song writing promps

song writing promps

Exploring Songwriting Prompts: Unleashing Creativity and Inspiration

1. Introduction to Songwriting Prompts

If you want to become a better songwriter, the absolute most important thing you can do is write. A lot. Every day. So, then, why on earth would you want to waste your precious time struggling to find something to write about? This is a free and completely uncomprehensive list of songwriting prompts suitable for musicians and even poets. The point of these prompts is not to copy them verbatim, but to enable an idea to spark from them. Engaging in creative writing can bring forth newly planted seeds of inspiration, and it reinforces the craft of creating music with stuff that’s floating around your subconscious. It’s just a fun way to think about things. Too often, people waste valuable time searching for…well, something to waste their time. There are more things enveloping you to think about or getting behind doing: the slight measurement difference between sugar and salt when cooking for others and trying to measure two teaspoons when no teaspoons remain. The hustle of a Sunday Steps where you finally have the chance to talk with that person you’ve recognized from the caffeine shop, but must also moderate your energy. The vacant electricity of a small gas pump surveilled by Stop-n-Rob’s surveillance. Icky places your awareness day hypnosis during finals week while dry mopping the floor of your chicken wing emporium. Dishes drying in a strange pattern that creates the bruise-color of your room at sunset. Your absolute dread of taking outdoor showers when summer’s at its hottest. Ever wonder exactly where those songwriters got the content to fill in those verses and choruses of their music? A free association, followed by some direction can really warm the coals of imagination, so here’s your chance to play.

2. Benefits of Using Songwriting Prompts

Benefit 4: Trigger memories: You’ll be surprised how well some memories and emotions that you’d forgotten or suppressed are evoked by using songwriting prompts. You’ll often get a good songwriting start and find inspiration and direction from memories and stories from the past that the prompts uncover.

Benefit 3: Prevention of writer’s block: The most famous negative aspect of songwriting is writer’s block. That’s a creative roadblock that makes it nearly impossible for you to begin creating or finishing your work. It’s likely that writer’s block is caused by a variety of issues like negative thinking, self-doubt, lack of inspiration, or fear of failure. But addressing these negative feelings is hard. So a prompt relieves the pressure for a lyric idea to come from you.

Benefit 2: Clarity and focus: Sometimes there are too many ideas and you feel overwhelmed and unable to pick a good songwriting starting point. Sometimes, the problem is that you can’t think of any ideas at all. Songwriting prompts can guide your focus and give you a direction to explore.

Benefit 1: Encourage creativity: The purpose of a creative endeavor like songwriting is to express oneself while further developing and honing creative skills. Songwriting prompts can help by providing a concept or idea that you may not have otherwise considered. A prompt can suggest a direction to explore and push your creative boundaries.

3. Types of Songwriting Prompts

Topline prompts are related to a melody or lyric and try to get inspiration from specific situations, scenarios, or emotions. As with any creative exercise, it is all about testing the creativity and having fun. For a new track, top-line prompts revolve around specific themes, topics, and scenarios. A few other prompts surrounding objective aspects of songs are Groove and Style. These specified prompts generate defined building blocks such as a rhythm, progression, or a melody-related starting point. It is a very effective way to continually expand the creative songwriting process. The next category of prompts is subjective-based ones where the songwriters can experiment with more ambiguous titles. This type of prompt is a little more lighthearted but more open-ended, enabling the songwriter to concoct numerous songs of their own possessions. Types of subjective-themed prompts are scenarios, concepts, and emotions. Emotional prompts cover a wide spectrum of feeling, such as grief, love, fear, joy, ambivalence, or confusion. These are the most commonly used types of prompts, and they can force the songwriters to push their own emotional boundaries. All these exercises are about the songwriter trying to uplift their foundational instincts, meaning they are planned to portray their creativity and not limit it.

Songwriting prompts help musicians and writers start producing melodies and words without thinking. For songwriters, these prompts are not only tools for busting writer’s block, but also a way to get into a creative mindset. Songwriting prompts can bring a fresh perspective to a situation, which in turn leads to a different, more innovative result. From top-line prompts to genre-based, and from mood to other subjective-themed prompts, there’s no scarcity of creativity. These prompts are applicable to songwriting groups, Instagram Songwriters community, and various Facebook songwriters’ groups as well.

4. Tips for Effective Utilization of Songwriting Prompts

When engaging in a creative exploration of writing music, it often becomes useful to have an assortment of approaches to hear the music one is trying to write. These need not be present in the recording that becomes the product, but rather as stepping-stones whereby the artist can, using predetermined methods, help themselves achieve clarity to the ideas intrinsic to the structure of the song. Regarding songwriting prompts, it is often useful to use them to obtain a freshened vision of songs one is working out, of various stages of completion, thereby allowing for new connections to happen. To sort them or welcome in peace, rather than shutdown opportunities, is the entire purpose. A clean slate and a fresh beginning are intended by the songwriting prompt.

Allow Yourself: We have found a few subtle processes that seem to work for people in helping them access the creative flow that songwriting seeks to develop. In all cases, the value in songwriting prompts is almost always in the effect and the doing. Most importantly, they encourage one to allow oneself to be creative, to trust one’s instincts, and to let oneself go. A “democratic-creative” approach, as we have defined, is the core value. If one is willing to go in some direction, even if it is not the most original or complete, interesting, lurid, definitive, or fascinating, creative satisfaction and rewards can be found.

The primary function of a songwriting prompt is to build a stimulating environment that will encourage and strengthen one’s natural creative impulses. This includes creating a thought-provoking and aesthetically pleasing space, as well as a manipulable raw materials environment in which one can freely wander. These prompts can be created by you or by others and can take various forms, such as pictures, words, clips from films, or others’ music. They are most powerful when they also provide further stimulus to aid the generosity of creative flow. At the core of songwriting is creativity, and as we have mentioned, instant creativity comes easier to some than to others. Through the use of songwriting prompts, the goal is to have some fun and to come to the secret song within.

5. Case Studies and Examples

Connection to Songsmithing Images of campfire ditties are the core of any rootsy songwriting sessions using instruments like guitar. Bouncing lyrics and the feel of simple presentation off of instrumental cues may become a useful songwriting prompt. Tarka’s lyrics about magic perspectives are well matched to the mood of the music. Letting simple visuals like these lead the creative engine is the spark of primordial songwriting genius.

The Prompt After a few weeks of going over these issues, I had a realization that might help me write to these existing melodies. If I tried to write a “campfire” ditty that sucked independently over each loop, I might be able to add vocals to the otherwise instrumental loops. With that simple framework, I was able to make the version below over the course of approximately 1.5 creative hours.

The Challenge A friend gave me three old sketchy looping pieces that he made using his guitar with GarageBand. The loops were instrumental with a similar feel— kind of “up and western sounding.” It took a little while to find the vocal melody, and then I sang in the shower “to remind me what I wanted to sound like (why does my voice always sound bigger and better in the shower?)” Finally, I had to think of some words.

Case Study 1: Create a Ditty Over a Random Loop Name: Paul Miklas Occupation: Management Consultant

It is important to delve into real-world examples of how songwriters have used actual songwriting prompts in their creative process. The following case studies illustrate real-life applications across a diverse range of songwriting scenarios.