SONGWRITING EXERCISES
Songwriting exercises help you do a couple of things:
- Practice your songwriting skills so over time the entire process comes more easily, and
- Have techniques in your tool bag to get you beyond the blank page.
We’ve selected some that are quick and easy and given you some more if those don’t suit your fancy!
The point is, use exercises to have fun, grow your songwriting skills and end up with a few unexpectedly new songs!
Songwriting Exercises: Quick Drills (1 Hour Or Less!)
More Songwriting Exercises
Tempo Change With Drum Tracks Songwriting Exercise
Free drum tracks with no augmentation are a great way to change up your songwriting. They're also a fantastic way to practice accompaniment in a...
Create A Songwriting Habit
Because starting a song is the hardest thing to do, having a ready-made bucket of ideas, thoughts, observations, lines, hooks and cool words is one...
Auto-Generate Chord Progressions
One of the easiest ways to tune your ear into different sounds is to force the creation of variety in your chords. This gets you out of common...
Song Vamp
Using someone else's song to help you get started isn't cheating, and it's not copyright infringement unless you don't change it significantly. So,...
Ghost Songs: Lyrics First
Using someone else's song to help you get started isn't cheating, and it's not copyright infringement unless you don't change it significantly. So,...
Rhyme Pattern Proxy
This song exercise is great to use if you're stuck on a song line and can't seem to make the song work. It's a great way to spur new ideas and...
Follow Your Own Rules
This song exercise is meant to get you outside of your normal routine, and create some variety for you as you approach a song. TO START: Give...
Song Prompt: The Life Of An Historic Character
There are great characters who create great stories throughout history. The best thing about those stories is that all you have to do is a little...
Song Prompt: Picture Of Yourself
I recently got a song prompt at a songwriting workshop (yes - a virtual workshop), that initially I was going to pass on. The prompt? Find a...
2 Hour Songwriting Exercise
Whether you aspire to write songs in Nashville, or just write great songs, the 2 Hour Songwriting Exercise could be one of the best ways to ramp up...
Write For An Artist
This exercise focuses on writing for another artist. You'll work through some simple steps to (1) find an artist that works with your style of...
Turning Poems Into Songs
Turning poems into songs sounds like something that's pretty easy to do. After all, the words are there. The rhyme is there. The meter is there. All...
Song Sketching: Using Story Arcs
If you've ever been in a high school English class, you've studied how drama is created in a play, a novel or short story. So you knows the "story...
What’s Furniture In Lyrics?
You've probably gotten song critiques that suggest you need more furniture in lyrics to give the song a stronger sense of showing versus telling. To...
Point Of View (POV) Switch Exercise
One of the easiest ways to increase your understanding of point of view (POV) is to take a song you've completed and work through each of the POV...
