How I’d Learn Songwriting (If I Had To Start Over)
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In this episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast, we're talking about how I'd learn songwriting if I had to start over.
After writing songs and continuing to learn for around 20 years, I'd certainly do things differently if I had the chance to do it all again. So, in this podcast I'm going to walk you through exactly what I would do in what order if I had to learn songwriting from scratch. What I'd do if I wanted to learn songwriting but had never written a single song before. The ultimate "songwriting for beginners" guide if you will.
So, let's talk about how I would learn songwriting if I had to start from the beginning.
Transcript:
In this episode we are talking about what I would do if I had to start all the way at the beginning. If I was back to being 11, 12 year old me, and I knew that I had to relearn songwriting from scratch, knowing nothing at all, this is what I would tell myself to go learn in what order. Let's talk about it. [music]
Hello friend, welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I am your host as always Joseph Adala, honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk songwriting with me. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free music theory guide. A few of the things we're going to talk about here are actually in that guide. That will be an easy way for you to learn what I'm talking about. Some of these steps, most of these steps are not music theory, but admittedly music theory is going to be a part of it because that was the most impactful thing that I learned in maybe my entire songwriting journey. The biggest A B switch of like, "Oh my goodness, I just opened a whole new world" was theory. Some of it is incredibly useful. That's the songwritertheory.com slash music theory guide.
So, the first step is really understanding at a high level three things, I think. One is keys, just at a high level, which we'll talk about in a second, phrases and song sections.
So, let's talk about keys first. When I say understand keys at a high level, I don't mean what notes are in keys.
I don't even necessarily mean some version of what keys are and why they work that way. I'm just talking about understanding that generally an entire song is written in A key.
So, you understand that a song might be in A major or it might be in B minor and that is a key.
And then understanding that that means that probably the song 99, maybe 100% of the time is utilizing notes that are in that key. Every chord is a chord from the key and every chord is a chord that is made up of notes in the key and every note of your melody is probably going to be in the key. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, of course.
There are many songs that are perfectly diatonic, which means literally every note that everything ever does in the song is a note from the key. Tons of songs like that, maybe even most.
But there are also a lot of songs that will have borrowed chords and a bunch of other things. There's way more you can do than just have every single thing in key. But when we're starting with songwriting, you don't want to worry about any of that because when you're a beginner, you have to do beginner things. And part of doing beginner things is just understanding that at first you're best served by just understanding, okay, if I write a song in the key of C major, what that means is that my melody, what I sing is going to be notes from C major. Again, you don't need to know what those notes are.
And also the chords are going to be chords from C major. We're seeing another way. The chords are going to be chords that are made up of notes that are the notes of C major.
You're not worried about memorizing what C major is and exactly the notes versus G major versus A major. Not worried about any of that. Is that useful down the road? Yes, for sure. Is it necessary now? Absolutely not. But at least if you understand what a key is and how it relates to a song that a song is usually in a singular key and the ramifications of that, that's the first step.
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0:00 Intro
1:22 Step 1: Understand Keys, Phrases, + Song Sections at a High Level
17:32 Step 2: Stock Chord Progression 4 Chord Songs
21:56 Step 3: Start Diving Deeper Into Lyric Writing
31:33 Step 4: Upgrade Your Chords + Theory Understanding
41:00 Step 5: Grow As You Go