How to write songs and the creative process
April 1st, 2008
Before the good, the bad. Over on wikihow, the entry on How to write a song has this as the first entry.
1. Learn Music Theory.
No Way! Learn music theory. Never would have imagined that. Wow. So - What does the entry for how to cook say? Go to cooking school? Totally lame.
The good: Metafilter had a gem of a post recently on song writing. Pulling from the comments you’ll find a new NYT blog by songwriters about their creative process, NPR’s All songs considered project (Pros write a song in 48 hours), The freshman experiment about people writing a musical.
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Thanks for the shout out! We always wonder if people are actually reading. It’s been a strange experience - trying to keep our writing process completely transparent and just show everything we’re doing with the site at all times. I’ve learned a lot about songwriting in the process though. It forces me to look through these blogs to find the song moments. Since I’m generally also the book writer, that’s a new experience for me.
Not “lame” at all! You clearly have no idea how many people think that because they love music, they don’t need to learn theory to be able to write it or even perform it with a modicum of understanding of how it works.
It’s like wanting to play an instrument. For example, someone picks up an instrument and says “ohhh it’d be really great to be able to play this .. show me how!” … I reply “you need to take lessons” ..they go “WTF??! no way, i just want to play it a bit”.
ARRGHGH.
People honestly do think they can do this with no formal learning or instruction.
It is most definitely NOT a lame suggestion.
I meant lame as in “stating the obvious without offering any clues”, not that music theory isn’t important.
It’d be one thing if wikihow told me *how* to study music theory - say by recommending a book, or a school, or something with a link or two in it, but just to say ’study music theory’ is closer to useless than useful.
erm, go to a teacher? you can’t learn music unaided from a book or a website. as for a school .. yellow pages?
if a person is too stupid to figure out “how” to go learn theory, then they can’t learn theory.
haha.
no, really.
Though there is some good advice in the wikihow piece, I think “learn music theory” _is_ a lame suggestion. Plenty of great songwriters started (and many continue) not “knowing” music theory. Even before the sort of audio software people routinely use nowadays, you didn’t have to know - even - how to notate your song: the cassette recorder opened many doors to music. According to a great deal of music theory, most songs that people write are “wrong” - doesn’t stop them from being great songs.
Rule 1 - surely - is have a song you want to write (don’t write out of duty or a vague feeling that it would be a cool thing to do). (Applies to more than songs…)
While learning music theory is certainly helpful if you want to write songs it is in no way necessary and it’s absolutely not set #1, at least for most people I know.
I have nothing to support this but I’d imagine that there are plenty of genius musicians how wrote their first song well before learning any theory. And among those there are certainly some who never bothered to learn any theory at all.