How To Get Ideas For Songwriting

Series Summary

Songwriting has been a part of human existence since before we were only banging on make-shift drums. Man has always sought to convey feeling and emotion through what we create and music is one the most powerful ways to do this. Today, after millions of songs have been written over thousands of years we still manage to find new and innovative ways to reinvent our creativity and our muse. It has never been the easiest of processes but it is definitely one of the most rewarding.

In this free video clip series our expert will not only give you tips on how to write a chord progression and a melody but you will also learn some great advice on where to search for inspiration lyrically and musically and how to piece together several unfinished ideas you may have into one great song! Songwriting is an intense process that normally leaves you exhausted so have a seat, relax and let these videos help guide you on your own personal musical journey!

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about getting ideas for your songs. Now you can find inspiration from a variety of different sources from newspapers, other songs you heard on the radio, people's terms of phrase, just about anything could be inspiration for a song. The important thing is getting that one starting point where you build everything else from afterwards. So to give you an example, something that I often do is hear one little piece of melody or get some little lyric idea that I want to expand off of. So one thing that I heard once in my head that was annoying me because I heard it over and over again, it was like this...it was just those three chords. So I started to play it over and over again and then I heard a melody in my head, I'm not quiet sure how exactly it happened, if I thought of a melody or if it just came to me. But I heard that one little melody that went...and from that point on I knew that I could build off of that with other chords which I later on did and I built a whole song around that little piece. It started off as just this one little melody I heard and I worked forward from there. One other technique that I use for songwriting is to think about someone else's song that I like and then twist that song around. So the Beetles for example are great inspirations and I respect and a lot of people have taken Beetles songs and twisted them around. One song I did recently I was playing around with chords to a Beetles song from the White album and I ended up playing them out of order like this...and from that point on I actually built a song around that as well and I'm not the first person who had done that, believe me. I often enjoy seeing how people can start going from one song and then throwing on their own tape till it's a completely different song. There are a whole bunch of different ways you could go about getting the initial song idea, but that's the important step. Once you have that initial idea there are so many place you could go to develop your song, to make something unique and exciting. "