Four Tips To Jumpstart Your Songwriting Routine

If you’re visiting music think tank for the first time or the 50th time, you have something in common, you’re here for the music and your whole life has probably been dedicated to music. Perhaps this craft is basically all you can imagine yourself doing for the next however long. 

If that’s the case and perhaps you should consider making the move that I did, from small-town to thriving music scene. You may want to consider changing up some other aspects of your daily routine, as well as the setting. Here I’ll share some of the tips that led to my confidence as a composer, after all the only way to improve your skills as a songwriter, is to set up a practice. 

A Change of Scenery 

Let’s begin with the first step I took. I grew up in a small town of hardly over 25,000 people. That may seem like a lot on paper, but when searching for contemporaries, and band mates, it couldn’t have been a less helpful setting. Though I did begin to thrive as I grew older, meeting several well practiced musician that were will to practice and trade secrets,  it didn’t beat the world I found upon moving to larger town with a prominent music scene.  Though only you can ultimately decide where you’d like to live (Austin, Texas has a great synth scene) there are tools out there to help. 

Once you’ve made a firm decision on moving it is wise to create a space for practicing your daily composing.  Create a clean space with some of your favorite objects i.e. inspirational items, possible collected from travel, or mementos with a significant meaning. Otherwise, you’ll want to give this room the Feng Shui treatment.

 A Daily Routine 

Setting up a daily routine as a musician can be incredibly hard to comprehend for most.  Societies expectation of musicians are of useless longhairs sitting around and drinking all day party and partying all night long, but this can be further from the life of actual successful musicians. I will compare my own daily ritual to that of writer Stephen King. Waking up as early as five in the morning allows me to not only take advantage of spending mornings alone and writing it, but builds on another concept called the Alpha flow state. This idea comes from the different wave states your brain enters during sleep, meditation, or focus. The state you wake in is called Alpha, but can be fleeting. Regardless of what your daily routine is if you’d like to be successful songwriter, then having the self-discipline to set aside time for writing is the most important aspect. With my daily ritual I’m allowed time to experiment unbothered by society and most important of all, roommates. By entering the Alpha state immediately, I am able to write in a more focus manner. 

Songwriting Groups (Not Just An Echo Chamber)  

If you can’t seem to make time on your own perhaps due to intense working hours, or perhaps you have kids or roommates and never have time to yourself it’s important to start or join a song-writing group. This allows you to get creative with other people perhaps get feedback on your work, expand ideas, and even get into other peoples perspectives on songwriting. You can search craigslist or a local message board to find like-minded individuals. This also feeds into a daily or weekly routine and set aside time specifically to work on music, which is the most important thing if you’re going to grow as a songwriter or composer. 

Recording and Critical Listening 

Lastly the probably the most important out of any of these tips is to record yourself by hearing what you’re capable of or not capable of you’re able to feed back into feedback system. Recording oneself is incredibly important, as you must accompany a metronome and play perfectly each take. However, listening back is even more important as you’re able to understand more about what you desire of composition and the kinds of things you think are missing from your work. 

Consider trying out loop pedals as to build multilayer arrangements quickly and on the fly. If you own a MacBook computer then you’re already capable of using the digital audio workstation, Garageband, to take an arguably more efficient take on multilayer recording. There’s really no end to the amount of experimenting you can do with in a digital audio workstation like this or others. Additionally working with MIDI can be not only beneficial for your songwriting but can facilitate as a winning tool for music theory. 

 Music theory is where we end this article. In the past only those fortunate enough to obtain a proper music education could learn music theory. In this day and age everyone is able to teach him or herself this seemingly endless world of music just with the computer. Programs such as guitar pro allow one to dabble in bass, piano and etc. just with the click of the button. The possibilities are endless. 

These steps are incredibly important to thrive as a musician. This day and age recording and arranging is as easy as ever, as long as you have the drive.

4 Tips To Jumpstart Your Songwriting Routine