How to Start Writing a Rock Song

Video Transcript

"Even though, eventually, you're going to want to write rock music into something that's going to fit on the electric guitar. Not that there isn't acoustic guitars, Led Zeppelin used acoustic guitars, the Beatles, all of them used acoustic guitars and it would still be legitimate rock and roll. However, the majority of rock music does come through the electric guitar. However, for the sake of songwriting and for the sake of our purposes here, I am going to use the acoustic guitar. So when you start out writing a song, you want to grab your guitar. And the best thing to do, if you already have your lyrics ready, you're going to have your lyrics sitting in front of you and then just kind of work through stuff. And you've got to remember that, remember that you are writing for rock music. So even though it is an acoustic guitar, you've got to translate that in your mind. And I would just mess around with different stuff. Something like that is going to be a pretty cool feel. You can already hear it, even though it's on the acoustic guitar, you can hear it being translated on the electric guitar. So, once you've done that, once you've gotten into a comfortable spot, kind of develop that, work through that, this could take, this process, even starting out before you even write lyrics down, the process of coming up with the theme and coming up with just kind of a general feel for how your song is going to go is, it can take months. It can take sometimes minutes, it can sometimes take months. But you don't want to rush it. Because, no matter what, you don't want to write bad songs. If it takes you a long time to write a good song, it's more important to write a good song than to write thirty bad songs. So, that is how, at least I as a songwriter, start out writing a song. Whether I have the lyrics or I just have the theme, I will sit down with my guitar and start to develop something that I think sounds cool, that I think will work for the rock genre. And then I go from there and I think through the song structure and then I actually sit down and hammer through the different sections of the song."