Does your songwriting process need some help? The eBooks in “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle are meant to do just that. Check them out at the Online Store, and get “Creative Chord Progressions” FREE with your purchase of the bundle.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your own songwriting skills, it may surprise you to know that teaching songwriting to others is a great way to do this.
Teaching, of course, is meant to help the student, but here’s what teaching someone else can do for you:
- Teaching organizes your thoughts. How you approach songwriting in the first place can be a mystery even to you, but teaching someone else helps you to understand what you get out of songwriting. That can be a crucial part of inspiring someone else, but it also serves as a powerful reminder to you.
- Teaching clarifies your own songwriting process. One of the toughest aspects of songwriting to beginners is how to do it. They may have musical ideas bouncing around, but newcomers to writing music often struggle with how to get started. Being able to describe this very important step helps you, by reminding yourself of the many different ways that songs can be written. It can help you by keeping you from getting into a songwriting rut.
- Teaching gives you an extra musical activity. Writer’s block can happen when you feel stuck, and teaching is a way to keep your hand in songwriting without the pressure of writing your own song. You’ll notice that no matter how bad your creative block is, you can still show others how it’s done. That may seem weird, but it’s not, really. By teaching, you’re tapping into a completely different pathway in your creative mind.
- Teaching can answer questions that you may be having. It’s happened more than once with me that showing a student how to do something has actually helped me. Teaching often means slowing a process down to show the various parts of a potential solution, and in so doing you often find that you’re answering questions you’ve had about something you’re working on.
- Teaching can give you another revenue stream. You may be showing your own child, niece or nephew how to write songs, and doing that for free. But expanding beyond that and teaching others can be a rewarding career. And depending on your situation, you may find that that extra money is taking pressure off you, especially if you’ve been relying on your own music, and the performance of it, for a good percentage of your income.
We like to think that songwriting is purely a creative activity, where we hope to simply imagine our songs, and there they are! But in fact, songwriting requires discipline, hard work, and a clearly thought-out process.
And in that regard, teaching others how to do it can help. Its main benefit is to slow the process down, and nothing does that quite so well as teaching.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter
Do you get stuck at the chord progression stage of songwriting? This eBook, “Creative Chord Progressions“, is being offered FREE with your purchase of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle.
Never tell them they are wrong try —We have this now can we improve on it, if not
we always have your original-
I often start my songs with lines that are simply trite , but at the start I am looking
for melody and rhythm that draws todays recordings into a wide audience
Let your songs evolve , dont jump the gun and post it to lyric sites looking
for pats on the back;
Take as long as you like great songs rarely come quickly despite many claims
to the contrary
Re Write and then Re write again until you are 100 per cent happy with the end result
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