Songwriting became easier for me after I learned a bunch of songs. That way I knew the format of most songs and what I thought made my favorite songs great and could try and put that in my music. Mark Levine makes a book about jazz theory that really had a great impact on my songwriting. Whether you're into jazz or not, it's a great book and can be applied to virtually all music.

Hey Dylan, thanks for the tip. I've got the book in my amazon wishlist now. Knowing jazz theory can help you in every style of music. I agree that learning songs helps you understand structure a lot better. You get a "feel" for how songs are put together.

Listening to a variety of music is a great idea, but I think it's good to focus on one and master it before moving on to others.

good exercise i have tried to improve songwriting is to dissect a song you love, especially if its in the same style you want to make:

try and just create the song from scratch by ear, by just listening to the song you like. i grabbed my bass dissected the bassline, grabbed the keyboard dissected the synth lines, dissected the guitar lines with my guitar, then dissected the vocal lines on guitar. drums are easy. then wrote them out in guitar pro. it trains your ear to detect pitch too, works great if you don't use any aids to help with pitch. you are soaking up all the "lessons" and "rules" of songwriting that your idol uses. this is great when you can't figure out "WHY" it sounds good, you just know it DOES sound good. because even if you can't figure out WHY if you can soak up the elements that make it good then you won't need to know why, it'll just come out of you over time and distance

another great idea is to try and copy a song you love but not be anal about it, just get the gist of it. it starts out sounding like a ripoff then at somepoint you abandon the copying and just "take it from there" and you end up with an original sounding song. you start off copying to get a platform then from there it becomes a new song.

the way i was teaching my friends songwriting was by making them learn one scale. and then tell them to make a song just in that scale, as the notes will work together. when they do that for a while they can learn another scale and do the same thing. after they've built up about 4 scales or so, you can then learn to cross keys and scales and abandon rules and get some less robotic sounds come out. i think learning musical theory, internalising it, and then throwing it out is great. and lets not forget the MOST IMPORTANT RULE: ask yoruself all the time "DOES THIS SOUND GOOD". i'm more about getting something that sounds good, rather than trying to force myself into a particular style and feel. i thoguht i was a metal guy but realy when i just focus on making something sound good i end up going more down funk territory

Learning the structure of songs you love really helps. The format is like the basic blueprint for the song.

yeah definately man. that's actually been a focus for me lately. and the way i'm picking up stuff is by doing that dissection technique above for some songs i really like. i really get what dream theatre says when they said "its easy to write a 14 minute song, its harder to do a 4 minute 'tight' song" i totally get them. its so easy to just add sections and make your song go forever, its much harder to get it concise and communicate everything within a shorter amount of time.

Phil, that's right bro. If you listen to and learn the songs you love then you can understand what makes them sound so special to you. Then you can use that knowledge in your own songwriting efforts. I think long and short songs each have their own difficulties. You ever notice how it's usually the technically brilliant musicians that usually have the longer songs? It gives them a chance to stretch out and use their chops and explore different ideas musically. It's hard to do that if all you know is three chords.

i find it much harder to make short awesome songs than long ones, i've made plenty of "epic long progessive" songs, i find they flow out a lot easier, but when you try and keep something concise and in the same theme,you have about 5-6 different ideas of where you can take the song but you can only pick one of those ideas, i find it very difficult to pick the right one as i like all the ideas, where if its a long song you could just put all the 6 ideas in.

I've been studying songwriting this last year, a little after I got into RYV and training singing seriously. Seemed like a natural combination. I totally hear you phil on the short awesome songs. I started out a guitarist writing big 8 minute instrumentals trying to be like Dream Theater, so it was a challenge getting more concise and focused songs.

I've read a number of books on songwriting and by far the best overall primer I've found is Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting by Robin Frederick. It has sections on the lyrics, music, and structure. The music part is what I find lacking in many 'how to write songs' books. The tips in this book also helped me dissect songs that I listen to a lot better and learn more from each listen.

Another great online resource is www.songu.com. They have articles and probably 6-8 interactive live instructor classes each month on various songwriting topics, but the most valuable thing of all to me is the feedback sessions where you bring your song to one of the pro songwriters and they give you feedback on all different aspects of the song. It is a pay site, about $20/month but if you consider you're getting several hours of live instruction every month is a really good deal (compared to 1 single voice lesson which costs more than that).

Once you're a bit more advanced, a good book on screenwriting is probably the next best thing. Songs really are little movies or scenes and screenwriters are some of the best at creating emotional/visual stories from words. "Story" by Robert Mckee and "Writing For Emotional Impact" are my two favorites.

random1destiny: good post, very interesting stuff.

Knowing basic music theory helps in writing a LOT! Knowing what chords are in a specific key/mode is very helpful. You can also play stuff outside of that, it helps you know how much you can break the rules and still have a coherent song. Once you learn the major scale and how chords and all 6 other modes are derived from it then you can play in any key you want easily.