I wanted to share a link with you guys.  Here is a page with 21 songwriting tips.

It seems like I’ve shared this before, but I couldn’t find it when I searched through the blog.  What that probably means is that I planned on sharing it. 

This is not a how-to article. This is just on some songwriting tips that I want to share with you to help you become a more versatile songwriter. Take the hints that you feel help you out and discard the ones you don’t agree with.

#1) Authors and Musicians…
I have had some people tell me that composing music is easy, and that anyone can do it. Yes, anyone can do it, but few can really do it. Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn’t all of a sudden make us best selling authors. Authors work at their abilities, often every day. The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another. Writers do this by using motivation, chararacterization, and powerful word combinations among other things. Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

This is where our first tip comes into play: Never stop working at your abilities. If our main goal is to connect emotionally, we should want to have as many tools as we possibly can to achieve that goal. The more abilities that we have, the more choices we can make musically. It’s important to have a wide arsenal of choices at your disposal, because if we keep doing the same ‘tried and true’ methods, their emotional effects will wear off as the songwriting becomes caged into a predictable movement.

Read The Whole Article Here:21 Songwriting Tips by Songwriter Ken Hill

Today’s article will be a short one.  I just wanted you guys to check this link out:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/29/robot.musician/index.html

Watch the video.  It’s about some guys at Georgia Tech that are designing robots that can improvise music by playing along with human players.  The robots hear what the humans are playing and adapt and put in their own music to go with it.

It’s a pretty interesting video.  Maybe this will be a wave of the future?

Just some random music and creativity links for you to look through today

• Austin Bat Cave – Songwriters Workshop (texasmusicmatters.kut.org)
• Your Take: Songwriter Spotlight (the9513.com)
• Subtly Powerful Songwriting Tips (artistshousemusic.org)
• 10 Ways to Unleash Your Creativity (beliefnet.com)
• Taylor Swift Honored by Songwriters Hall of Fame (cmt.com)
• How to unlock your creative genius (dondodge.typepad.com)
• Are Your Ideas Crazy Enough? (teachstreet.com)
• Wridea: Online Resource for Creativity (teabreak.pk)
• Your Creativity Quotient – How To Boost It (selfimprovementbase.com)
• Labrador teen wins big with ukulele (cbc.ca)

I decided to try something different today.

I have a little gadget that suggests links from around the web every time I write a blog post.  It’s suggestions are based on the keywords that it recognizes in whatever it is I’m writing.  It’s not a gadget I use a lot for this particular blog, but I thought it might make for a fun type of blog post for today.

I’m going to feed it a bunch of keywords, let it suggest a bunch of articles for me, then I’m going to pass on the links that I like to you guys.  I thought this might be a fun way to discover some new sites or read about some interesting things.

Here are some of the links it suggested:

• Slash – s/t (2010) (heavymetaladdiction.com)
• What Are the Greatest Guitar Jam Tracks? (psychedelichippiemusic.blogspot.com)
• New Keys For Old Songs – Try It, You’ll Like It (datamusicata.com)
• Serve The Song (datamusicata.com)
• Maintain a Groove (pianodiana.blogspot.com)
• Blues Chord Progression (pianodiana.blogspot.com)
• Open Source Lead Sheet, Improv Tool, a Free Band-in-a-Box Alternative (menson.wordpress.com)
• Fine Tuning Your Work (datamusicata.com)
• Best Travel Guitars | Best Travel Guitars (definitiveink.typepad.com)
• MAKE asks: Guitar finishing techniques (makezine.com)
• No Doubt Are Recording New Music Together (pinkisthenewblog.com)
• The Cure for Bad Recording Conditions at Home — Editors Keys Release the New Portable Vocal Booth ‘Home’ Edition (uk.prweb.com)

Let me know what you think of this?  Is it interesting to link to random music articles?  Is it worth doing it regularly?  Like say, once a month?  Twice a month?

I found this link while browsing around on Twitter, and I thought you guys might be interested.  It’s called “8 Cures For Lyric-Writer’s Block”

Here’s a sneak peak:

Lyric writing can be a frustrating, nail-biting, paper-crumpling experience.  Getting just the right words to tell a story and convey emotion while conforming to the cadence and rhythm of a musical piece can be a harrowing exercise in patience.  Here are 8 tips to inspire and help you get through the roughs spots in lyric writing.

1.  Let The Music Set The Scene

For most of us the music (or some version of it) comes before the words.  Use this to your advantage.  Music is adept at painting complex emotional landscapes.  In fact, music often tells a compelling story without any words at all.  Even if all you have is three chords on a piano or guitar, record it (every songwriter should have a hand held recorder).  Try to listen objectively.  Listen to it over and over.  What emotions does the music stir in you?  A slow minor progression might conjure feelings of lost love: a romance.  An upbeat and major chord progression might produce feelings of vigor and challenge: a hero’s song.  Let the music reveal to you what kind of tale it has to tell.

2. Discover Your Story

Story is at the heart of any great song.  A great story is usually more engaging then fancy prose and rhyme (Bob Dylan often sacrificed the latter in order to tell his stories without compromise).  Fret not.  Stories are neither mysterious nor hard to find.  All you need is a character with desire, and suddenly the whole pantheon of fables, myths, and tales from across the globe are at your disposal.  People desire love, money, fame, safety, and many other things.  Story is created when a character wishes, dreams, risks, acts, or dies in pursuit of one of these things.   When you listen to the music you are working on, do you feel a yearning for something?  Then you’re halfway there!

Check out the rest of the article by clicking here

I found an article today that I found interesting, and I thought I’d share it with all of you.

The article is entitled “How to Write A Song”

I’ve personally written probably hundreds of songs if you combine the ones I’ve done by myself with the ones that I’ve done with bands and with my songwriting partners, but I still really like looking at how other people approach it.   I’ve written songs with a lot of different people, and I have noticed that everyone really has their own method.

The reason that I keep reading articles like this that are probably geared more toward beginners is that I really am interested in those different methods.  I think a lot of times I’m able to think about the different ways of writing songs, and sometimes change or adapt my own methods a little.

Not only that, but I think anyone who has tried to be creative on a somewhat regular basis has fallen into ruts before, whether it’s writers block, or even feeling like every thing you write sounds the same after a while.  I think trying different writing methods can pull you out of those types of ruts.

The article is called How To Write A Song, and I found it on www.robinfrederick.com

There’s something magical about songwriting. No matter how many songs I write or how much I know about songwriting, I am still amazed and a little awestruck that it happens at all. How does a song get started? How do you know where to go next? How do you know if your song is any good? Well, I’ll answer the first two questions in this article. The third question – How do you know if my song is good? – is answered like this: A song that expresses what you feel is a good song, even if no one else thinks so. A song that expresses your thoughts and feelings in a way that reaches other people, helps them feel something deeper or understand something better – that’s a really good song!

Read the rest of the article by clicking here

I like to pay attention to the Google search terms that bring people to this site.  Because I write a lot about creative inspiration and songwriting, one of the common themes in the terms that Google associates with this blog is the idea of how to write a song if you’re a beginner.  I see a lot of search phrases in my web stats that look something like this:

How to write your first song
How do you get started writing music
How can you write a song if you can’t play music
How can you write a song if you’ve never done it

When I was surfing through some music sites recently, I came across an article called “How To Write A Song When You Are A Beginner”.

Here’s a little piece of the article:

For many learning how to write song is not so much the issue. However, learning how to find the problems in the songs they do write, is a valuable tool. To start with, new songwriters should just write lots of songs. The best goal is to write 100 songs. Sometimes beginning songwriters need to write a lot of songs to find what isn’t working and figure out how to get them working better. And this is often difficult to do on your own, which is why looking to outside sources can be most helpful.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE

I’ll be honest, I’ve been writing songs for so long that it’s hard for me to think in those terms.  However, it looks like this article came from a blog that is specifically about getting started writing songs.  If you are a beginner who is interested in getting started, you might want to search through the rest of the articles on that blog.  You might find something very useful.

But of course, keep coming back to this one, too. 

Ever have to deal with Writers Block?

I think everyone deals with it from time to time.  I spend a lot of time reading about creativity, writing, inspiration, and other things around the web, and I came across a great link.  The author listed 33 ways to get past writers block, and what’s awesome is that it’s written from a songwriters point of views.

Here’s a small piece from the article

Put these 33 impeccable ways to the test yourself and experience the magic of inspiration:

1 – Ask why, how, when, where and who?
Ask yourself questions about the subject. If your song is about a suspicious old man then ask the questions: Where does he go? Where did he come from? Who is he? What is he going to do? Who are his friends? Does he have any? What are his interests? What are his dreams? Is he married? What is his history? Why does he act so strange? Ask as many questions as possible to come up with ideas.

2 – Put on some music.
Listen to music that fits the mood of the song you are about to write. It gets you into the vibe.

3 – Don’t try to be a perfectionist.
Just write your story, lower your standards and adjust it later if you need to.
Knowing that you can always alter it afterwards will make you write more fluidly.

4 – Read.
Read books, blogs or magazines on the subject or topic you want to write about.
Expand your horizon.

5 – Take a cup of coffee or nice cappuccino.
Caffeine will wake you up and increases mental faculty.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE

This is an article that I highly recommend that you take time to read and even bookmark so you can come back to it later.  Songwriting is a highly creative task, and it’s just natural that sometimes it’s not easy to force creativity.  Sometimes you need methods like these to get you through the block.

Today I’m going to share with you a collection of links with nothing but ideas on how to spark creativity.  None of these sites are “music” sites or “songwriting” sites, but they are written by creative people who want to make sure they keep thinking in creative ways.

Image via Wikipedia

Check them out and see what you think.  Maybe you’ll find some ideas that you’ll want to put in your toolbox for when you’re dealing with creative block.

1. Creativity Tips
2. TIPS DESIGNED TO GET THOSE CREATIVE JUICES FLOWING!
3. Tapping Into Creativity, 14 Tips on How to Be Creative
4. Eight tips for sparking your creativity
5. 16 top tips for awakening creativity and innovation
6. 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity
7. Ten Steps for Boosting Your Creativity

Today I want to share another link with you guys. This one is one that I came across quite a while ago, but I keep going back to it from time to time. It’s called the “Song Lyrics Scrapbook“. Basically it’s a list of lyrics that people have submitted (pretty much all consisting of 2-4 lines each) that they wrote but eventually decided to scrap.

I’ve used the site in a couple different ways.

One time I found a phrase on the site that I really liked. I ended up not using it word for word, but rather letting the idea of the phrase inspire me. I changed the wording a little to fit my new inspiration, and wrote a song around it.  The phrase was “Is anyone out there?  Is anyone even in here?”  I didn’t use that word for word, but it inspired me to write a Christian song where the main line in the hook was

‘Cuz even when if feels like no one is out there
I know there’s Someone in here

I didn’t take the suggestion word for word, but I let it spark an idea in my mind that I ran with.

I also found a more fun way of using the site, though…  I turned it into an “outside-the-box” mental creativity exercise.

I took a lyric that I found on the page. The lyrical line was:

Traffic Jam in my head
Thinking of words I should’ve said

I decided I wanted to use that phrase as a songwriting exercise. I started trying to think about it from different angles. Instead of taking the potentially obvious approach of writing the song from the point of view of someone who is dealing with hindsight being 20/20, regretting that he/she didn’t think of the right thing to say a little sooner, I decided to try to take it in a direction that a normal song wouldn’t go.

In the end, I wrote the lyrics from the point of view of a nerd/geek/dweeb type of guy that really wants to talk to the hot girl that he’s around all the time, but he gets too nervous to make the words come out. Here are the lyrics that I wrote:

Written by Jason Hannah on 12/5/08
Written to my song “Space Age Jam” from about 7 years ago

Verse 1
========
I’m dying to meet you, I just want to say hi
But I’m not sure you even know I’m alive
All my friends say you’re out of my league
And I know that it’s true, but my heart won’t agree

Even though you’re a model, and I’m just a nerd
I hypothesize I can rock your world
And it’s just my luck now you’re walking down the hall
Let’s just hope this time I say anything at all

Chorus
=======
Traffic jam in my head
I’m still thinking about what I should’ve said
But the gears froze up, I hit the brakes
When I’m around you I hardly know my name

Traffic jam in my mind
It happens around you each and every time
I don’t know, what to say
Even though I practice every day

Verse 2
=======
It happened again, I just froze
I was sweating so bad my glasses slid off my nose
I practiced at home in front of the mirror
Hoping that I could overcome my fear

But it didn’t work, you’re just too hot
I try to act calm even though I am not
But here’s another chance, you turned around
I’ll talk as soon as I get my tongue off the ground

As you can see at the beginning, I then put the lyrics to a piece of music that I had written years prior, but didn’t know what to do with. The music was written around a very weird guitar riff… the riff was just too odd to fit with much of anything, which made it a good fit for my geek song.

To top it off I tried to sing it in a nasally “nerd voice”.

Because it was just an exercise in creativity, I never took the time to record a polished version of the song. I did, however, record my nerd vocals over the original riff demo that I had laid down years before. It’s not a good recording, but it’s something to show for the thought put into the lyrics.

If you’re interested, you can play the MP3 below:

So how will you use the Song Lyrics Scrapbook? Creative practice like I did? Inspiration for your next songwriting session? Maybe you’ll find a line in there that fits perfect with a song you’re already working on?