Songwriting 101: The Beginner’s 5-Step Blueprint

1. Lesson 1: Introduction: Here's what we think is happening in your life. You are someone who can play an instrument, put together some chords, and every lyric that comes out of your mouth, you are cringing. Or you're someone who's constantly coming up with great lyrical ideas, but you can never seem to turn them into a full song. So in this video, we're going to break down the songwriting process into five simple steps. And we've guaranteed if you follow these five steps, you will write a song. You can be proud to stand on a stage and sing, or at the very least, impressive friends. One of the biggest challenges for any songwriters not starting a song, but in fact finishing a song, which is why we've created these five steps in this particular order. There is a tip in step five that is often the difference between songwriters who finished song's, songwriters who joined. Between us, we have written hundreds of songs, top thousands of students, and really studied the craft of Songwriting for the last two decades. So believe me, when I say these five steps are directly from our experience. They have been tried and tested. They will absolutely help you write your first song and hopefully many more after that. To be clear, there's no one way to write a song, but what we're going to show you is a great way to write songs because it really works 2. Lesson 2: Start With Chords: Step one, Start With Chords. Now, there is a question that we get asked all the time. It's alright, isn't every Songwriting gets asked on the regular, which is, how do you start a song, music first or lyrics first, as if there's a right way to do songwriting. And really a song can start anywhere. But for simplicity sake, what we're going to do is Start With Chords because it's a great way to start a song. So Benny, will you pick your guitar plates? There's a couple of parameters. We're going to sit around the chords. We're going to pick that you can do as well. Those parameters are, we're going to pick for Chords because for Chords is nice. There's lots of songs that are made up of four chord. The second parameter is those four chords are going to come from the same. Kate. Now, every key has seven chords that belong in that key, which basically means they're going to sound good together no matter what. So we're going to show you three different permutations of the same four chord that all sound great together. So we're going to play in the cave, Zhe, replace the G chord, Benny. And we're gonna call that the one chord because it is the first chord in the key of G. So our first chord progression is going to be 1564. Beautiful. A second combination of those same four chord Is 1645. Nice. And a third winning combination of those same for goods is 4156. Okay? My choice is gonna be the third option there. It's gonna be 4156. Yeah, great. So we've done our first day. We've got some chords that work together 3. Lesson 3: Lyric Writing: Step to create some lyrics. And this usually raises another big question, which is, what do I write about? What makes for a good song lyric? And really the answer to this question is, a song can be about anything. The way that I think about it often is anything that has some emotional crackled to it for you is probably the basis of a song. But beyond that, there are a few questions that we can ask ourselves that will always lead us to great ideas. And here are these questions. What do you want to get off your chest? What annoys you? What are you worried about? What do you wish was different? What do you want that you don't have? What do you want to say to someone you haven't said yet? Or a second really great approach to writing songs is to write a Song of celebration. To write a song that expresses joy or delight or a sense of wonder and, or with the world. But really the songs of frustration, they're generally more moody and interesting. We want to give you for pro, tips about Lyric Writing. They're going to help your lyrics connect more quickly with an audience. The first tip is this, right? Your lyrics in direct address, which means right from your perspective, singing the song to someone else, that makes the song relationship-based, regardless of what the theme or topic is, you can always find a way to house it inside a relationship. And that is going to make your song more emotional and more appealing to whoever's listening to it. Tip number two, Start With the present tense. This really creates a sense of immediacy and it helps the listener feel like they're with you. Draw the listener into that present moment, like they're watching a movie. This again will help you connect with the listener. The only thing it does is it creates a sense of emotional urgency. Because it means that the world of the song is happening. Now, that the stakes are higher. It's not something that has happened already. And the story is over. It means that the emotional stakes are much higher from the beginning of the song, which means we care more. Tip number three, create a problem, tension, or conflict. In the first two lines of your song, one of the things you will find in songs that are charting in any genre is that the songwriters a very clear from the beginning of the song what the problem, tension or conflict is that has driven them to sing a song in the first place. And tip number four, make sure your song is about one thing. We don't want to start writing a love story, but also start talking about climate change somewhere in the second verse, song's only go for three-and-a-half minutes. We don't have time to address multiple themes and big topics, so stick with one thing throughout the song and it will feel clear and it will be impactful for your listener. Here's a bonus tip, and honestly this tip is probably the most important of all. The tip is this. Find the title of your song at your earliest possible convenience. Now that doesn't mean it's song needs to start with a title, but you are actively looking for a title as soon as you start the writing process. And the reason is this great songs and great lyrics, not built on broad themes or topics. It's really about how you write about the thing you want to write about, not the thing itself. When you settle on a title, that is really a way to anchor the song in that one thing. It's a way to decide that this song is about this thing. And I'm going to talk about it in this way. All that sounds great, but how do you find a title? There are lots of ways to find the title, but one really effective way is simply to brainstorm title ideas. So again, this relies on actually having an idea of what you want to write about. And then we can just brainstorm title IDs. Now, great titles tend to be six Words or less that are inherently memorable or interesting. Often titles that contain an image, a very powerful. So I think if song's like diamonds by Riana, another way you can find titles is by just Free writing on your theme or topic, which is essentially uncensored journaling. And I might just dip inside what I think, what I feel, stories that come up, Is there a particular scene, Moment, memory, or event that really captures that feeling for me? And I might spend some time simply journaling or describing what happened, how I felt, what I smelt, how it sounded, how my skin felt, really leaning on the sensors to bring that seem to life. And then I'm going to scan through all that writing at the end, really looking for that short phrase that captures the essence of the id and could really serve as a title. So let's walk through this process and do it step-by-step. So let's go back to that list of questions that we're going to ask ourselves to try and work out what we actually want to write about. The question, what do you wish were different resonates with me this moment in time. What are the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately as I approach 40 years of age is how quickly that comes around and how it really felt like five years ago I was young. Suddenly, I will injure myself picking up a sandwich and I don't think that that's going to stop anytime soon. I just think that that's going to get worse. So to me, there's something about this, like speeding up of time that happens at this particular moment in life for me. And what do you wish was different? I wish that I knew how quickly 40 was coming. Like a motor car speeding around a corner, but I was like lazily picking flowers on the mountain side. You wish you'd known back then back when you're younger or even just at like 30? I wish I'd known at 30 that 40 felt like the beginning This has gotten depressing real quick. Let me just say something here though. There's an instinct as a songwriter that comes up in this moment, which is that if I were to write a song about being 38, that might be totally unrelated able to people who are 21. It might also be completely alienating to people who are 60. But there is an essential ID here that is universally relatable. That as soon as I say that I realized I felt that way when I was 20. And I can imagine that people who are 60 feel exactly the same way just from that perspective. So what I would be seeking to do is write the song that captures the essence of the idea rather than specific to actually of being 38. That's a great word you just use universal because I think when we're looking for ideas or things to write about trying to find things that a universal in terms of they relate to anybody or anybody could understand them. Such a powerful idea, it means anyone in any country, no matter what age, what their living conditions will resonate. That's usually a good start. I'm also just going to say right now, That's something just stumbled out of my mouth. And I think it couldn't make a great title. Even just at like 30. I wish I'd known at 30 that 40 felt like the beginning. So I'm just gonna put it on the page. Okay. That title jumped out at me because I had the benefit of talking through an ID with Benny. But what I'm going to do is do some of that free writing now and see if there are any other alternate titles that come out. And I'm also going to have the benefit of having gotten some ideas and thoughts down on the page. And a lot of that is going to serve as raw material for lyrics that will come up later. So that was only 4 min of writing. And yet keppie is basically filled two pages of the notebook. So let's just have a look at what you got from that process. The first thing I did was I started in the present tense and it really grounded at, in a specific moment or seen on memory and wrote about it in terms of how it feels. So I wrote about waking up in the morning is harder than it used to be. Bones, creaking muscles, sore eyes, puppy feet, dragging my body store. I can't do as much I feel it in my knees. Sometimes I throw my neck out just by laughing too hard, that sort of thing. So how does this feeling of aging present itself in my body? Then the very next thing I did, I compared that to how it used to feel. How I used to feel Once upon a time. And really relied on specific science-based memories and descriptions to capture that feeling. So here's what I wrote, how it used to be. We could go out every night through drinks back like our dot-dot-dot. I'm not sure what that lyrical bay, but I know that it could be a cool line. Dance until three listened to music loud and the buzzing in our ears would fade by the next afternoon, but not anymore. Then the final thing that I started riding was a deviation from the complaining. So I thought, how could I take this song in a different direction? That's not just about complaining. And I thought, well, I might be losing a sense of youthful body vitality, but there are things that we gain as we age. I started to just write a little list of things that are actually the benefits of aging. So I've written less judgmental, less anxious, more comfortable in myself, more secure in relationship. Also, I am more thirsty, ambitious, and energized. And then I have ever been in my life because I am so much more aware of how time is running out. So just to be clear, you weren't trying to run. You weren't trying to create any lyrics as such. You would just trying to get your thoughts down on paper on this topic, on this thing. The other thing that I have done here is structured my free writing in a song map, and this is not an accident. This was very deliberate. And this is a really crucial tip that is going to help you finish songs when you have NID. A song map is essentially a way to begin a song, to develop a song, and to finish your song. But it ensures that you are not merely repeating the same idea over and over again inside the verse lyrics, but the, you are actually progressing the ID that is the song proceeds. You are introducing new ideas that actually take the emotion deeper and further. But crucially, even though there are new ideas here, they are all going to relate back to the central idea, the singular thing that is encapsulated inside the title, the beginning of the end. And this song map becomes so crucial when we think about one of the big challenges we talked about before, which is finishing your song. And really a great tip here is to think about this like a joke. You would never start telling a joke If you didn't know what the punchline was. Well, we wanna get into the habit of writing out song's kinda knowing where we're heading or where we want to end up. And so this song map is really like an essay plan for your song. It helps you map out roughly the structure of where you want to go and why you want to end up with this story. Really think about a song map though, is that you're not contractually obliged to it. It's not a legal document, which means it gives you a sense of direction for the song. But what will happen and what tends to happen for me, new ideas will arise as I'm going. But they wouldn't have a reason unless I set out in that direction. And a song map is a great way to give yourself that direction and to give yourself the confidence that even if you stuck to the song map with no deviation, you would get to the end of the song Just quickly. Any other title options jump out from that process? Nothing anybody saw laughing too hard? No. Look, maybe out every night could be something that I could connect to each of these different stages. Not anymore. Can be a cool idea that could become a title. What I got from this process was a bunch of great lyric ideas. But in terms of titles, even though there are a few contenders There, we were lucky enough in this moment to actually start with a title that I think is going to work really well for this song idea 4. Lesson 4: Melody Writing: Step number three is melody. We're going to bring melody into the equation now. And the most important thing when crafting a melody is really to keep it simple, keep it restrained, and make sure that it fits with the lyrics that we're starting to create. Makes sure that it supports the lyrics and that they support each other. Again, this question that comes up a lot is where the melody is come from. How do we create them? And really let's just go back and look at the chord we're playing with. Again, the key we were in was the key of G. So there's our Hong Kong. The melody notes are really going to be drawn from the scale of G major, which is this. Without really even needing to think about that as Benny place through the chord progression, that 4156 chord progression, the nerves that emerge out of those chords are going to be the notes in G-Major. So what I've done is I've just written a couple of little lyric ideas directly drawn from the writing I adjusted. Benny is going to cycle those chord and I'm just going to improvise a few simple little melodies that fit these lyric ideas and vice versa before I start playing the chord. So this is an important time to ask the question, how should we play the chords? Because we're trying to establish a mood, right? And so I could play this caused really fast and upbeat, or I could play them slow and melancholy. What is the mood we're trying to create with this song? Ultimately, this song is going to start out sounding like it's complaining. But what I want it to end up as is actually a celebration of things learned and new vital energy that arises. So I think something that's not too fast, but also not to select that bad. I can feel it get inside money. What were you just latching onto them melodically, what we, you, what was your process? I came up with one simple melodic idea that started high. And if I start high, the natural direct needs to go low. And that was data, data that then what came out then he's almost like an answer to that phrase. So that phrase sounded like it wasn't complete to me. So that ended with dadadada, which sounds like it's finished a thought. And now that I've created that little two-part colon response Melody, I then just sought to do it exactly the same, almost exactly the same. Again, to create that sense of repetition, this is such a great way to write melodies, to simply come up with a phrase and then a little response to that phrase. This call and response idea is tried and tested. It works beautifully in any genre, and it works beautifully here to what I might do is write another full lines to create a nice long fleshed out first verse. But even those four lines serve as a verse and give us enough to work with that we can move on to step four 5. Lesson 5: A Catchy Chorus: The chorus. So as we write this course, there are three really important things that we're going to focus on that if you get these right and your song, they're going to make your chorus hit hard and really create some impact for your listeners. The first thing is we're going to change the code. So remember we picked that first chord progression. We're going to now pick one of the other chord progressions. And it's going to feel like a shift, like contrast, like the song is moving somewhere else, which is exactly what we want from a chorus, beautiful to, to be using the same for chords but in a different order. So we're not introducing any new chord, we're just changing the order of the ones we've been using. The second thing that I'm going to focus on achieving in the melody here is I'm going to make sure that the highest note of the song appears in the chorus. And I'm even going to focus on making sure that it's in the title of the song. And speaking of the title, we're going to try and get the title to be the first and the last line of the chorus to really reinforce what that title is and what the theme of this song is. And this is really important because of course, is not just a different kind of Verse. Chorus is really the moment where we need to put neon lights around the central ID, which is housed inside the title. And there really isn't a better way to do that, then repetition. So there's lots of different ways that you can repeat the title, but using it as the first-line and the last line is a super effective strategy and that's the one that we're going to use here. Then to get at least as good as Zach can feel. Sad. So we've written a course, we've written the verse. Now all I need to do is write another verse that fits exactly or more or less exactly, the same melody is the first verse, which brings us to step five 6. Lesson 6: Bridges Provide Departure: Step five is writing the bridge. And now that we know we're going to write a bridge, we also know what our song form is going to be. A song form is going to be Verse Chorus, Verse Chorus. We're going to bring the bridging after the second chorus. And then we're probably gonna come back and finish off the whole form with a final chorus with a variation. This song form is really the pop song format that we've seen for the last 20 or 30 years and we still see up and down the chart. It's actually an incredibly resilient, so form for a very specific reason. And that is because it works and it's not to say that every song has been the song form. And you also see lots of different variations on this song form in contemporary songwriting. But we're going to use it because it just works so well. So to create this bridge, which is a brand new section and it's going to create a little bit of contrast as the only time we're going to hear it in song form, we're going to follow these three simple guidelines. The first guideline is we're going to start The Bridge on a chord that we haven't started either the verse or the chorus on. So it's going to sound different automatically because of that chord choice. Because we've actually only been using for out of the seven possible chords within the key. We might even use this as an opportunity to introduce a chord that we haven't heard before from the case. So we might even use the two chord or the three chord to start out Bridge. The second guideline here is to avoid the one chord. So the one-quarter is powerful, it draws us back home, it feels very stable. We want to avoid that to create a little bit of tension so that when we come back and use that one chord or that home chord in the chorus, it feels good, it feels impactful. And the third guideline that we're going to use and we recommend that you try out as well, is the idea that Bridges are really about creating a final little sense of tension that then resolves back into the chorus. Bridges thrive on tension or instability. And one of the best ways that you can create a sense of instability in a section is by using an uneven number of lines. I'm gonna give us the perimeter of making sure that this is not a full line section like the other sections, but in fact he's a three-line section. And I'm also going to make sure that I hold the chords for a different duration because we've been using pretty much the same patent for the other two sections. We're going to change it up here and introduce not only a new chord, but hold that chord for a different length of time. Everything, nothing 7. Lesson 7: The Finished Song: These days, Zach and see way down here. We're used to have three. What's the sunrise? Now I want to wash away that standard. Everything is nothing but dream that I begin