It’s not hard to get completely bogged down in the songwriting process. How familiar is this to you: You come up with an idea or two for a melody, you put them together… sounds good. You improvise a new idea to stretch the original one a bit, but that doesn’t work. So you keep at […]
One piece of advice songwriters hear over and over (and I think it’s usually good advice) is to “silence your inner critic.” The belief is that songwriting can grind to a halt when you spend all your time finding fault with what you’re writing, before it’s even finished. Being critical, though, need not always be […]
Being critical of what you’re writing is an essential step in perfecting your craft. Anyone who wants to improve at anything needs to be able to objectively critique what they do. To not have this kind of honest reckoning with yourself as an artist means limiting how much you can improve. The problem with being […]
It’s exciting when a song seems to happen spontaneously and easily; within what seems to be a few minutes, you’ve written something that is, for all intents and purposes, a great song that’s ready for prime time. As you hopefully know, that’s not the norm. It usually takes a lot longer to write songs, anywhere […]
Nothing slows the songwriting process down as much as second guessing every idea you get. Silencing your inner critic, at least temporarily, is a good way of making sure that you give yourself a fair chance to get something written. You need to give yourself the opportunity to hear what different song components sound like […]
No one likes negative reviews. You put your heart and soul into the music you write, and then someone says that the lyric doesn’t work, or the instrumentation feels wrong, or they simply… don’t like it. If there’s a way to put your emotional reaction to a bad review aside, you’ll find that you will […]
