When you ask yourself, “How do I learn songwriting or become a better songwriter,” the answer just might take you outside of traditional pathways. The goal is to achieve a naturalness to the variety of musical choices you can make so that you can say what you feel about any subject and put it into a musical context that touches the people who hear it as a song!

I was just speaking to a prospective student who expressed a feeling that I have heard over and over again for as long as I have been coaching songwriters. He said that he took college music theory and composition classes, and even did well enough in the classes to get A’s, yet he is totally unsure how to apply any of what he learned. Why do you think that might be? It is certainly the way almost every student I’ve ever spoken to feels about formal training.

In order to successfully apply what is taught in music theory classes in college, you need to be able to separate what you learn from the era and genre in which that device was originated. I often express to students that there are only seven notes in a scale, and seven chords in a key, and that they are the same ones used by both Mozart and Ozzy Osborne. The trick is to see the big, big picture, and not be sucked into the fact that you might be learning the music theory through the vehicle of a Cantata by Bach. If you get stuck in the formatting of the classical approach that you are studying, you may never be able to feel how that technique might cross over into usefulness for a Rock, Pop, Folk, Country, or Jazz song in the 21^st Century. Continue reading »

We’re so happy that you found your way to our Song Chat blog. We will be regularly discussing everything that has to do with songwriting, and it is our intention to help you build a better tool box, filled with extremely useful songwriting tools. If you are a beginning, hunt and peck type writer, we’ll show you what you need to do. If you’ve already got several songs under your belt, we’ll take you from modeling your songs after your favorite artist’s songs, and show you how to begin creating something truly original that still has commercial value. Even those of you who are advanced songwriters will find material here that you may never have considered, and remember, it only takes one new idea to launch something new and remarkable.

The premise that we operate from, and it should be fairly obvious to you, is that songwriters can be developed and cultivated, they’re not just born. So if songwriting isn’t currently easy for you, you probably just don’t have enough information. We will be dissecting the elements of songwriting a couple times a week here in this blog, so we recommend that you bookmark this page, or even better, subscribe to the RSS feed.

This will be an exciting adventure. We have helped countless songwriters gain a firm grasp of all of the musical tools that songwriters need to know as well as lead them down a pathway of introspection about what’s going on in their life and in their world, so that they’re constantly developing ideas to write songs about. Whether you need to work on your lyric writing, your melodies, or your chord progressions, you are in the right place. And if you ever want to go faster than the posts in this blog can lead you to go, please contact My Songwriting Coach, we’d love to have you as a private student or welcome you into one of our group classes.