THE INTUITIVE APPROACH
Most songwriters begin intuitively. This means they make decisions based on what "feels right," or what "seems right" based on their experience. I want to emphasize that the intuitive approach is indispensible; I will talk in a moment about all the different ways the intuitive approach can sometimes cripple your productivity and your development, but it's important to remember that any creative artist will (and should) rely on intuition much of the time. That being said, I find that the biggest problem my songwriting students have is an inability to do things that are counterintuitive. This inability is a great hindrance; in many cases it has a devastating effect on an artist's output.
The biggest obstacle for me and my students is the difficulty of moving beyond the intuitive. We're wired to act intuitively; this is perfectly natural. That doesn't mean that it's always healthy. When you learn something, you add new ideas to the ones you had before. These new ideas often have an uphill battle trying to break into the already-established group. This is true with all kinds of learning. It's true with songwriting, which is in fact a skill and craft that is learned. It is not a magical or inexplicable event when someone puts rhythms, melody, chords and lyrics together. There is always an element of the personal in anything creative that's worth a damn, but it must be combined with knowledge of the craft.
My goal in teaching songwriting is to give you the tools to write the best music you can in your style.
(note-- certainly there are some elements of the craft that may be understood intuitively. Most novice songwriters know, for example, that a pop song should not be one hundred minutes long. You don't have to learn this from a teacher. There are many crucial structural techniques, however, that are not intuitive at all, except perhaps for the most gifted. Most of these concepts are easy to grasp once they're explained to you.)
There is another reason songwriters often have trouble accepting non-intuitive ideas about the craft, the work needed, etc. Life is filled with work, and filled with rules. To survive, most of us have to spent a fair amount of each day doing things we'd prefer to avoid. Sometimes the most painful part of this is having to cater to the whims of others.
Creativity offers a seductive alternative. After many years of songwriting, I realized that I didn't like the world as it exists today. I felt powerless to change it, and loved songwriting because it is an opportunity to create my own little two-minute world. In the world of the song I am writing, I get to make every decision for everyone. There is no dissent; I am like an all-powerful dictator. I assume other creative people feel this as well. When you go to a teacher to help you improve your songwriting, it can feel as if you are giving up some of this control. But you don't want to! And who does this guy think he is, telling me what to do with MY song? (see "THE SONG CRITIQUE APPROACH" below.)
When I teach songwriters, I use different approaches depending on the needs and desires of the student.
THE SONG CRITIQUE APPROACH
Some of my students bring original material for me to critique. This is not my favorite way to teach, and I don't believe it is the most productive for the student. The problem with this method is that any time I make a suggestion, I don't want to just tell a student what they should do. If I did that, I'd just be rewriting their song for them. I prefer to explain the philosophy behind my suggestion and let the student use the new information to do their own rewriting. Often I find that students are stung by the criticism and it's difficult for me to sell them on whatever new concept I'm telling them about. Creative people (including me) take it very personally when their work is criticized, and many times over the years I've had people react with anger. Sometimes they start attacking me personally, questioning the legitimacy of my credentials. These days the most common negative reaction is an apparent skepticism about my suggestions.
To minimize this kind of time-wasting unpleasantness, I ask that songwriters prepare in the following way before they ask me to critique a song.
1. List all the things you don't like about your song.
2. List all the things you do like about your song.
3. Give me this information before I hear your song.
This will help avoid the phenomenon of pretending that you want a critique, when in fact you are looking forward to a bunch of praise. (Incidentally, everyone, including me, wants to hear people say nice things about their songs. The problem is when you pretend that you want honest criticism when you actually want nothing of the sort.) I ask students to only bring in songs that they think are imperfect in some way. If you think your song can't be improved upon, please don't play it for me without making that clear upfront.
MY PREFERRED APPROACH
I prefer to teach songwriting as a very complicated craft, involving mastery of many disparate but nevertheless interrelated musical skills. (Chord progressions, melody writing, song structure and rhythms are all very different. They operate together in a song, and often a weakness in one area can undercut the effectiveness of strengths in other areas.) Sometimes I demonstrate musical ideas with musical examples (usually written by others, sometimes written by me). It's also possible to learn musical concepts in the context of a song critique, but only when the student understands what I wrote in the previous section.
Many musical concepts can be learned through exercises. It's essential to understand that a musical exercise is part of the learning process. It's almost certainly counterintuitive, at least in part. This means that working on musical exercises typically lacks the adrenaline thrill of being creative. Many students resist working and learning because of this; our current era of childish instant gratification has probably contributed to this phenomenon. It's essential to remember this-- being creative is not a passive experience like riding a roller coaster.
Songwriting is work. If it never feels like work to you, you're probably not very good at it. (The popular conception of an artistic genius is a person who creates without having to break a sweat. I've known a bunch of musical geniuses; all of them worked very hard at their music. None of them believed that everything they did intuitively was automatically sacred and beyond criticism. Geniuses work very hard. If you're not a genius, you should probably work even harder).
Here's what I mean by work. I don't necessarily mean neglecting everything important in your life, and grinding out songs 8 hours a day. Sometimes the most difficult work need not take a lot of time. In general, if you're willing to accept information that is foreign to you, and do work that involves ideas that are counterintuitive, you can get results in less time than someone who resists the unfamiliar. In short, if you are unwilling or unable to spend much time each day working on your writing, I advise you to make yourself open to any and all new ideas. Otherwise, you are unlikely to get desirable results. If you have a lot of time available to work on your writing, so much the better; it's still advisable to keep an open mind about new concepts.
If you've read and accepted all of the above, it will be a good foundation for the process of improving your songwriting.
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