Songwriting Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Mark JW Graham: Singing Lessons Nottingham

May 4, 2013July 6, 2025

Songwriting: My Fourth Lesson – Looking for songwriting inspiration?

In previous blog posts on songwriting I’ve covered various topics, namely just getting something being a great way to get good songs quickly, how writing about anything or nothing allows you to get the creative juices flowing, and how to…

This time I want to tackle something from a more philosophical perspective.

One of the most common comments from students who claim to be songwriters is that they hate waiting for songwriting inspiration – and that it seems to be months between inspired creative bursts.

I learned this the hard way:

Don’t wait for inspiration.

Now I’m not saying that inspiration isn’t helpful, particularly songwriting inspiration, that moment where you have an inkling of an idea and you can’t wait to have a free moment to get it out of you, or those times where you have a topic you’re burning to write about that spurs you to a complete song in an hour or two… However, every songwriter will tell you that those unprompted moments of focus and unbridled clarity for songwriting inspiration are infrequent at best.

The reality of life is, we’re rarely as inspired as we dream we should be or could be. We often sit down ‘waiting’ for inspiration to strike, as if it’s the universe’s fault we’re just not inspired.

Contrary to this common artist’s mantra, the answer is NOT to wait for songwriting inspiration to strike, as you may as well be waiting for the rest of your life. The answer is simple, and straightforward, but not easy.

The answer?

Write little and often, and do it regularly, with or without songwriting inspiration, whether you want to or not

There are a number of great books like ‘Outliers’ and ‘The Talent Code’ that tell you about how the most skilled people in particular fields have spent around 10,000 hours on that skill. While those people will undoubtedly have great focus and determination, their greatest asset their drive to just get down to doing their particular activity every day – whether or not they feel as inspired as they should be. Athletes, musicians, inventors… songwriters… we all need to get down and do it, and do it often – that’s how you get good at it. With or without inspiration. Like most things, the path to being a great writer is plagued with things you don’t want to do in the first instance, but are necessary to progress to the next level.

Trust me, it works!

One of the more interesting songs I wrote I was forced to write in preparation for a songwriting workshop I was going to. It had been a whole month since the last one and I’d been inspired in two or three different ways and so had two or three 80% complete songs. However in the whole month I just couldn’t locate the songwriting inspiration to finish them. In the end, I wrote a song out of sheer frustration in the last 20 minutes of a train journey home just before the workshop. In reality it wasn’t as good as I felt the other songs could’ve been if I’d finished them, but it was a self contained song. Self consistent, strong lyrically and melodically, but it wasn’t written from a place of inspiration, rather it was written from a place where I had a complete LACK of inspiration. However, it was the skills I’d been developing through regularly writing and sharpening my writing skills that allowed me to write a song, almost devoid of inspiration, that was still relatively strong as a song in its own right.

What is the essence of good songwriting? How does songwriting inspiration come into this?

So then, if someone can write a decent song in 20 minutes without any strong level of inspiration striking, what does that say about the essence of songwriting? Maybe that’s too broad a subject… what does it say about the importance of inspiration in writing a good song?

In my opinion, inspiration is the icing on the cake of determination – it can really enhance the flavour of the cake, but its the determination that is the minimum necessary component to make it to a complete song. I’m not a huge fan of cheesy metaphors, but inspiration is nothing without the drive to execute the inspiration through to completion. And this is so true when it comes to songwriting inspiration.

So I’d challenge you, if you’re feeling a lack of inspiration, don’t let it get you down. Just write, do it little and often, and know that you don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike before starting writing, as you can always infuse some afterwards.

November 20, 2012July 6, 2025

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.

September 29, 2012December 7, 2025

Songwriting: The Craft of Songwriting Made Easy/Hard

I was recently watching a Youtube seminar by a guy called Ralph Murphy.

Who?

Well, most of you will never have heard of him, but he was a songwriter of over 50 years, has toured the world as a performer, writer and teacher. He was a Vice-President within ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). He toured internationally giving seminars on songwriting and giving insight into what it takes to make a hit song and keep doing it. He really does break it down and make it easy to understand just how hard it is to craft a song that makes it big.

Sadly he passed away in the last few years, and I was fortunate enough to have a brief interaction with him via X/Twitter before he passed.

Here is the Youtube video of his stellar masterclass:

If you don’t have the time to watch the full video, here is a link to a blogpost by someone who has helpfully discussed the things that stood out to him from Ralph’s instruction.

Stop Releasing Every Song

Check out one or both of these links, and try some of these techniques out. You will notice a big difference in your final products if you do.

September 7, 2012December 3, 2025

Songwriting: My Second Lesson

Following on from my last post on songwriting, I wanted to share another more songwriting tips that have really hit home over the summer:

“Write about anything, whether nothing or nonsense”

…Say what?

Writer’s block?

When I got to a certain stage in my songwriting, I always wrote about something. It always had meaning, no matter how trivial. The songs and their imagery always made sense, it always had a preconceived concept at the core of it. I would write lyrics like prose devoid of music to convey what I wanted to say.

My songs were… OK. So-so.

Throw away your preconceptions

A little while ago I was at a singing teacher’s training event, and I was out for dinner with other teachers. We were chatting about songwriting, sharing songwriting tips, and one of them who is an accomplished writer with many songwriting tips of their own asked us:

“Have you ever written a song where you have no idea what it’s about?”

I was shocked by this question and the idea behind – write a song? without knowing EXACTLY what it’s meant to be about? They then proceeded to offend my preconceptions (and ego) by saying:

“Some of my best songs are songs where I’ve just written whatever comes to mind, sometimes they are about nothing, and sometimes they are complete nonsense”

I have to admit, I was pretty hammered by this. I just could not get my head around writing a song where I literally have no idea what’s it about – i.e. tantamount to nonsense. It tooks weeks, months even, to even pluck up the courage to try doing this – I mean, after all, how can you write something if you don’t know what it’s about?

I’ve now tried it, and I’m totally sold on it. It really gets the creative juices flowing. In combination with a ruthless desire just to get a song written rather than right, you can get some pretty epic songs done or 90% of the way there in record time.

Here’s an example…

I mentioned Matt Blick (@realmattblick on Twitter – www.mattblick.com online) in an earlier post on songwriting. He runs a songwriting group that meets once a month. The only condition of attendance is you have to have written and prepared a new song for that group.

The frequency means you can’t spend months agonizing over a song, but it also means you can run out of seedling ideas very quickly – or at least seedling ideas you hold in high regard.

So armed with the knowledge I acquired after my First Songwriting Lesson, I started to write a song that came 100% from this idea of writing down whatever came to mind – almost stream of consciousness style.

Hendrix

I’d recently been inspired by Jimi Hendrix’ Little Wing so I was experimenting with some similar and interesting chord structures, when the words ‘Contentment’ and ‘strolling’ popped into my head. I thought around these words for a while, and the FIRST thing that came to mind was this phrase ‘Contentment strolling hand-in-hand with ecstasy’. It makes no sense. But rather than search for something else, I ran with it.

While the phrase didn’t make sense in itself, it conjured up all sorts of neat little ideas. A song about emotions. Maybe the emotions were labels for real people that we see. Perhaps the emotions weren’t real but imaginary. Or was it was all in someone’s head. It could be it was all of these things… I liked the possible ideas so I ran with it.

And within half an hour I had two verses 90% complete. Another half-hour yielded the final version lyrics with a chord structure. Another half hour gave me the final arrangement. Here are the lyrics:

My entire thought process was ‘seeded’ by and grew from that first line. The image I liked most strongly was people strolling down a high/main street holding hands, so I wanted to mirror that with other positive emotions arm-in-arm across the street.

I thought comfort was an interesting emotion or state, and that an empty (or vacant!) chair was really intriguing imagery to capture that idea. At that stage I thought it might be interesting to draw attention to the strangeness of the song by asking the listener ‘what could that mean? meh, who could tell?’.

At that point I decided that as the first verse had been filled with positive emotions, it might be nice to have a second verse referring to negative emotions. And while I’m at it, lets have the negative emotions acting on the first – i.e. resentment of the happy ‘couples’, malice as well… and deep depression which is so self-focused it is ignorant of these tensions.

What did I learn?

This song was meant to be an exploration of themes rather than a strong narrative, but together they create a world that makes sense in itself and is very intriguing to read or hear about. It was by far one of the best songs I’ve written both musically and lyrically.

Perhaps having clarity or a deeply thought out concept before putting pen to paper isn’t as necessary as we think it is, and as long as we ‘seed’ a song with an idea, no matter how nonsensical or abstract, we can create a song borne wholly out of that idea, but in a far more interesting way than could be achieved through careful planning.

August 21, 2012July 6, 2025

Picking the right key

So, how many of you play guitar? Whether you play guitar or have ever seen a guitarist play, you will likely have come across something called a ‘capo’.

What this nifty gadget does is make it possible to shift songs from one key to another, without having to change what the fingers would be doing.

Why do we need something like this? Well, the guitar is built and tuned in such a way that some keys – like the keys of A, C, D, E and G – are really easy to play in. However, this means that all the OTHER keys in between those 5 – Ab, Bb, B, Db, Eb, F and Gb – are comparatively less easy. Not impossible, but they are undoubtedly more difficult, just because of the way the instrument is built. These notes and their related notes that fall in their scales/chords all fall either just above or just below where the pitch of the next string up starts. Put simply, this means that certain notes end up lying in difficult to reach places, or you can’t use a particular string you’d otherwise want to, or it just doesn’t seem to sound as good (to do with the resonance of certain notes and their placement on the guitar).

What’s this got to do with singing?

The exact same problems that plague guitarists also plague vocalists – but MOST singers don’t even know it’s an issue when it comes to picking the right key.

Really? How come?

The answer lies in the ‘bridges’ of the voice. I’ve talked before about ‘bridges’ in the voice. Bridges are just passages from one area of the voice to another.

At certain points in a singers range, the voice moves through a bridge or passageway (referred to as ‘passaggi’ or ‘passaggio’ in the old Italian) from one area to the next. You may well have encountered these in your voice and perceived these as ‘breaks’ or ‘disconnects’ in your voice (they’re not actually breaks, they are just difficult to cross without training).

It is ALWAYS easier to sing in between the bridges than it is to sing right on top of, or just either side of the bridges.

So what do I do to pick the right key for me?

OK, the short genuine answer is “it depends!”, but here is a general rule of thumb to follow.

1) Using a piano or guitar (or some other instrument), work out where the highest note of the song is.

2) Start by moving the key of the song so that the highest note you just identified is towards the top of your chest voice (women, your chest voice ends at A4; men, your chest voice ends at E4 – I’m omitting true basses and true altos because 99% of all men and women are tenors and sopranoes respectively). The top notes should feel comfortable. Move the key around there til it feels comfortable. Don’t skip this step.

NOTE: You may find the lowest notes in the songs with larger range requirements feel too low. Beyond further development of your chest voice (which is essential anyway!), you should note that without a functional mix to extend your range, this indicates that the song is too large in it’s range for your current vocal ability.

3) Work on making this sound full and like your speaking voice. Any disparity between your singing and speaking tonality will compromise the full extent of your tone that can be unlocked with training.

THIS is what makes a great singer. A great phrase is “half the range, double the quality”. The more you focus on quality, the less range truly matters. Great singers almost sound like their high notes are NOT that high. Why? Because they follow the above steps, and then, through training they follow the 4th step…

4) Take the key up ONE key, then repeat step 3. This step can be looped for many years to come. But the emphasis MUST be on the quality at each key change. If the quality ever diminishes at a key change, there is work to be done to develop and build quality into the voice.

Your number one objective as a singer is to SOUND GOOD!

So many think it’s to impress or riff or deliver an astounding performance. While these are not irrelevant objectives, if you make your number one priority to sound good, the extra stuff almost happens as a matter of course.

What this means is that if you have a song in a key that lands the melody you want to sing right on top of a bridge, or slightly either side of it, you will find it harder to sing than if it was somewhere between your bridges.

The crucial thing is to pick a key so that the melody fits as best it can around your bridges. Sure, it can be good practice to put a key right in the way of your bridges, but that is for practice – for performance you need to know where to put songs to get the best out of your voice.

July 17, 2012July 6, 2025

Stevie Wonder – For Your Love

The last few weeks I’ve been listening to lots of Stevie Wonder – he is an absolute monster songwriter and vocalist. This one is particularly excellent. In particular, check out the epic key changes and effortless pure high notes towards the end. The man is unbelievable.

I should also point out that he is a long-time student and friend of Seth Riggs – if you want to know more about Seth and his contribution to the progression of vocal technique (trust me, it’s important!) then just click here.

Love it.