Learn to improve your songwriting with these tips, stories, and resources to help you break out of a creative rut and start writing better music. For more help, check out Soundfly’s course, The New Songwriter’s Workshop.
+ Improve your songwriting with Soundfly! Explore our range of courses on emotional chord progressions, basic songwriting technique, songwriting for producers, and many more. Subscribe for unlimited access here. Writing creative lyrics is a challenging task. If you want to write for radio, you’ll probably lean towards accessible themes of love with simple, easy-to-digest lyrics. Poetry, as beautiful as it…
This article is being published jointly on Soundfly and Sonicbids in celebration of #SongwritingWeek! My pursuit to become a songwriter started shortly after learning to read words and music twenty-something years ago. Throughout my quest to become better at what I love doing, I’ve studied a wide range of writing styles — both musical and linguistic. Here are five lessons…
By Rowen Bridler The privilege of being a songwriter is that I never know when I’m going to be inspired with a new idea for a song, nor if I will have to push for that inspiration to show up in the first place. Some songs come about easily and others take lots of cajoling.…
If you have a story to tell, then you have something to say with your songwriting, and guitar is your backup instrument. In other words, use your guitar to support your singing. Write your story down and keep your lyric ideas in a folder or binder just for songs. Save them to a folder on…
A while back, Taylor Casey asked if I’d sing some backgrounds on his EP. All I knew about the project was that Taylor — who grew up alongside my baby brother — was a nice, Southern California kid whose love for music brought him to the big city. One of my favorite singers happened to be staying…
By Alan Semerdjian There’s this idea out in the world that unless we’re working as songwriters and doing music full-time — music solely — we’ve somehow failed or compromised our integrity as artists. I’ve come to understand this notion as flawed thinking. Let me explain. I have been writing, releasing, and performing music since the drummer in…
I remember the first time I tried writing a song — it was a mess. I had no idea where to start, no idea how to come up with melodies (let alone match them with lyrics), and no idea what to write about. Songwriting can be an extremely daunting mountain to tackle if you’ve never written…
Need a boost of inspiration? Try any of these fool-proof chord progressions to jumpstart your writing process.
If you’ve seen Easy A, you probably remember the scene where Emma Stone receives a card that plays Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine” and how Stone’s character hates the song — at first. Flash forward to a few days later, and she can’t stop singing it. There are songs that we can’t stand, yet can’t get out…
Songwriting is a cathartic, stimulating, and back-and-forth process. When inspiration really sinks in, it’s incredible what we’re capable of creating. And after channeling that inspiration into a new song, there’s a strong feeling of purpose and secure creative identity. We can, however, often sit around waiting for that moment to happen. Writer’s block is one…
