tom music. Next thing is inversions. And you may say, "Joseph, that's cheating. That's technically the same chords because inversions are just basically a different way to play a chord." And that's true. Or maybe you're not saying that because you don't know what inversions are. But if you would say that, that is true. But I think it's a mistake to just right away skip to other chord types because inversions can have a massive sound difference while technically being the same as a basic major or minor triad. So if you don't know what an inversion is, it basically is just having any chord, any chord at all. But we'll start with major or minor here because at this point theoretically all you know is you've listened to me, you've gone out, you've made sure you really understand major and minor chords. So you're like, "All right, what did he tell me to learn next?" So now we're on inversions. So we're going to concentrate on inversions in the context of major and minor triads. So all it is is having a different note other than the root note. That is the lowest note. Now when we say lowest note, what the heck does that mean? You can see it multiple different ways. If we're just playing piano, it would just be the lowest note I'm playing on the piano. So a C major chord with Cs in the bass is just a root position C major chord. It's the default way to play C major, is to have C in the bass. And the root, by the way, is just always going to be the note that the chord is named after. So the root of D major is D. The root of D minor is D. The root of E major is E. E minor is E. You get it. So you probably got it the first time, but we'll make sure. So C major chord, by default you would have a C in the bass, which also means by default, let's say you're a guitarist, you probably would be playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist would be playing a C, by default. An inversion would be, instead of having a C major chord with a C in the bass, we have a C major with an E in the bass, would be first inversion, because that's another note from the chord. It's an E, which is in our C major chord. It's just the third instead of the first. Or a C major chord with a G in the bass, because that's also a note from our chord, other than the root. That's the fifth of our chord. So back to if you're a guitarist, in this case this might be something like you're playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist is playing a C, versus you're playing a C major chord but your bass guitarist is playing an E, or you're playing a C major chord and your bass guitarist is playing a G. As you can tell probably, those all sound pretty different considering it's technically the same chord. In fact, I talked about this in a livestream fairly recently, but as I've thought about it more, I think I agree with what I said more, which is I think the bass note is disproportionately important to the sound of a chord. Disproportionately important. If there's one note in your chord that matters most for what the chord overall sounds like, I think is the bass note, by a wide margin. Second most important is maybe the, what are the highest note is, but certainly the most important is the bass note. So for instance, here's a C major chord, here's a C major first inversion, so it's a C major with an E in the bass, and here's an E minor chord. I don't know, to me, this, technically this is a C major chord, but does it sound more similar to this, or does it sound more similar to this? I don't know, I think it's maybe in between, and yet technically it just is a C major chord, but because of that all important low note, it kind of has a vibe, like it's an E minor chord, even though really it's not. So it's technically major, but it kind of has that minor three sound a little bit. But anyway, whether you agree with me or not, that it's disproportionately important to the sound of a chord, certainly I'm sure to you ears, you hear that this does not sound like the same chord as this, or as this. It is the same chord, but it does have a different sound, it just doesn't have the same character. So if you learn inversions, which is really just an extension of major and minor triads or any other type of chord, it's just understanding that changing the lowest note that you play and considering using something other than the root makes a big difference in the sound of the chord, you've effectively tripled how many chords you can play. Let's say that we're only using major and minor triads in the context of C major. So we have six different chords, right? Three major and three minor. If we had inversions, instead of just C major, we get C major root position, C major first inversion, C major second inversion, and that's the same with D minor and then E minor. So we have immediately tripled how many chords we know how to play. While technically not actually increasing the amount of chords we can play at all. But from a songwriting perspective and giving your song a sound, there's no question that inversions significantly change how a chord sounds, even though it is the same chord. So this is the next thing to learn. Inversions and really starting to integrate inversions into your song. So if you were to do this while you're songwriting, which is what I'd encourage you to do, you know, in your first song that you write after this podcast, concentrate on making sure you're writing using major and minor triads. You probably already do that, but maybe you're new to songwriting, so use just major and minor triads. By the way, a ton of songs use exclusively major and minor triads. Like a ton of songs don't use anything but major and minor chords. Tons. I might go so far as to say most. If you listen to pop music, then probably most. If you listen to all kinds of different music, that's where it's like maybe not most, but a lot of songs literally use nothing else but major and minor. And that inversions is already going to get you a ton more for a sound color palette, if you will, or a sound palette, however you want to look at that. So third thing to learn is actually a different type of chord, and that's a suspended chord. Now, a suspended chord is just taking any major or minor chord, remove the third, and then add a second or fourth. So we'll use C major again. C major chord has a C, an E, and a G. For a suspended chord, aka a sus chord, we just said that you remove the third and insert a second or fourth. So the third of a C major chord is not the C, that's the first. The third is the E, and then the fifth is the G. So we remove the E, and then we insert either a D, which is a second because C, D, or an F, which is a fourth because C, D, E, F. So if this is a C major chord, this would be what's called a C sus2 chord because we are suspending the third or we're getting rid of the third, and instead we have a 2, a second instead. So we have C, D, and G instead of C, E, and G sus2. And then sus4 is the one that takes the third out, the E, and adds the 4 instead, which is an F in this context. So that would be a C sus4. For those of you who maybe play music and you're used to reading chord sheets and stuff, and you're like, "Joseph, sometimes I just see C sus or G sus." Whenever you see just sus, that implies a sus4. This is a common theme in music. It's kind of like if you see a C chord, you know that you default to C major because it would explicitly tell you if it were minor, and that's because major chords are more common than minor chords. So, I don't know, laziness? Or I guess you could see it as it's a good way to reduce the amount of characters you have to read. When you just see C, you know, okay, C major is the default. It would tell me if it was specifically minor or sus or whatever. So in the same way, sus4 chords are way more common than sus2 chords, so by default if you see C sus, it means C sus4. Same with any other sus chord. That part doesn't really matter as songwriters unless you're writing chord sheets for other people to play your music, in which case, you're welcome, I guess. So take a major or minor chord. This would work with like an A minor chord. You can have an A sus chord, A minor sus chord, I guess. Although really, for the record, it's not a minor sus chord because you don't know whether it's major or minor. This could be an A major sus chord or an A minor sus chord. You don't know because it doesn't have a third. An A major chord has a C sharp and E, and back to what we said about major and minor triads. You just flat the third or see in another way you have a minor third instead of a major third. So flatting the third means take that third and just go down by one note, which if you're a guitarist means one fret. Go down one fret with that note. So an A major chord has a C sharp. A minor chord, the only difference is it has a C natural. When we have an A sus chord, we don't have either one. So it's actually vague whether it's major or minor, which by the way is a beauty of a sus chord. If you want to have a chord that sounds more vague and it's not minor and sounding more sad as minor usually does, or maybe dark, or you don't want as bright as major often sounds, a sus chord can be a great way to go. It's kind of more vague, more nebulous, which you can use to your advantage, especially if you want to essentially have, let's say, a three chord, but you don't really want it to be that minor. So you want to go from a C major chord to an F major chord, and then maybe you want to go to, let's say, a D chord, but you don't want it to be minor as it would be in C major by default. So you go C, F, and then you go to D sus. So now it's vague. We don't know if it's supposed to be minor or major because we just don't have a third at all, which is a great way to use suspended chords, by the way. And also, going back to the keys cheat sheet that I mentioned, another reason that I give you all the notes in every chord or in every key is because it's important to know that because otherwise you wouldn't know when we add the two or the four what note exactly because you could say, well, Joseph, for a C major sus two, how do I know if I'm adding a D flat or a D sharp or D natural? Well, how you know is in the context of C major, there is no D flat or D sharp. It's a D natural. So you would add a D natural. So and this is why, one of the many reasons why it's important to understand chords in context of keys. The chords you have in any key by default are going to be chords that only use the notes that are notes in that key, which is the same as a scale, by the way. So like C major scale and C major key, it's all the same notes. Just a scale implies that you're going up and doing a scale, whereas a key isn't talking about that. It's more concerned with the musical center of gravity, because made up of the same notes. D minor scale, D minor key, A minor, A minor, all the same. So those are suspended chords, which is the next thing I think is good to learn. And then finally, we're going to put two together with this one, because one of these chords I see as sort of a special type of the other one. And that's seventh chords and add chords. Really seventh chords are essentially a special type of add chord, but let's talk about what an add chord is. So an add chord is literally taking a chord and then adding another note to it. That's it. So if we want a C major chord, add four, that would be this. Or a C major chord with an add two, that would be this, because we have our C major notes, but we also add the two. By the way, this normally would be called a C add nine, which is probably how you've seen it written. For whatever reason, the music world decided to do the octave up version. So C add nine is the same as an add two. C add eleven is the same as an add four. C add thirteen is the same as an add six, etc. And then we have seventh chords. Seventh chords are add chords, but specifically that add is seventh. Now also I guess technically seventh chords are special because it has to be a major or minor or diminished triad that adds a seventh. So going to our major, our C major chord, C major is three notes stacked in thirds as all triads are. A seventh chord would be yet another note added to the top. That is another third. So we have C to E as a third, E to G as a third, and G to B as a third. Put those all together and you have a C major seventh chord. Now the notes don't have to be in that order, right? We could play it like this. In fact, very often when we have seventh chords it's not played like this. Very often it's played in different inversions. But that's all seventh chord is. Take major, minor, or diminished triad and just stack yet another third on top. Doesn't matter the order of the notes, but it is important that it is that seventh that you're adding. Wherever it's actually played, so this is the same, right? So I put the E at the bottom or E at the top. And then add chords can be any chord that you're just adding another note. An add is like a catch all. So if you just want a chord that is a C, a G, and an A, that would be a C5 add 6 chord. Why? Because it's a C5 chord. 5, the number 5, not Roman numeral 5. C5 is basically a power chord if you will, but it's just the first and the fifth. It is not major or minor because it doesn't have the third. So it's just C and then a fifth up, G, and then we're adding an A. So this would be a C5 add 6 chord, whereas it often would be denoted a C5 add 13 chord. We can do this with anything. Whatever chord you have, you could even have a C major seventh chord add 6. Because it's a seventh chord and then you add the sixth. Or C major seventh chord add 2. It's starting to be a lot of notes to play at once. But add chords are an important thing because you would be shocked. Or maybe you wouldn't because we just did some. But tiny changes to chords, tiny changes, whether it be a major versus a suspended chord, radically different sound. We talked about how just changing the inversion radically changes the sound. Maybe radically is the wrong term, but it certainly makes a significant change. You can hear the difference. They don't sound the same and they just sound different in context of a song. You can't just...like a song would change its sound if you decided, "Oh, I'm just going to do totally different inversions than the song normally would have." Or "I'm just going to replace every C major chord with a C sus chord." You can't do that without the sound of the song changing. A little bit goes a long way in music. So in the same way with an add chord, just adding one note goes a long way. If you have a super simple chord progression, let's say a 1, 4, 5, 4, you'd be surprised how big of a difference just changing one of those to maybe an add chord could make. So 1, 4, let's do...this would be, let's see, an add 4. So this is a G major chord with an added 4 because we have a C added. And then back to an F. Like, that's one note, but this versus...what I do? Like already makes a decent difference because we have this one chord that's actually kind of interesting. It's got a little dissonance going on. Whereas before we just had all just super major kind of happy sounding chords. So just swapping out one chord for an add chord or a seventh chord can go a long way or swapping out one chord for a suspended chord or an inversion. So don't go too crazy with any of these. In fact, I would recommend if you're writing a song, do something where it's like, okay, your first song, major or minor triads, great. Your second song, maybe to one chord progression in your song, have one inversion of a major or minor chord. Or maybe two. Or maybe in each song section, you have one chord where you figure out an inversion that you really like. And then in your next song, have one chord in one progression that is a sus chord. Find one place to use a sus chord. And then in your next one, find one place to have an add chord. Don't feel the need to make every single chord in a progression like a major seventh with an add 13 and an add 9, which by the way, you can add multiple notes. So you can have add 9, add 13, you can have stuff like that too. But don't go over the top. You can just know that a little bit goes a long way. So again, hopefully this was helpful to you. This is the order that if I were to go back to basics, if I had to learn from the beginning, from a songwriter's perspective, what chords I would learn in what order, because how important I think each one is. Start with major and minor. Once you have that down, inversions, learning inversions, which again applies to any type of chord, not just major and minor, but it's a great way to get a lot of use out of your major and minor chords without having to learn a new chord type yet. Add chords, which adds a lot, gives you that little dissonance that you don't really get from major or minor. You get more dissonance from minor, obviously, than major. And then seventh chords and the more generic type, which is add chords, which is sort of almost a coverall. I mean, almost any chord can be a sort of add chord. And there's almost infinite number of chords. Once you add add chords, there's like infinite possibilities. For a C major, there's C major, add 9, aka add 2. You could have an add 9, add 11, which would just be all that. That's a little gnarly. Maybe you'd want to play it not quite that way. But alas. So hopefully this has helped you. If it was, or if you found yourself lost when it came to certain things like, oh, well, he just was like, oh, a G major has G, A, B, C, D, F sharp. And he just knew, how do you know that? How do I know that? Do I need to memorize that? You should memorize it probably if you're going to write a lot of songs in the key of G major. But to start, a great place to start is my free keys cheat sheet. Because again, it's just going to give you every single major and natural minor key. It will give you all of the major, minor, and diminished triads that you have in each of them. And it will give you all the notes you have in each of them, which are going to help you make your own add chords or sus chords. Because you can look and see, oh, in G major, I have an A minor chord, and I have the notes B and D. So I know that if I do an, what would have been an A minor chord, but I do a sus two, it's going to be a B, E. If I do a sus four, it's going to be a D and E. And then you also know things like if you're going to do an A minor chord, again, in the context of G major, and you're going to make it a seventh chord, you know it's a G natural, not a G sharp, not a G flat. Because again, in the context of G major, there's a G, which you're going to know because I give you all the notes. And again, I kind of glossed over this, but I do think it's something that's good to memorize eventually, especially if you're going to be songwriting a lot. Because if I just want to improvise and I'm trying to songwrite, what's useful to me is not that I think through what are the notes in E major again, I just know the notes in E major and just can play them. And I don't have to think about it. In fact, it's easier, it's probably faster for me to just play in E major without consciously thinking about which notes I'm sharping and all that than it is to just play. I think I said that right. It's slower to actually think of the notes than it is to just play because it's ingrained. So be sure to grab my free keys cheat sheet because it will give you all of the answers. You can go out, write a song in G major, A major, A minor, B flat major, E flat major, whatever keys you like to use. And you will immediately know all the main triads that you have or all the triads you have because there's only seven in any given major or minor key. And then also all the notes you have, which are going to help you with things like building sus chords off of your chords or add chords, seventh chords, and also in versions. Thank you again for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. If you haven't already, if you're somebody that has been here for a while and you get value out of this podcast, something you can do to help me out is leave a kind review on Apple Podcast or Spotify wherever you listen. I know I don't say this a lot. You're probably supposed to say it every episode. I probably should say it every episode because it probably would be more reviews, which I think there are a decent amount of reviews. I appreciate those of you who have done this. But again, a great way that you can help out if you've gotten a lot of value from this episode or other episodes, even if you thought this episode was worthless, but hey, he helped me the last three episodes, which is why I listen to this episode. If any of those descriptions are you, great way to help me out is just take the couple minutes to leave. If you think I deserve it, a five star review and whatever suits your fancy to say in the review, or you can just leave the stars and not actually leave a text review if you want to make it really, really, really fast. If you feel like I don't deserve five stars, just let me know how I can improve. My email is joseph at songwritertheory.com. I would much rather, much rather if you think that there's something to improve, you think like, oh, this is like a three and a half stars, this is four stars. It would be better if you tell me how to improve that so I can earn five stars from you rather than tank in the rating so that other people don't give this episode a shot. So again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for those of you who have left reviews, and I'll talk to you in the next one.…

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5 Songwriting Sessions That Will Change Everything 43:36

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►► Download the 20 Ways To Start Writing A Song Cheat Sheet here: http://songwritertheory.com/freeguide/ Transcript: Something I think songwriters don't talk about enough are songwriting sessions, because not every songwriting session looks the same or should look the same. In fact, I think there are a lot of different types of songwriting sessions, and most of the time a successful songwriting session is one with a pretty specific goal, not just something like, "I'm going to work on song X." I don't think that is specific enough. So in this episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast, we are going to talk about five different songwriting sessions that will change everything. Let's talk about it. Hello, friend. Welcome to another episode of the Songwriting Theory Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Joseph Adala. I'm honored that you take some time out of your busy day, your busy week, to talk songwriting with me. It's coming out a bit later than usual, but I was sick with the flu for a week, so that's why this got delayed. And my apologies in advance for any coughing. I will be sure to try to do it not into the mic or anything, but still recovering from that. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free guide, "20 Different Ways to Start Writing a Song," because a great way to make sure you don't get creatively stuck is simply by starting in different spots, starting with different things, not always starting with a chord progression, not always starting with a bass line, not always starting with lyrics, not always starting with music. Sometimes changing it up is a great way to stay creatively fresh and get some different results with your songs. There's something I don't talk about probably as much as I should, but these aren't just 20 ways to start a song, but they can be 20 different ways to start any given song section. So if you wrote your first verse, and that first verse is built off of a sweet bass line, that's how you started your song, and now you're sort of stuck on the chorus, or you're trying to figure out where the chorus needs to go, you can again go to 20 different ways to start writing a song, but in this case you're actually starting a song section, because just because you started the verse with the bass line doesn't mean that you can't start your chorus with something different, like your melody or with the piano riff or something else. So let's talk about these five different song... so be sure to check that out. It's at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's talk about these different songwriting sessions. We'll start with the beginning, and that is simply an idea gathering session. And the beauty of these is, first of all, they're fun, and it's just a great way to get really excited about songwriting. If you're stuck on songs, just going back to basics and sitting down with only the intent of gathering ideas. There's something beautiful about the lack of pressure that you have when you know that you are sitting down just to come up with ideas. You don't need to care whether they're good ideas, you're just trying to get as many ideas as possible. And also the lack of pressure that you know you're not trying to come up with an idea so that you can write a song 10 minutes later off of that idea. It just frees you up to think of more ideas, to possibly think outside the box a little bit more. So be sure to check that out at songwritingtheory.com slash free guide. So let's dive into the songwriting sessions that we are talking about. The first one is right at the beginning. It's an idea gathering songwriting session. And you can even argue this isn't really even a songwriting session because it's sort of a pre-songwriting session or as sometimes I like to think of it a song developing session. And really that wording comes from a lot of times in movies they'll say like a movie is in development and what that means, what that usually refers to is the process before you actually start making the movie in the way that most of us think of making a movie. So principal photography is when they actually start to film the movie. It's really getting made. But development is sort of that stage where they're kicking around ideas, they're trying to figure out maybe casting, they're trying to figure out what's the right budget for this movie, is this something that we can do with the budget that we have, all those sorts of things. It's really the pre-movie making stage if you will. So in the same way there's no reason that we as songwriters can't have essentially a pre-songwriting stage. In fact I think it's a great idea. Authors do the same thing. Most of the time an author doesn't just sit and start writing a book. Some do, but a lot plan beforehand. They'll do exercises to really flesh out their characters and make sure they understand their characters before they start writing for them. They don't discover their characters as they write the book. They already know their characters before they write the book. Or they know the general plot points. They try to outline the book, make sure that the story arc makes sense and it resonates with the characters and it makes sense. All the characters' decisions make sense before you actually put the proverbial pen to paper. So this is something that I think we should do more often in songwriting. I don't think we need to do as much of it because a book is a pretty big endeavor. There's a lot when it comes to characters and story. And songs have less. So there's no reason to spend months developing a song before you actually write it in the way that maybe it does make sense to do for a book. But there's something glorious just about having no pressure to come up with a song idea and immediately execute on it. There's something just great about that. Because in an idea gathering songwriting session, you're not actually trying to write a song. You're really not even trying to figure out what is a good idea for a song. You are simply, you have one job, gather ideas. You're not worried about whether the ideas are rotten or great. You're not worried about anything like that. That's for later in the process. For now, you just want to go find ideas and find as many ideas as you can. And really we're trying to maximize the pool of ideas we have that we actually go execute on. Because I think another mistake that is pretty common to songwriters is really, I could call it just impatience. I think impatience is something that negatively affects many songwriters where they're too impatient to actually edit lyrics. They're too impatient to actually craft a song. They just want to get a song done so every song takes an hour. And it's like, well, I can tell. It's not that you can't write a great song in an hour. Of course you can. But just like a book, can you write a book in a month? Yeah. But on average, if you took a million authors and said, okay, write a book in a month, and took those same million authors and said, okay, now write a book in a year, of course on average the yearbooks are going to be way better. That's why authors take a year to write a book. Right? You know, this is the whole process, not just the writing part, editing, all that sort of thing. But usually it's, you know, an author comes out with a book something like once every six months if they're pretty fast, or a year on this lower side. And I think sometimes songwriters struggle with impatience. Whether impatient to start writing a song, they're impatient to finish a song, they're impatient to just, you know, put out there whether the lyrics make sense or not, whether the lyrics are really something powerful or not. They're just like, oh, it's done. It's done. We think too improvisationally, I think, sometimes when it comes to songwriting, which we'll talk about a little bit more for songwriting session too. But a part of the beauty of this is it forces us to come up with more ideas, and then we can choose the best ideas for ourselves. Because the pressure of I'm going to come up with a great idea and immediately execute on it, probably the idea sucks. Right? If you and I, right now, were to try to think through a song idea, and we were to go write a song off of the first idea that we have that's halfway decent, by tomorrow we might think that was a stupid idea. Why do we even make a song off of that? But when you have a giant pool of ideas, it allows you to pull from the best ideas you have, and it also allows you to pull from the ideas that most resonate with you at the moment. Because, you know, if you got laid off two months ago and you were ticked at your boss because you feel like you were not the right person to get laid off, blah blah blah, so you're ticked about it, now two months later when you have a better job and maybe you're not bitter about it anymore, maybe right now is not the time to write that song. Right? Maybe in two months when you have a new boss and they're kind of annoying you too or something, then maybe that brings back the emotions that you had when you were laid off and maybe now that's the time to write the song. So there's an element of that too, right? Where some nights or some days writing a sweet love song might be something that makes sense based on how you're feeling. In other days you couldn't do that if you tried, but you can write a bitter angry song. So when you have a giant pool of ideas to work off of, it allows you the luxury of sort of working on a song that best fits where you are at right now mentally, emotionally, etc. and it also allows you to be more picky, where if you have 30 ideas and you're only writing one song off of one of those ideas, you get to pick the best idea of 30, which is probably a much better idea than just coming up with an idea and immediately executing on it, because now it's one of one idea. That idea might have sucked. You might have just written a whole song in an hour or something that already you wrote a song in an hour, so on average they're probably not going to be that great, it's probably going to need a little more crafting after the fact. And you might have built it on an idea that wasn't even a good idea to begin with, which you can still have great songs off of not great ideas. I think ideas are somewhat overrated to a degree, but ideally if you're going to spend time writing a song, don't you want it to be on some of your best ideas? And a great way to have best ideas is to have a long list of ideas. In fact, again this goes back to a mistake that I think a lot of songwriters make. Our ideas should far outpace our songs. Far outpace. You might have something like 20 ideas for every one song you write, or 10 ideas for every one song you write, at least. At least, because if you sit down to just come up with ideas for 15 minutes, 15 minutes, you probably have 25 plus ideas. Easily. You might even have more. Maybe you only have five ideas. Okay, that still is at a rate of 20 ideas in an hour. And what are you going to do? Release any more than 20 songs in a year? So if you take an hour, have one idea gathering session for one hour, you have enough song ideas if you used every single one for the whole year. So no matter how you look at it, it just seems silly to ever be in a situation where you came up with 20 song ideas this year, and all 20 of those ideas turned into songs. Why? There's no reason for it. Just spend an extra three, four hours just gathering ideas, and you might have 20 better ideas to then build 20 songs off of. And for the most part here, we're talking about lyrical ideas. And there are many great ways to gather lyrical ideas. One is just sit with a pen and paper and just write down anything that comes to mind. A cool word, a song title that you think would be interesting, a piece of symbolism that resonates with you. You might not even know what it means yet. But you're just like, "Ooh, Shadow of the Tiger. That sounds cool." I don't know what it would mean, but it sounds cool. So write it down. You can figure out later if it has a sensical meaning, if it's worth actually developing further. You don't have to worry about that part here. Turn off that editor portion of your brain. Turn off that portion of your brain that says, "That's a bad idea. You suck." Turn that part of your brain off as much as you can, because it's not helpful to this. And that's the glory of this song-ending session. It's very clear about just produce as many ideas as possible. Turn the editor off. Your job is not even to find a good idea. It's just to gather ideas as quickly as you can and as many as you can. Something else you can do is look up, like Google Images, look up art. Go to an art museum. If you're somebody that really, you know, computer screens hinder your creativity, go to a local art museum. Take a pen and paper and decide that you're going to go to the art museum, maybe with your spouse, significant other kids, whatever. And you're going to bring a pen and paper. And you're going to write every little idea that you get by going to the art museum. That can be a great way to go. And that might be enough ideas. Going to the art museum once might provide enough ideas for songs for the next three years. Right? So, just taking the time to have an idea-gathering song-writing session, I think, is a great way to go. You almost certainly won't regret it. And they're just a lot of fun. And then, sort of the other side of the coin is an improvisation song-writing session. And if idea-gathering tends to be more on the lyrical side of things, improvisation is sort of the equivalent on the musical side of things. So this is where we are just trying to get in our instrumentalist mindset and just kind of try to create magic by just going. Just play. Just play until you find that guitar riff that resonates with you. Just play on the piano until you hit three notes in a row that's like, "Ooh, that's the start of a magical melody that resonates with me." Or just sing or hum randomly in the shower or anywhere else in the car. And in that moment where you're like, "Ooh, I kind of got goosebumps from that melody I just made up." That's your hint. That's something that's worth developing further into a song. So this is essentially doing the same thing, gathering ideas, but instead these are musical ideas. And it's a great no-pressure way or low-pressure way to start writing interesting music because interesting music is less likely to come from picking a stock chord progression and going from there. And we've talked a lot about stock chord progressions because I think two things can be true at once. It can be true that it's the easiest way to write a song, especially for beginners, especially for people who don't know any music theory. But it's also true that as you develop as a songwriter, it is no longer the best way to write a song. If I were to help somebody write their first song, and I've done videos and podcasts about this, it is probably best for your first song to write with a stock chord progression. But if you're on song 2030 and you're still just using stock chord progressions, you are massively missing out because we're choosing to build our song on a, by definition, cookie cutter foundation. Why would you do that? It's essentially like saying, "I'm going to build my whole book off of I'm just going to do the hero's journey." Like, the hero's journey is by definition cookie cutter. That doesn't mean you can't make something magical off of it. The original Star Wars trilogy is great, fantastic, and it's off of the hero's journey. Now also it benefits from at the time most movies and stuff weren't built off of that. So now it would feel a little like, "Okay, here we go again." Whereas when Star Wars did it, whenever you're the first, you kind of have the advantage of... It's like if somebody sounded exactly like The Beatles today, you'd be like, "Oh, so derivative." Meanwhile, the same person is like, "The Beatles are the codes." So that's the glory of being first as you get credit that maybe sometimes you don't deserve. Or you do deserve because you were the first. But anyway, by definition, if you start your song on a stock, well-used, overused chord progression, you are building your song off of something that is by definition uninteresting. Because uninteresting is almost, when it comes to creative, is something that's just not different. It's the same old, same old. We've all heard it a million times before. If you start with the same stock characters for a movie, why would you do that? You should build your movie off of a cool, different, likable character. Or you should build it off of... Be like Christopher Nolan. Build your movie off of a really cool concept like entering people's dreams for inception. Or the Prestige, which is a cool concept with magicians back in the 1800s or something. But why build your song off of a cookie cutter foundation when you can build it off of not a cookie cutter foundation? And that's what improvisation gets us. Instead of building your song now off of, "Oh, I guess I'll use the 1-5-6-4, the 1-4-5-4." Instead of that, you're playing on your instrument or using your voice to try to find some magic that then you can build your song off of. That way, if you come up with a sweet bass line, now you're building your song off of a foundation that is already interesting. Unlike the chord progression, which probably isn't interesting, now you have this really sweet bass line that, because you improvised for an hour, you've got this awesome bass line. And that can be maybe the bass line for your verse or maybe for your chorus. And now you can build a melody on top of that and then figure out the chords from there and write the lyrics and do the rest of the normal songwriting process. But at least now you've built it on an intriguing foundation. You've built your song off of a good idea instead of a, by definition, cookie cutter idea. And also, improvisation is just fun. To me, if you don't enjoy the process of gathering ideas, whether musically or lyrically, then you probably are not going to enjoy songwriting because this is like the most fun portion. This is where there's the least struggle. Because an improvisation songwriting session is sit down for half an hour and just play on your instrument. See if you can find something super cool. There's nothing really to get frustrated about. You probably will get at least a few decent ideas. Maybe you won't find a magical idea per se, but it probably will still feel like, "That was fun. That was a good time." And just as a last note on this, the beauty of improvisation too is I think it puts music theory and feelings in their proper place when it comes to music, which is largely we should be writing music off of what feels right, but using theory to inform us and to get us there faster. Because that's essentially those two in their right role. Any time we say that there's some music theory concept or "rule," music theory doesn't really provide rules. It just provides ideas and concepts. But if there's ever a point that we come up with, say, an awesome chord progression or sweet bass line, and then we figure out, "Oh, well, based on some music theory concepts, I probably should..." No, if it sounds great, go with it. Go with the feel when it comes to music. I think this is maybe an inherent difficulty of songwriting. And I haven't thought fully through this yet, so I'm not entirely sure if I agree with what I'm about to say. I think when it comes to words, your brain is slightly more useful than your heart, but when it comes to music, it's the opposite. Because I think trusting your gut, going with the improvised part, or just doing what feels right often is going to result in the best music, which doesn't mean we don't use music theory to inform it. Of course that's going to help. But ultimately going with your gut, going with the feel. But I think with lyrics, it tends to be a more... I mean, this is why books... Any form of writing, right? Every form of writer except songwriter acknowledges that the editing process is the most important part when it comes to words. Whether you're writing essays, articles in a newspaper that don't really even exist anymore and suck, but whatever. Back in the day, they were legitimate, I guess. Whether you're writing a book, a screenplay... Editing is where usually the magic happens. You take something that's kind of a good idea but rough around the edges, not actually good, and you form it into something good in the editing. And that's true, I think, with lyrics too. So I think a hard part of songwriting is switching our brain back and forth. Because some of the things that will make you strong as a music writer are actually weaknesses as a lyricist, I think, and then vice versa. So... Improvisation. Great songwriting session. So we've talked about idea gathering, that's basically lyric ideas and improvisation, which is essentially music ideas. Then we have one hour song drafts, or what I call song sprints. And I've talked about this a decent amount recently, especially if you've been listening to me going through your answers to what your biggest songwriting struggles are. But maybe you may or may not have been keeping up on those, which is totally fine. I don't want to make... I will re-say it here, just in case. Or if you're new here, you could be new here as well. But I think something that probably every creative person, but certainly songwriters, need to think about is, where are you on the spectrum of obsessing over quantity versus obsessing over quality? Or seen another way, are you somebody that leans towards, if anything, you are too busy just pumping out song after song to actually take some time to maybe edit the song into something better, or spend more time crafting the song to make it better instead of just moving on to the next song before that song is actually done or ready or actually good? It's like you write it and it's like a five out of ten. And instead of editing it into an eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, you just move on to the next song, which is missed opportunities. Or are you somebody on the other side of the spectrum where you spend so much time crafting and obsessing over every single piece of a song that you don't actually get songs done? And probably all of us are going to fall into one of these two camps. And I think regardless of what camp you're in, you need to be cognizant of that and push yourself towards the other camp. Partially because I think probably the best is somewhere in the middle, right? If you tinker too much and you only write two songs a year, that's a problem. If you write 200 songs a year but they're all crap, that's a problem too. So a song sprint is especially for those of us that lean into the quality element. And if anything, probably need more help getting out of our own heads and just going fast, working on quantity. If you're somebody that, oh, every song they write takes an hour, then this is not the thing for you. If anything, you need to push in the opposite direction. Because if your average song takes an hour, I'm sorry, you're not spending enough time on a song. You're just not. You're not. I don't even have a follow up to that. I think it's self-explanatory, but just as a side story, I have a friend who is a professional songwriter paid by Sony just to write songs. That was literally his old job. And it was a 40 plus hour a week job that it was paid a lot of money in the 80s to do. And the expectation was that he would have one song a week, which if you do basic math means their expectation was something like 40 plus hours on a song. So if you think one hour is plenty on a song, but Sony thought 40 hours plus on a song, those numbers are wildly different, wildly different. So maybe, maybe one hour is not enough. Can you write a great song in an hour? Yes, absolutely. You can write a great song in 15 minutes. It's been done before. That's the exception, not the rule. It's the exception, not the rule. Even if you listen to songwriters, yeah, the most common story they tell is that magical song that came together in 20 minutes because Americans like that crap. We like the success story overnight that conveniently ignores that they worked for it for like 10 years. So it just seemed like an overnight success. We love, we eat up the stories where we can delude ourselves that, oh, just, I don't need to work to earn it. I just magically, there's this moment where I go perform on an open mic and somebody really important is there. So the first open mic I go to, I get discovered, whatever that means. And then it's just easy from there. We love that story, even though it's very much the exception, not the rule. So I think that's why those get told the most. But any songwriter, if you listen to the full story, it's, yeah, most songs, there's a struggle. Sometimes it takes a while of revisiting the song because the lyric just isn't working or I just couldn't figure out the bridge. And a lot of it is not time necessarily even spent writing as much as it's resting on the idea or tinkering with the idea. There's a bunch of different things that go into it. It's not usually like it took 50 hours of active work finishing a song. It's not necessarily that. Sometimes it's just sitting there and listening to the song and thinking, what is it? What is it about this that isn't resonating with me? What is it about that lyric that makes me cringe? And then figuring out how to rework it. So anyway, so if you're a person that averages one hour song, look, you need to push in the opposite direction. But for those of us that, if anything, are in the other camp, where if anything, we probably spend too much time obsessing over every little detail, a good habit to get into is a song sprint. Because it forces us to get out of our own hands, trains us to stop overthinking if we are falling into the trap of overthinking. And also trains us to be biased towards finishing over perfection because perfectionism is a double edged sword like most things. I think you need a little bit of it. Otherwise, your standards are too low. But if you have too much of it, you never get anything done because nothing's ever going to be perfect. So it has value. I think people who don't have any perfectionism at all and have no artistic standards at all, they just pump out. Like, oh, it took me 20 minutes, pump it out just the way it is. Like, well, you have no standards. You have no artistic standards. And that's fine. But like, I don't know, don't be upset when people are like, yep, that song exists. That's what's going to happen. Like, on average, a 20 minute song is going to sound like a 20 minute song. Chocka, I know. It's almost like if you or I wrote a book in two weeks, it probably would look like a book that took two weeks. And books that take a year, on average, are going to look way better. It's almost like there's a reason for that. It's so weird to me how we know that's true in literally everything, but then deny it when it comes to songwriting. For anything creatively. If somebody built your house in two weeks, you would be like, I'm sorry, I am not entering that house. Explain how you built my whole house in two weeks. If somebody built you a piece of software and it took two weeks, and you're like, I don't know, that's a pretty involved web app. You built that in two weeks? What's the code look like? Is it really buggy and bad? Something's got to give. We know this for literally everything, except we deny it when it comes to songwriting. But anyway. Song drafts or song sprints, which to me should result in song drafts, not necessarily finished songs. Now they're finished in the sense that they have all the parts, but most of the time, if you do a song sprint, I think what you will get probably, most of the time, not always, is a finished draft of a song that then you can edit and craft into something better. Maybe the bridge needs to be reworked because the music just wasn't working for the bridge. Or maybe the lyrics need a lot of work is probably most likely to be the case. But at least trains us into being biased towards getting things done. And it also reduces the perceived value of each individual song in a good way, I think. In the same way that we want to do with ideas. Where if you know I'm going to finish one song a week, guaranteed, because I'm going to do one song sprint a week, and I'm also going to do more in-depth crafting for my other songs throughout the week. But I know that at the very minimum, I'm going to finish one song a week. That helps you to not fall overly in love with any specific song. And then you're less likely to obsess and just overly tinker on one song. Because the reality is value is somewhat seen as how many... If you finish two songs a year, the amount of pressure and value on each one of those songs is huge. If you write 200 songs in a year, you probably don't remember or even care about half the songs. Now I think that's too far in one direction, and two is too far in the other. I don't know where the sweet spot is. Probably 20 to 50 songs a year is probably the sweet spot. Maybe 15 to 50 somewhere in there. But song sprints, especially for those of you that are more like me, which is probably a lot of you because you listen to this podcast, but people who spend time, if anything too much time, crafting, obsessing, maybe not finishing. Song writing session number four, song developing. So we touched on this, but I think this is another thing that is often missed that can be so helpful. It's just taking time to flesh out a song, the background of the song, maybe the outline of the song, what you're communicating each song section. What does the chorus have to say? What does the first verse have to say versus the second verse? Making sure that they have something different to say. They have something to contribute to the conversation. We're not just repeating ourselves. Developing the characters a little bit more. Figuring out the symbolism. So going back to that idea gathering concept, I think I said something like Shadow of the Tiger. Song developing is when you would take the, okay, let's say you think Shadow of the Tiger is a sweet song title. I think it maybe is a little too try hard. It just sounds like it's trying to be cool to me, which it is cool, but it's kind of like Black Sun or something. It just feels like it's trying too hard, right? Like, of course. It's like take some space thing and make it dark. Every metal band just does that over and over. Some of them are kind of cringe, right? So anyway, to me Shadow of the Tiger is, at least right now in my head, it's borderline cringe is maybe trying too hard to be cool. But let's just say that that's the idea we're going off of. In the song developing step, that's when you would take that idea and be like, okay, let's see if I can make Shadow of the Tiger into an interesting symbol for something. Like, what does that mean? What is the Shadow of the Tiger? Is it that there's this tiger that's going to eat me and its shadow is overcast over me? So then what does the tiger represent? Clearly some form of danger. What is it? Is it addiction? Is it maybe the beast within, right? Is it a darker side of me that threatens to eat me whole? Is it we're just spitballing here, right? But you know, that's what right now what I'm doing is sort of sound developing, right? We're taking an idea that we have and we're trying to flesh it out a little bit more. We're not jumping into let's write the song Shadow of the Tiger. I'll figure out what it means later. No, that's a problem because now we've written a whole song that means nothing because you didn't even know what it meant before you wrote the song. So that's a problem. We need to get clear on what is that about? And if the one hour song draft or a song sprint is biased towards just going, right? Getting out of our own heads and just going. Song developing is biased towards making sure you go in an intentional direction, making sure you don't get stuck when you get to the second verse because you didn't figure out before you started writing what the first verse needs to say versus what the second verse needs to say. If you have a third verse versus what the third verse has to say, we can avoid those pitfalls just by planning it beforehand, right? It's like an author. If they get halfway through the book and they're like, now what? Well, you didn't take the time to outline at the beginning. So that's the problem. Maybe you think you're at the middle of the book, but really you're at the end of the book. Maybe your whole plot was just going nowhere because you haven't figured it out yet. So this song developing is being biased not towards just going, but making sure that the direction we go is actually the quote unquote right direction or a good direction or direction that we can make work. So excuse me, but you can think about this as like mapping out before you go on a trip, right? So my wife and I went to Denver last year because I had never, as you may or may not know if you've been a listener for a while, I'm a pretty diehard Denver Broncos fan. I mentioned it once in a while, but you know, I've watched every single game for as long as I can remember. I've suffered ever since Super Bowl 50, etc. Maybe you don't care about football. That's fine. Just know that they are in Denver, Colorado. So I had only been to Denver, Colorado for one day and we visited the stadium as a part of our honeymoon, which based long story short, I just worked out that way where they screwed up our flight and I said, look, I'll forgive you if you drop us off in Denver for a day, give us a day there. And then that flight takes us back home to Ohio. So it wasn't a part of the plan, but we kind of made it happen. But I had never, you know, I'm a diehard fan and I had never been in Denver for football games. So we planned a three day trip, right? And when we did that, we planned out one of the main things we have to have. We have three days in Denver, really like two and a half days. So what are the things we have to hit if we never come back, which I'm sure we will, because again, diehard Denver fan and also Denver is beautiful for any of you who might live in Denver. Holy crap. I mean, Colorado is just so beautiful. But before we committed to the trip and how many days it was, we figured out what are we actually doing? Right? What are we doing here? That's a normal thing that you would do with the trip. Otherwise you just get to the hotel and be like, now what? And that's a problem. You're already there. You've already committed. Maybe there's nothing to do. Maybe you went to a city where there isn't that much to do. Or maybe you needed more time and three days wasn't even going to begin to cover it. So song developing is doing that, but instead of for a trip, it's first song. It's first song. It's figuring out, you know, how many song sections you need to tell the story you're going to tell, how to flesh out your idea, making sure that, you know, the song structure is going to serve what you're trying to say in the song. And also song developing frees you up to explore creatively without the pressure and burden of meter and rhyme and just the overall lyric pressure. There's something about being able to just write and write in prose, write basic English or whatever language you're writing songs in or whatever your first language is and just write. You're not worried about meter and getting the rhyme scheme. You're just writing. And you may, if you just write a page just worth, have a bunch of different lines that you came up with right on the spot that actually make perfectly great lyrics. And maybe they'll need some adjusting. Maybe there are just some good ideas in there, but it's a great way to just get your thoughts out and start developing out your idea before you are committing to the actual writing of lyrics where you are worried about meter and rhyme and all that. You can think of it as it's sort of the same idea as a lot of music producers will talk about. They always, if they have a vocalist in, they'll be like, all right, let's just do a practice run. And they tell the vocalist, oh yeah, I'm not recording. We're just doing a practice run. They always hit record. They always hit record. Why? Because a lot of times the singer will do much better in that first take when they think they aren't being recorded. Because psychologically there's something about, oh, this is a practice take. It's not even being recorded. That frees them up to just sing. But then they tighten up a little bit when it comes to when they know they're being recorded. It's the same idea as, you know, it's playoff football right now or, you know, any sport of your choosing. It's a thing to freeze up a little bit in the playoffs. Get a little tighter because now you know if we lose or out, it's done. So now there's all this pressure that there wasn't before. So song developing helps with all that. And really what it looks like is planning out your song a little bit, outlining your song, figuring out the background of your song, fleshing out your characters if applicable, figuring out your symbolism, what does it really mean. Doing some prose writing just to flesh out your idea with no expectation for it to be calm lyrics or anything. Just fleshing out your idea before you really try to start writing your lyrics. And then a fifth songwriting session is lyric editing. I don't think a single song should be released without the lyrics going through some form of editing phase. I don't think a single song should be released that doesn't have at least one pass for an editing phase. Are there exceptions to this? Probably. But very much the exception. So if you're not editing your lyrics at all, you don't even entertain the idea that maybe you could word something a little bit better or cleaner or clearer or in a way that's more poetic or more powerful that would give people more chills. Or you haven't considered that maybe some of your words, especially verbs, are particularly weak and don't really incite any emotion in anybody and just by going through your verbs and seeing if you can upgrade them to something that is maybe a little bit more emotionally packed. If we're not doing that, missed opportunities. Because just changing one word in a line from a met verb to a really powerful verb can make all the difference in the world. In fact, I think you should go through every word generally or almost every word. But at the very least, go through all your verbs. At the very least, you should never put out a song without looking at all the verbs you have and saying, "Is there a better verb that I could use here?" And you can literally plug the word into thesaurus.com and sometimes it will literally give you a word and you're like, "Oh yeah, that is a much more emotionally packed, better, more precise word. That is exactly what I'm trying to say." There's no reason to not at least do that. You'd never release a book or a poem or a movie, unless you're Disney maybe, a movie or anything without editing first. Without editing the screenplay, without editing the book. Again, usually multiple times. I mean, I just watched a Brandon Sanderson update video and I think he talked about how they're on draft four for a book and they expect to have five total drafts for a book. That's what writing a book looks like. That's what writing looks like, is you have to edit. And a common phrase, or at least one that I heard a lot specifically in college from my composition professor that's really stuck with me because the more I've written, the more it seems obviously true to me. Writing is editing. And all he meant was, it's a very concise way of saying that most of the final quality of your writing is created not in the writing process, not in the first draft. It's created in the editing process where you find better ways to word things, where you clean up the clunky wording, where you find better words. You think about sentences that just don't feel like they're quite working, so maybe they should just be cut out. Maybe they need to be changed. Maybe they just need a verb change and all of a sudden they work much better. Maybe you need to get rid of your adjectives which didn't really add much, they just kind of get in the way. Editing can take so many different forms, but simply, again, simply finding one verb that you can upgrade in a song section or in a line can make a huge difference. A huge difference. So don't overestimate how much even a little editing can do for your lyrics. I'm a big fan of spending a decent amount of time on editing. Also, I think there's some part of the process that you could argue is like a hybrid between editing and writing. A lot of some people call this rewriting. I technically put this in my editing process. That's when you technically have written a line, but instead of trying to fix the line, you entertain the idea that maybe the line is inherently broken, so you just rewrite the line. Is that editing or is that writing? I don't know, it's kind of both, right? Because you're taking a written line that the writing has already been done for and you are rewriting because in the editing process you saw that the line wasn't working. It's kind of a hybrid. I personally put it in the editing process. It doesn't really matter, but that's a part of editing too, right? Rewriting. Another common phrase, somebody brought this up in the live stream, I think a commenter brought this up, but they said writing is rewriting. That's very common. It's similar to the writing is editing phrase. It means sort of the same thing, right? That rewriting or editing, that's where the magic is made. That's where you get from a good idea that's meant in execution to something that is actually good. So five songwriting sessions, idea gathering, improvisation, one hour song draft, or what I call a song sprint, song developing, and lyric editing. If you aren't having these as songwriting sessions, you totally should. Totally give them all a shot. Probably more than one shot. See which ones work for you. I have a feeling all of them will work for you again, unless you're somebody that leans into quantity over quality, then the one hour song draft. You already do that and you probably, if anything, should do less of it, not more of it. If your average song is something that takes half an hour or an hour, my challenge to you would be pushing the opposite direction, because just like quantity people or just like quality people need to push towards quantity or people who obsess about quality need to obsess more about efficiency, being faster. People who are already just obsessed with efficiency maybe need to work on actually crafting a song instead of just pumping out every single idea they come up with. So that's my challenge to you if you're one of those people. If not, all five songwriting sessions should be for you. I guess all five are for anyone. Just don't concentrate on it as much if you're somebody that already does that by default. But hopefully this has helped with you. Again, be sure to grab my free guide. 20 different ways to start writing a song. Again, I can help you with starting a new song, section two for a song you've already written. If you already have a baseline for your first verse and you're trying to write your chorus now and you're stuck, you can start with a melody. Just know that it should be in the same key as your bass line. So if you wrote your bass line in A major and now you're trying to start your chorus with a melody, just make sure it's also in A major. Because most of the time you don't change keys between song sections. And if you do, it might be something like to the relative minor and the bridge. Of course there are exceptions, but most of the time your song is going to be largely in one key, maybe with the key change at the end, especially if you're trying to model after 70s music, which seemingly every single song did that. And now it's almost dead. I feel like key changes almost never happen now. If anything, maybe it's time to bring them back. But songwritertheory.com slash free guide. Hopefully this episode has helped with you. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. And I will talk to you in the next one.…

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The Inherent Difficulties of Songwriting and How To Best Deal With Them: Part 1