Introduction

Welcome to this guide on songwriting! As always, I’ll be efficient and don’t waste your time. Yes, there are ten chapters, but each is quite short and has many examples. Breaking it down like this makes it easier to read (and take breaks).

This is not about performing, recording or mixing that song! It’s about writing it. (As mentioned at the course overview, recording and mixing aren’t my strong suits … yet.)

I started playing guitar when I was seven. I taught myself many other instruments during my youth (of which the piano was by far the most useful). And all that time, musical idea after musical idea popped into my head. There are over five hundred demos for songs on my hard drive.

As we all know, quantity breeds quality. Just doing something a lot will automatically teach lessons and create some intuition for the subject.

In this guide, I will explain the best principles I learned from trying to write five hundred songs. Also the most practical ones: music is an emotional journey, not a theoretical subject.

That’s why this guide has many playful audio examples, like the one below.

Not only can you see the melody and play it, you can even edit it!

• Click + drag any note to move it around
• Drag the ends of a note to resize it (start time or end time)
• Right-click a note (or make it zero size) to remove it
• If you move a note above or below the current view, it automatically adds more pitches for you.
• Finally, use the buttons and sliders to change the melody’s properties.

With everything you learn, you can immediately play with the examples and construct melodies right within the web page!

At the end, you hopefully have tools for …

• Getting inspiration and starting
• Applying the important basics
• Then supercharging creativity to add your personal “flavor” of songwriting on top of the basics
• What to do when you get stuck
• Where to go next

This guide is general and applies to any genre or instrument. I personally write pop, rock, folk and acoustic singer-songwriter music. But my father was a theatre manager for decades, which means I’ve seen too many musicals to count and discovered many musical styles at a young age. Where needed, I’ll mention if a tip is specific to some genre.

Let’s start!