Coffee Before Songwriting

Being Bored and Distracted While Writing Songs

It might alarm you, as you work on your next song, to discover that your mind is wandering and you feel — quite frankly — bored. Surely, if you’re bored as you work out your next tune, your audience is going to be bored as well. Actually, boredom and being generally distracted while writing songs, […]

Ed Sheeran

The Best Way to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

If you’re a songwriter, you probably have experienced this fear at least occasionally: the thought that something you’ve just written has already been written by someone else, and you’ve unintentionally copied it and called it your own. At the least, it’s embarrassing, and at most, it could be a legal liability. The good news is […]

Keyboardist songwriter

Making a Song Immediately Appealing

In the pop song genres, the short length of a complete tune (when compared to, let’s say, the classical genres), is an interesting challenge to deal with. Interesting, because the inexperienced songwriter might be fooled into thinking that a short song means you can put it all together quickly. But in fact, a short song […]

Songwriting relaxation ideas

What’s the Difference Between a Rule and a Principle in Songwriting?

You’ll hear lots of songwriters say that there are no rules in songwriting. But while that may be the case, every one of us has written a song that we think really works well, and other songs that we have to admit are real turkeys, and we toss them aside. So if something can be […]

Bruce Springsteen

Ideas For Changing How Loud Your Song Sounds

If you’re a player in a band, you’ve got lots of options for controlling the dynamics (loudness) of your music. Other than, of course, simply turning things up, you can add instruments to the mix to get the louder sounds you’re looking for, and/or subtract them to make your music more transparent. Trying to get […]

songwriter - guitarist

Why It’s Taking You So Long to Finish Writing a Song

It’s not unusual for songwriters to think back to a time when songwriting seemed a lot easier. Certainly if you look at how long it used to take you to write a song, you may be discouraged to know that what used to take you hours now takes you days, or even longer. That’s not […]