Authentic Songwriting Tips & Inspiration To Get You Started

Songwriting is much like any other creative or non-creative discipline, in the sense that to become the best at it you must practise like the best. It is a muscle you need to work at, patience, discipline & consistent amounts of work and research. Yet, if you love it… who cares right?

As a music producer & songwriter I want to share with you some major tips that have helped me create and write songs without waiting for the right inspiration to come along because sometimes, it wont. If you feel that you’re suffering from writers block, it may just be the need to refine some of those songwriting skills.

 Let’s start with the basics.

What instrument do you feel most comfortable on? And if you don’t play an instrument I will assume you may be coming up with melodies vocally.

Either or, whichever way you decide to get started doesn’t really matter.

 Now, Lets talk about the SWISS! The Swiss songwriting technique is based on writing melody first. Which to be honest, is one of my favourite techniques.

After many years of practicing writing beats and instrumentation first I’ve learnt that, you can create a great instrumental but if your chorus or melodies are less than hit worthy, then it doesn’t really matter how great the music production is behind it. If the melody is trash, then guess what? Yup, you guessed it…

If you have a great chorus first or a catchy melody, then proceed with joy by building a great instrumental around it and you’re in business.

A great song can be played on guitar, or keys and still be a great song. It doesn’t necessarily need mega production behind it. The production is the icing on the cake. A shitty song can be produced by the greatest producer in the world and it will still be a shitty song!

 If you’re coming from a music production background first or are deciding to go down that road, it’s best to push your strengths forward when it comes to songwriting. Start with what feels most organic to you. Some people prefer to write lyrics first, some prefer finding the melody. Again, it doesn’t matter where you start, it just matters where you end up.

I think a great place to start is thinking about the emotional intent behind your songwriting. This will very much guide the rest of your tune. Are you connecting with the sounds of your production? What are the sounds that you are using and how do they help place you into the genre you’re intending to write in? Do you know what genre you want to write in?

I always think of sound design or sound selection as the colours you choose before you start painting. Based on your colour pallet, your song will fit into a genre, or if you’re abundantly talented, you may even blend some colours together that people haven’t heard before! Don’t worry about copying colour pallets at this stage, it is the only way to learn and also one of the best ways to learn! We are not re-inventing the wheel when it comes to music, we are just experimenting with building new and different ones.

So, I went on a little tangent there, however I want to get back to the emotional intent of your song. Some of the best songs in the world and the ones that have lasted the tests of times are those songs that have had the strongest emotional pull. This is of course complimented by the music that supports those lyrics and melodies but put all those elements together and your sure to get some attention. Think about the songs that have helped capture memories of your life. When the artist/producer wrote these songs, they had a strong emotional intent. We are all human, we all get “the feels” from time to time and we love to connect with music that captures those feelings and the memories of our lives.

 Think of any song you’ve ever loved, what type of emotion did it make you feel? What memory comes to mind when a particular song favourite pops on the radio or elsewhere?

 You see, the biggest secret behind writing successful songs in the commercial world is that, it’s already been done a million times. The formula is actually there in front of you. You can copy arrangements of other songs, most generic pop songs are Verse – Chorus – Verse – Chorus – Bridge – Chorus and many other combinations within structure. 90% of people that walk through my door struggle to arrange their songs. It’s as simple as listening and copying the arrangement of songs you admire at the beginning of your song journey. After a while, you’ll get the hang of it and start creating your own. 

Here are some of the basic exercises that I use when songwriting and hopefully some helpful songwriting tips for you.

First I’ll take you through my method as a music producer. 

1.     Find a sound that inspires you. Whether it’s a bass line, or synth sound, or a few chords you’ve whipped together on an instrument that you love the sound of. Sound often inspires creation. Find a unique sound or something that makes your ears get excited.

2.     Start filling up the track with other little parts, it can be drums first or last, bass, top line melodies. Get a solid beat happening and fill it up with as many sounds as you can which you may or may not use down the track. The objective here is that you have plenty to work with when it comes to arrangement time.

3.     Once you have all your sounds and a very full sounding beat or idea, do a very rough arrangement, this should take you between 5-10 minutes. So when I say rough, I mean rough! Don’t over think it! And if you’re not sure about structure or arrangement at this stage, take your favourite song, throw it into your DAW and copy the arrangement by throwing drums or bass lines or melodies in the same order as your favourite artists/producers.

4.     Now you have a rough structure in front of you. You can see the start, middle and end. You’re already light years ahead of most songwriters. No more unfinished beats or songs, you can see a structure from beginning to end in front of you and this already makes the songwriting less daunting. Now it’s a puzzle that you need to add, fill, take away parts until you start slowly to hear a song.

5.     Songwriting is all about building tension and release. Help the listener know something is about to happen and then release by giving them what they want to hear! How can you create tension? Does it mean less instrumentation for a verse? Then the chorus hits with all the bells and whistles?

6.     Work on your transitions, make sure that everything is starting to seam smoothly between your intro, verse, verse into pre-chorus or chorus. This can been done with sounds between those transitions, in a lot of cases, up sweeps or down sweeps.

7.     Now is the time to either mix that track and get it sent to a list of singers to write a melody OR record in your vocal melodies and ideas.

Now, if you’re a singer-songwriter and the above sounds like Chinese (and if you’re Chinese, no offense, it’s a beautiful language) then spend your time writing catchy melodies either sung into your phone or some chords on guitar/piano if you know how. Record as many as you can and take your top 5 or 10 and find your nearest music producer. If a producer hears the melodies and thinks they’re fire, then trust me, he’ll be striking up some deal with you, whether it’s paid or 50/50 publishing splits if they know what’s good for them!

 So, above are only some methods to writing and creating a track. The other would be starting with melody and then building everything around it in the same method as above. At least you know if you have a strong melody that you have a good chance of knowing how the final song will sound. A great way to drive the track down a certain road or genre is use reference tracks. Find a few tracks you like the sound of and infuse those colours into your music!

Songwriting inspiration can be stemmed from any track you’ve ever heard. Simply reverse engineer the process. Listen to the track and dissect it. What makes it special, what does it make you feel? What is the instrumentation doing to make you feel that way?

Often at times I have taken one of my instrumentals and sung a popular songs melody over the top, this is another great method to find what vibe sounds good. Then you can just twist some of the notes around, change the lyrics and you now have something completely different!

 Lastly, another popular songwriting method is getting a singer or yourself to jump on an instrumental and sing whatever is the first thing that comes to your head. Make sure you record it all either on your phone or your chosen DAW and then dissect your own work and select the parts you like!  

There are many different formulas when it comes to songwriting. The best thing you can do, is experiment with as many as possible to see what works for you and better yet, find other writers to collaborate with and see how they work, this will be one of the greatest tips I can give you when it comes to songwriting. There are so many great people to learn from and like I said in the beginning, songwriting is just a muscle that needs constant exercising!

Look forward to hearing your work soon!

Spike Leo