Songwriting: My Third Lesson – Songwriting tips to write quicker

Here’s one of my favourite songwriting tips

My friend and fellow songwriter Matt Blick recently – http://www.mattblick.com/2012/10/you-need-deadlines-slight-return.html – wrote a blog post full of songwriting tips about the importance of deadlines. I am not QUITE shamelessly ripping it off, but the third lesson I wish to share with you is a similar title extolling…

Songwriting Tips: The Importance of Deadlines

Matt rightly points out deadlines have an immensely motivating element to them. They bring a sense of urgency to getting things done, a sense of importance, or even a sense of impending doom.

This is not going to be an especially long post, simply because I’m applying my own songwriting tips and I’ve aptly set myself a deadline to write it in. I have 8 minutes left.

Set yourself ludicrously short deadlines to write SOMETHING in

I often set myself what others might call unreasonably short periods of time to do things in. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but when it comes to songwriting, it’s not like anyone’s life depends on it. Of all my songwriting tips, this is possibly the most powerful tip for getting things done.

So, what I often do, is set myself 30 minutes to write a verse, or rather AT least a verse. Note that the requirement is not that it be brilliant, or original, or unique, or that you are even that happy with it… it just requires that it be:

a) at least a verse; and

b) that it is a whole verse.

When this is the ONLY requirement you set yourself, you can get to a ‘finished’ (albeit imperfect to-be-polished) product verrrry quickly.

6 minutes.

I did this the other night for the umpteenth time, certainly I’ve lost count of the number of times I do this deadline tactic. This time, I managed to get a whole song out. I actually love the melody of this song, and many of the lines and lyrics, and it is definitely a ‘finished piece’ in the sense that it has all the sections I wanted it to have. The melody is pretty darn concrete, and the themes are what I want them to be. It’s not the final draft, but it’s a really good first draft (for what I wanted it to be at least).

In previous iterations of this exercise, I’ve really only managed a verse in 30 minutes. An imperfect one I’m not that fussed by. As I got more practice at hitting the ground running and moving on, I managed to start getting a verse and a chorus done. Then a couple of different verses, and two possible choruses. Then a bridge would come. All in 30 minutes. Chords, melody, lyrics, structure, even a solo sometimes!

Sure, I could spend another 30 minutes or longer polishing it up, but that was for another day. I couldn’t comfort myself with the thought of ‘ahhh I’ll just extend the deadline’ – that defeats the point. Having a ludicrously short deadline gets you SOMETHING to work with, with minimal time and outlay. In fact, having that minutia of time HELPS you!

3 minutes.

There’s nothing wrong with coming back and polishing it up after setting a ludicrously short deadline, but setting those short deadlines help take advantage of the Perato rule – the 80/20 rule – where 80% of the results come with 20% of the total effort, but that final 20% takes 80% of the total effort. In the same way, setting shorter deadlines get you to a 80% finished product much much quicker, and then you have all the time in the world to polish it up…. but in reality I still suggest shorter periods of time. Businesses work on the Perato rule, and songwriting need be no different.

2 minutes.

For me, 30 minutes to do SOMETHING (whether at least a verse, or at least a verse and chorus, etc) works perfectly. I tend to work in 30 minute units (those who’ve seen ‘About a Boy’ will understand the logic), and I can track how long activities have taken me by doing it this way. But you can find another period of time that suits you better, e.g. 1 hour, 15 minutes. But I’d suggest you stay shy of more than an hour, because it will start to drag out.

1 minute.

To close, I just want to agree wholeheartedly with Matt Blick’s comments on the importance of deadlines set by others, but I also want to advocate using ludicrously short deadlines set by YOURSELF as a way to get something half-decent very quickly – use that time limit as an pro, not a con. When you can learn to harness that for your benefit, you start to become a better songwriter, as you learn to get from A to B in an albeit less than perfect manner, but at least you got there, and in time you’ll find your ‘journey’ gets more and more effective in even that short space of time.

TIME

EDIT: I spent about the same amount of time editing the above post than I did writing it. But 80% of what I wanted to say was there before I started editing. It was just a matter of polishing up that first draft to get across EXACTLY what I wanted.