Effective Brainstorming

Many beginners try and write songs by 'consolidation', i.e. by building them from the bottom up, piece by piece, the same way they might build a brick house. They start with a title, or with a line, and start writing more lines until the structure of the song has been sufficiently filled out. While it is certainly possible for a songwriter to successfully use this method, quite often it gets them stuck or lost, as they don't really have the 'big picture view' of their song while they're writing it.

A more effective method is writing songs by 'elimination', i.e. by starting with a large, thorough collection of thematically related ideas, and 'carving out' the song, the same way you might carve a sculpture from a block of granite. Here the writer might have five or more pages of potential ideas they've written, from which they can then choose the pieces they need and cull those that they don't.

This method tends to work better, as it breaks the songwriting process down into smaller, more managable steps, and gives the songwriter a better perspective of what the finished product might look like much earlier on in the process.

So how do you get a this 'large, thorough collection of thematically related ideas'? Begin by writing your song topic at the top of a notebook page. Here are examples of topics that you might want to write a song about:

• The excitement of watching a sports team
• The fear of asking a girl for a date
• The pain of losing a loved one

Etc. Now, concentrate fairly deeply on the idea and write anything down that comes to mind. In other words, brainstorm the idea. Go on any kind of tangent you like. Don't stop until you feel you've explored it as thoroughly as it can be. This may take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, an may require many pages of writing.

The most important thing to know about brainstorming is that you do not 'judge' the ideas as they come out. The elimination process happens after the brainstorming process. Be sure to write down every idea you think of, as each idea has the potential to generate a subset of new ideas, i.e. a not-so-great idea may provide inspiration for one or more much better ideas.

So the most important thing at this point is just to write. Some other "don'ts" include:

• Don't edit your ideas as you go, this can seriously interrupt the flow.
• Don't think of any ideas as a 'line' or a 'title' or otherwise at this stage.
• Don't consider rhyme and rhythm yet.

If your brainstorming starts to run dry, or you would like more inspiration, you might think about your song idea in terms of:

Sensory experiences:

• Touch
• Taste
• Sight
• Hearing
• Smell

For example, refering to the idea 'the excitment of watching a sports team', you might think of the sound of the screaming crowd when their team makes a great play, for example. This might then spark a new set of ideas.

Or think about the five W's and one H:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How

Who might be the characters involved in this song? The players, the crowd, the umpires, commentators etc. When are the events in this song taking place? Now, last night, this afternoon etc.

Of course not all of these will be relevant to any particular song, they're just worthy of consideration if you need something to kick of the brainstorming, or to get it moving again if it stalls.

This process is actually something you'll get better at with practice.


This week's challenge:

1. Take three seperate song ideas that you'd like to write about. See last weeks lesson if you really can't think of anything, or browse through some fiction books on Amazon and find some intriguing titles of books you've never read before. Then use those to start generating ideas.
2. Now brainstorm each idea in the way described above. Most song ideas won't be exhausted until at least 3 or 4 pages of brainstorming has been done.
   

From there you can decide if you'd like to start writing a song from the brainstormed ideas you've generated. We'll look at how to do this in coming weeks.


RECOMMENDED RESOURCE

Learn To Play Piano With 'Rocket Piano'

Being a successful songwriter, people often ask me how they can achieve a similar level of success. How can I write beautiful melodies? How can I arrange rich sounding chords?

From my observations about myself and other great songwriters around me, it's clear that one of the most important skills an aspiring songwriter can learn is playing the piano. Not only does it allow you to perform your own songs, but it's an invaluable aid to writing, and it allows you to "get inside" the songs written by great artists of the past to learn how they did it.

If you've never played piano before, or you have and you'd like to improve on your skills, I recommend you check out 'Rocket Piano'. In a nutshell, it's a course that teaches you how to play step-by-step with video and audio files. It also gives you three books to take you from beginner to advanced.

Here's the link to the 'Rocket Piano' website.