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Knowing how to write songs is a skill, how to write good songs is a craft To acquire skill requires knowledge and technique. Craft comes about by observing and doing.

There’s kind of a “Hollywood” depiction of songwriting where the artist is overcome with inspiration and writes a song. If you’ve done any writing at all you know this really isn’t how it happens.Of course songwriting relies heavily on inspiration, but information, it is equally important.

It’s a guarantee that little flashes of inspiration disappear quickly. That’s when you switch over to information mode in order to get you to the next “pylon” in the song. Without that you have a very small segment of an incomplete song created by inspiration only.

It’s not that you want to have a song written purely by information.That would be lifeless. You try and balance the shift of power back and forth from inspiration to information in order to get a song written all the way to the end.

Okay, let’s say that writing a complete song is no problem for you. But now you face an entirely different problem, that of objectivity. We know that you’re pretty fond of your new creation, but how does that stack up in the real world? In other words how do you know it’s good?

How do you step back from it and neutralizing the emotional connection you feel with it Here comes that craft part again.

Most craftsmen go through a period of apprenticeship learning the proper skills and techniques and knowledge from a master craftsman.

How can you put yourself in this position? By having a good hard look at other people’s songs. Taking apart and analyzing other successful artists’ creations is the quickest and easiest way to hone your skills.

You’ll want to reverse engineer great songs. Every time you do this you should write your findings into a “little black book” of songwriting techniques for future reference.

What kind of things do you want to be looking at and analyzing? I’m going to throw out a big one here that gets very overlooked, yet it is of critical importance to any successful song. That is song form and structure.

When people do tend to look at this or talk about it it seems to be in very broad terms. That won’t do you you any good.

You want to be able to know how many sections that are song and how many bars are in each section and what each section is called (verse, chorus, bridge, pre-chorus, etc.) . This sounds basic but it really isn’t. After doing song form analysis on thousands of different songs, I’ve yet to come up with an exact duplicate.

There are definite trends that you’ll see again and again, but it’s the subtle differences in song structure that make for a good song.So dig in and start checking out song forms in order to develop a keen sense of this in your own writing.

Other elements that you want to subject to intense scrutiny will be lyrics, word use, rhymes, chord progressions, riffs, groove, melody, and production techniques.

I’ll close with a quick discussion about production versus songwriting.

First let’s come up with a fundamental description of how to tell if a song is good.

If a song was stripped down to its most basic elements so that it could be played by a guitar player and singer, and still remain captivating and enjoyable, then you know it’s good.

That’s because all of the essential ingredients would be present. Good lyrics, good melody, good progression, good groove, and good song structure.

If it can’t pass this simple test that you don’t have a song.

What you probably have then is some form of a production. Production relies on things like recording techniques and effects (signal processing such as reverb, delay, distortion, etc.), or different instrumentation, in order to make the song listenable.

Production is kind of like wrapping paper on a box. You are just dressing up an otherwise ugly box with more attractive packaging.

Again your objective is to write songs that survive the guitar/singer test.

So hopefully we’ve answered the question “what do you focus on first?” Simply put, it’s other people’s music. Load your head full of good information and inspiration first. You are trying to put great stuff in so that when it comes time for you to write songs it comes out easily. You want to learn write better songs by ripping apart and analyzing songs from other people.

Dissecting other people’s music is the best source of songwriting tips.

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