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.

I stumbled across an article today that I thought I would share with you guys.  The article is titled “Outside The Box Creativity Tips”.  It’s not specifically a music article or songwriting article, but inspiration for general creativity is definitely helpful among those of us who want to creatively explore music.

In the article the author gives 11 tips.  Each of those tips is a link to an article that goes more in depth about that idea.

The 11 ideas are:

Tip 11: Cloud Your Creative Judgment

Tip 10: Purposely make silly things

Tip 9: Take a nap to recharge your creative battery.

Tip 8: Act as if.

Tip 7: Ignore your inner critic (at least this once)

Tip 6: Take steps to manifest your creative idea

Tip 5: Try something new

Tip 4: Spend playtime with kids

Tip 3: Meet new people outside of your demographic

Tip 2: Finish reading that book

Tip 1: Do something radically different with your art

Click HERE to read the article and to get more information on each of those tips.

Text-To-Music:  Any potential there?

As I was just randomly surfing the web recently, I came across a site that converts text into musical notes.  It’s really kind of hard to explain, so I’ll just cut and paste the description from the website itself:

P22 Music Pro is a unique font system that expands on the concept used in the Music Text Composition Generator. It allows the user to compose music with text editing and page layout programs capable of OpenType features and contextual substitutions. P22 Music Pro covers a wide range of symbols and notation used in traditional western music composition. P22 Music Pro requires an application that uses OpenType features and is capable of contextual substitutions, such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator.

The font used in the P22 MTCG is a basic version that closely follows the initial Cage inspired idea. Each letter, number and punctuation mark is assigned a note on the C major scale. When the user generates their composition the same substitutions are applied to their text that P22 Music Pro font performs. These substitutions are based on the frequency of phonetic sounds and letters in the English language corresponding to the most common ranges in the human voice and note durations. For more information about the font click here.

The basic idea is, you type in (or cut and paste) whatever text you want to use… it can be random gibberish, it can be structured sentences… it doesn’t matter.  The generator goes through a certain process to convert your characters to notes in a C-Major scale.  Then you can listen to the musical creation, and even download the MIDI file of it.

So my question is to all of you creative people out there looking for interesting ways to make music, can you turn this into something useful?   It would certainly be an outside-the-box way of exploring musical sounds!

Click HERE to try the generator

Hey fellow musicians

Today I’m going to link to another one of Paul Nordquist’s pages

The idea of his most recent post is basically to get your brain used to writing.  Here’s a small clip of the post

When writing a song — or creating anything — we naturally want the results to be great. Why set out to create something average? But the pressure to produce great stuff is a burden on the creative process. It’s hard to be inventive when you need guaranteed results. At worst, you might find that you can’t write anything at all, for the fear that you might create something that isn’t good enough.

The Three of Clubs gives us an antidote to perfectionism and writer’s block. Start with several blank sheets of paper, and keep writing until you have filled them up! Your new goal isn’t to create goodness, it’s to end up with a page full of stuff — new stuff that you just wrote.

Read the rest of the article by clicking HERE

I think that’s a great idea.  I’m going to set aside some time to write a pile of songs without stopping… and I’ll worry about whether or not they’re good when I’m done!

Oh, and I know I’ve been focusing on topic ideas and lyrics a lot lately… I’ll get back to the musical side of things very soon!  I’m pretty much just writing about the things that are presenting themselves to me right now.

200 Useful chord phrases in C Major

I was looking around on Twitter today for posts about songwriting today, (by the way, if you’re not following me, please do so by clicking the little blue bird at the top right hand corner of this page) and I came across a blog called Paul Nordquist’s Unruly Beast of a Song Blog and I instantly loved it so much that I had to add a link to this site, as well as write this post about one of his articles in particular.

The post that caught my eye was titled “200 Useful Chord Phrases in C Major”. Here’s a little Excerpt from the post

Wherever you need a phrase of music, just drop in one of these chord phrases. (One key tip: Use repetition; that is, use some of the chord phrases more than once. It helps your song hang together.)

By the way, these chord phrases are not random; they’re in a sort of functional order. So don’t just pick from the beginning of the list. Use dice or something to choose at random from the entire list.

1. C – - -
2. C Csus4 C Csus4
3. C – Am -
4. C Am C Am
5. Am – - -
6. C – F C
7. C Am F C
8. C E♭ F C
9. C Dm F C
10. C D7 Fm C
11. C Em F C
12. C G F C
13. C B♭ F C
14. C F Dm C
15. C Em Dm C

If you want to read the rest of the post, and I have no idea why you would not want to, click HERE