Let me preface this by saying that I am by no means an expert at song writing. But recently I have dabbled in this area and really enjoyed it. I found some resources that really helped me get started and wanted to share them. I’m writing this from the perspective of already knowing the basics about music theory, like what key signatures and scales are. I have learnt to play various instruments while growing up although none really well. So I have a fairly solid knowledge of music theory. That’s not to say that if you don’t know anything about music theory you shouldn’t try and write a song. You can definitely go ahead and these tips should still be helpful to you but it does help to read up on the basics and if there is anything that you need explained feel free to message me.
Here are a few websites that are particularly good at explaining the basics of music theory.
Music Theory
Music Theory For Musicians
Basic Music Theory
Technically, I started writing (really bad) songs in primary school with a of couple friends. We never could decide and stick with a name for ourselves. At the time, we (or perhaps it was just me) were obsessed with a book about ancient goddesses. It was called Go Goddess Girl, which ended with a quiz to see which Goddess you were. The quiz said that I was Aphrodite the Greek goddess of Love and I was stoked with the result. I love everything to do with love.
I proceeded to test all my friends and we each got a different goddess. From that day took them on as our alternate personas. Thus we started off calling ourselves The Sea Goddesses (I’m not sure where the sea comes into it but hey we were young), which then evolved to The Goddess Girls. Regardless of what we called ourselves we couldn’t quite master the art of song writing.
Since then I have always loved the idea of writing songs and have tried (unsuccessfully) to write a good song throughout my years at school. It wasn’t until recently when my TV show budget was cut to save money, to help pay off our mortgage and I no longer had anything to do in my spare time, that I revisited song writing again. It’s amazing how much creativity can come out when you are not wasting your time brainlessly watching a screen. So there you go! Your first step is to stop watching TV and set aside some creative time for yourself. This time around has gone a lot more successfully I think. So far I have written three (fairly decent) songs in three different styles with three different song writing processes.
(High school music assignment to create a band, cd cover and write a song to sing in front of the class.)
Through this series of posts I’m going to attempt to give you an insight into the processes that got me to finishing my first three songs. I’ll share with you some websites that helped me along the way and some of my favourite mobile apps for assisting in the song writing process. I hope you’ll find at least some of it interesting and helpful to you. Continue reading onto Part 2.
