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Learn How to Write Songs
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In this video system I show you step by step how to write a song, even if you've never written one before. More »
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Guitar Buying Guide for Beginners
If you’re looking for a beginner acoustic guitar, your best bet is to stay within the $200-500 price range.
Anything cheaper than this is most likely going to sound terrible and be very hard to play, which will make you never want to pick up a guitar or write a song again. It’s possible to get a decent used guitar for under $200, but only if you know what you’re looking for and what to avoid.
Here are a few things to look for when buying your first guitar:
What Instrument Should You Play If You Want to Write Songs?
While it’s true that you can write songs on any instrument, certain instruments are easier to write songs with than others.
First, let’s talk about what qualities a songwriter should look for in an instrument:
1. Can play chords easily
2. Rhythmic in nature, doesn’t need another instrument to keep the beat
3. Easy to learn quickly
Chords in Rap Songs VS Chords In Rock Songs
Chords and chord progressions are incredibly important in the songwriting process. As you start to learn about how chord progressions work, you might start to wonder if different genres use different chord progressions.
For example, do rap songs always use different chords than rock songs?
The answer to this chords do not change much between genres.
Rap, rock, country, metal, punk, etc… are all based off of the same 6 chords.
What key should you write in?
When you start writing a new song, one of the first questions you should as yourself is “what key do I want this song to be in?”
Don’t worry about which key sounds better. Very few people can hear the difference between keys – even most veteran musicians won’t be able to tell which key you’re playing in, and they won’t consistently think that one key sounds better than another.
Intro To Songwriting
When you start writing songs it’s important to consider whether you want to write in the singer-songwriter style, or if you want to write full arrangements for bands. I recommend starting with just the basic singer-songwriter style, as it’s much simpler and writing for bands can get overwhelming if you’re inexperienced.
Basic – Singer-Songwriter Style Song
This is the easiest way to write a song, and what we’ll be focusing on in this guide. You’ll create basic song, written for a chord playing instrument like guitar or piano. This can be extremely simple to do, as it consists of just five parts:
Step 1 – Pick a Chord Progression
The first and most important step to writing a song is picking a good chord progression. The chords provide the musical foundation upon which everything else is built. It’s incredibly important that you pick a good chord progression, because if you don’t the entire rest of the song will sound off.
Fortunately, picking a good chord progression is easy because you don’t have to actually create your own unique progression. Chord progressions have been recycled for hundreds of years.
You see, there are really only 6 chords that matter.
Step 2 – Pick a Tempo and Rhythm
After you’ve decided on the four chord progression you want to use, you need to decide exactly HOW you’ll play that progression.
You need to decide on two things:
1. Tempo
2. Rhythm/Strum Pattern
Step 3 – Create A Simple Melody
Before you start trying to create a melody line, it’s important that you get really good at playing your chord progression with the rhythm you decided on in the last step. Just play through it over and over, until you’re completely comfortable with it. If you’re an experienced guitar player this may only take you a few play-throughs, but if you’re inexperienced just keep playing it until you feel confident.
In my opinion, creating a melody/vocal line is the most difficult, but also most beautiful part of the songwriting process.
Step 4 – Turn Your Progressions Into a Verse, Chorus and Bridge
Congratulations! If you’ve gotten this far, that means you’ve written your first song part. Good job!
Now you need to decide exactly WHAT you’ve written.
At this stage, you’re trying to write either a verse or a chorus–you don’t want to worry about the bridge until the core of the song is done. So now you just need to decide whether the song part you’ve written would be better if used as a verse or a chorus.
Step 5 – Pick a Time-Tested Arrangement
Arranging the parts of your song is probably the easiest part of the song writing process, since the less interesting and original you are, the better people will think your song is. People like songs that use arrangements that they’re used to, so your best bet as a songwriter is to just give the people what they want to hear (at least for this part of the process–there are plenty of other opportunities of you to get creative, especially with the lyrics and melodies).
There are tons of ways you could arrange your song, but for the purpose of this guide, I’m just going to show you the most commonly used, time-tested arrangement out there today which is the one I recommend you start with.