Today I’d like to talk about how to write songs faster. If you’re an artist writing for yourself and you have all the time in the world, this may not matter so much to you. However, if you work professionally as a songwriter or write production music for libraries, you’re often given tight deadlines, sometimes only days in advance of when they’re due.
The shortest amount of time I had to write a song was literally a few hours, and although I don’t generally enjoy working under that kind of stress, it was an amazing exercise in efficiency. Some people are shocked when they hear that I wrote a song the morning before a major performance, but I really don’t attribute to any special abilities or exceptional creativity. Instead, I used the techniques that I’m going to share below to start and finish a song in only a few hours.
Borrow chord progressions and song structures from other songs
Unlike melodies, chord progressions and song structures aren’t copyright-protected, so you’re free to take them and use them in your music without committing plagiarism. This is such a simple but fast way to get your song started, because I know I personally get stuck on this part of my writing sometimes.
Create templates in your DAW
This is a simple but effective technique you’ve probably already heard of, however it’s worth mentioning here. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, creating a template simply means opening up your DAW (Logic, Cubase, etc.), loading instruments and sounds, and saving that as a template. For example, maybe you write a lot of rock music, so you create various templates such as a “hard rock” template and a “soul rock” template with the instruments already loaded.
This can speed up the process immensely because it often takes time to find the right sounds for your song and load the instruments into your DAW. This is especially useful for people film composers and people writing production music for libraries, where turnarounds are tight.
Spend half your songwriting session on finishing a song, and the other half on starting new songs
What I often do is for one half of the session (usually the first half while I’m feeling inspired) I will open up a project that’s currently in progress and continue working on it. For the second half of the session, I put away the song I’m working on and start one or two new projects from a clean slate.
My goal is not to write a finished verse or get wrapped up in the smaller details, but simply to get ideas down and put myself back into a creative headspace, since working on the same song for several hours can put me in a creative dry spell. This also helps because when the day comes that I have to write and submit a song for a deadline only a few days in advance, I will have a library of ideas to draw from. The most time-consuming part of the songwriting process is often the very beginning when you’re getting your first ideas down, so if you can have a library of songs already started at your disposal, you’ll save yourself a lot of time using one of those rather than starting from scratch.
Batch your activities throughout the session
What I mean by this is if you’re working on 3 songs during your songwriting session, work on the lyrics to all of them at once, then the melody, then the chords, and so on. Most of us take the approach of working on one song at a time and trying to tackle all the different song elements at once, but this can be a slower approach because each time we switch from lyrics to melody, or melody to harmony, a bit of time is naturally needed to transition into the headspace required for that particular element.
This may not be your usual style, but try it before you decide it’s not the workflow for you. Some people like rotating between different song elements because if they get stuck on the melody for example, they can move to the lyrics and work on that in the meantime. I use this method myself, but when I need to write several songs in a short span of time I find that working on each song element for all the songs at once is much faster. As I mentioned, each song element (lyrics, harmony, melody, etc.) requires a different headspace, and every time you switch between them some time is needed to get into the flow.