No ideas? Half-finished ideas?
Feeling stuck is a drag. Learn how to take charge of your creative process.
Get unstuck and start writing now
A Reliable Process
Set up a schedule, write to a deadline, document and show your work
Dependable Tools
Use writing prompts, phrasing, rhyme scheme and more to move your songs forward
Creative Clarity
Use song form to write (and rewrite) until your song is complete
Songwriting shouldn't feel like a big mystery
Writing songs does take time and practice, just like playing guitar. But you can learn a step-by-step process to do more writing, more often. I've used this process myself to:
Write fourteen songs in a month, every February for the past ten years
Write a new song every week for the past year and a half
Write hundreds of library tracks for television and advertising projects
HOW IT WORKS
Sign Up
Use the secure form below to sign up for and attend the workshop live this Saturday, or just plan to watch the replay later
Take The Workshop
Learn how to set up your own writing practice and get specific tools for starting and developing your ideas
Write More Songs
Watch the replay for up to six months and use song form, prompts and deadlines to start and finish more songs
Learn how to start, develop and finish your ideas
Lots of blues guitarists would love to sing, but feel silly talking about mules and whiskey-drinking women or worry their voice can’t do the things Howlin’ Wolf’s voice does. Writing your own songs lets you speak from your own experiences while tailoring the music to your own voice’s abilities.
Ask anyone who writes songs how it’s going and they’ll have stories about getting stuck, hitting a dry spell or wishing they were getting more songs finished. In this workshop, we’ll bookend the steps for actually writing with a plan for how to set up and maintain a writing practice, so you can start, work on and finish songs just like you’d work on practicing guitar.
Songwriting is as unlimited as any other aspect of music, and that can get overwhelming. To stay focused and get good at a step-by-step writing process, we’ll use the blues form for everything in this workshop. Like haiku or the limerick, the twelve-bar blues is incredibly flexible, but you can always tell whether you’re doing it right or not, and that’s important when you’re getting started.
Writing songs, like improvising, is both an art and a craft. No one can teach you inspiration, but you can learn the mechanics of how a song is put together. That way, when you do get a great idea, you have the tools to follow through and create a complete song, instead of throwing one more idea on the “unfinished” pile.
The workshop includes a downloadable PDF detailing all the steps covered in the live stream. Think of it like attending a live clinic at a music store or a festival, only instead of just sitting in the audience scribbling madly for two hours, they let you video whole thing so you can rewatch it as many times as you like for the next six months. That will allow you to take notes and work through the ideas at a more relaxed pace, while the finite window will help you assimilate the content in a way that just knowing you have it “for later” won’t.
We’ll spend the workshop focusing on lyrics, as that’s often the hardest part of songwriting to crack. But every lyric suggests certain rhythms and phrasing, which means learning to write "lyrics-first" is not only useful and fun for its own sake, it's also a great tool for anyone looking to unlock new musical ideas for their songs.
