7 Tips for Becoming a More Prolific Songwriter

The first step to writing more and writing faster is to make sure you’re not just reinforcing the songwriting problems you already have. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle will show you how to learn from popular music’s best and most enduring hits. More.. 

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Looking to increase your songwriting output? Not that you should ever judge the quality of your writing by its quantity, but at least to a certain degree, speeding up the songwriting process can be one step to improving. Not unlike a baseball player having the chance of hitting more home runs if he gets more at-bats.

Here’s seven tips for you to consider:

1. Schedule your songwriting. If you write when the feeling hits, you’re going to be as successful as the batter who bats when the feeling hits: not very. Set aside time every day (or at least 5 out of every 7 days).
2. Practice your songwriting. Not everything you do has to be contributing to a finished song. It’s time well-spent to practice your lyrical writing, practice melody writing, and so on. Practicing really does help, and takes the pressure off having to “hit a home run.”
3. Change your songwriting process. If you’re a chords-first kind of writer, you’ll run out of ideas pretty quickly. So change things up; there are lots of options, including lyrics-first, melody-first, rhythmic hook first, and so on.
4. Switch genres. You may have never thought of yourself as a country songwriter, but why not? You’d be surprised how much it changes your perspective to try a new genre, and we’re only talking about a temporary change anyway. So switch it up and have fun!
5. Switch instruments. You don’t need to be a polished guitarist to write a song on guitar. So if keyboards are your instrument of choice, try changing to guitar or any other instrument. You’ll find that the muscle memory from your first-choice instrument doesn’t apply (usually) to a new instrument, and so new ideas should start to flow.
6. Partner up. Find someone you can write with, even someone who approaches songwriting from a totally different perspective. The infusion of new ideas and ways of thinking should open up the floodgates of musical ideas in a new and exciting way.
7. Try arranging instead of composing. Arranging a tune means taking an already-existing tune, and dressing it up to sound different from the original. Doing it with a song that’s been written in the last 50-75 years means needing copyright permission, but there are lots of public domain folk songs that can serve as material for a new arrangement.

Becoming more prolific means taking what you do seriously, and making songwriting a daily activity. Yes, even on the days that you don’t feel much like writing, you should be picking up your pencil and getting something down on paper. The more songwriting becomes a daily habit, the better your chances are for hitting it big.

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Gary Ewer is the author of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and of the new hard cover book, “Beating Songwriter’s Block: Jump-Start Your Words and Music.”