I just got back from a week of teaching songwriting to a group of students at YWAM (Youth With a Mission) in Denver, CO. Most of the students ranged from ages 19 to late 20's which is one of my favorite age groups to teach- so eager, so much energy! I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say how much I enjoyed it. For those of you who write songs (or do anything creative) I thought I would offer a few short bullet points we discussed this week:

Don’t shoot for quality, shoot for quantity

Huh? Don’t aim for quality songs? Yeah, you heard right! I started the week with a story about art, much like this one from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

“[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A,” forty pounds a “B,” and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A.” Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

It is obvious which group had artistic freedom, momentum, inspiration and which group felt pressure to perform rather than enjoy the opportunity to dream and create. Do you have a creative goal like making an album of ten great songs? If so, the worst idea is to try to write ten great songs. Set a goal to write 60 or more songs… no matter how bad they are, just barrel through them. Chances are that 10%-15% of them might turn out pretty good. Learn from your mistakes.

Quantity will lead to quality, and you will discover a lot in the process.

No such thing as writer's block

This is related to the previous point. Staying in creative motion is the answer to getting "unstuck.” More often than not, writer's block is when we can’t write something we think is good. When we confront this head-on, we move forward. Always finish "the bad” so that you can learn from it and get to the next “good.” You can only do this if you continue creating freely. Creating is learning.

Demystify creating

During workshops, I have my students play a game where we write melodies using a dice and a quarter. First, we roll the dice, and then we flip a quarter. Heads represents one, and tails represents zero. So if the dice reads 4 and the quarter lands on heads, they are added to equal 5. Five is the first note of the melody corresponding to the fifth note of the scale (this would work in any key). We do this (roll/ flip /add) process enough times to make a melody using the seven steps of the diatonic scale. Then I create a series of chords to go with the melody to make a song.

Any time I demonstrate this technique to students, the dice and coin never let me down. They never write a bad melody! The game has always yielded really interesting results, and usually, students are in awe of how a pair of two small inanimate objects can write something that sounds so good. Why do this? To demystify the act of songwriting. Many of us have this silly notion that our melodies come out of some divine state of inspiration. Maybe they do sometimes. But it is easy to believe that we can only create when inspiration strikes- if we’re not in that glorious place, we must have writer's block. The dice and coin teach us that there is more trial and error in the process than we recognize. It has to be ok to search and stumble through the uncertainty, writing melody after melody until we find something.

Writing good songs is not so much about inspiration but momentum.

Is the writing going well? Then keep moving forward and keep writing. Is it not going well? Keep moving forward. In theory and practice, I have found that you have to just get through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff.

Other subjects covered during the week:

- Three different approaches to melody writing (from scratch, lyric-based, chord progressions)

- Lyric writing: word associations and stream of consciousness

- Holistic Creativity: connecting body, mind, emotions, and spirit in the process.

- Practical exercises for implementing all of the above

Thanks, YWAM students, for a fun and fulfilling week!

If anyone out there is interested in having me teach or do a workshop on music, creativity, song writing, etc., please feel free to contact me!

Cheers!

~ Eric

Highlights from Teaching Last Week: Songwriting