Songwriting Guitar

[Cre Moonin]

SongwritingGuitar contains chords and licks for fundamental songwriting. Whether you want Acoustic Guitar, Electric (Clean) Guitar, or Electric (Distorted) Guitar, its right there. Everything is fully host-synchronized. We recorded major and minor chords in all 12 keys, so you can get rolling right away.

Songwriting Guitar is all about ease and playability. We created a super flexible and easy-to-use interface. We even added an animated smiley face to the user-interface, so you can always see what emotional direction you are going in. You can choose between three different guitars, isolated or mixed together.

Songwriting Guitar also contains a massive number of real-time effects that can be triggered via key-switches. This allows you to turn on and off the effects in real-time and use them on top of the guitar. We included Bit-Crusher/LOFI, Rotator, Delay, Reverb, Screamer, Distortion, Phase, Flanger, Cabinet, and a large set of custom convolution reverbs.

The reason you need to train yourself to get inspiration at will, and not wait for it to suddenly flash in front of you is that the most important thing you need to do to become a great songwriter is actually writing a lot of songs.

The process of bouncing off ideas, coming up with new ones, and at times, even arguing over songwriting differences, is not only fun but if the chemistry works, you may come up with a song neither of you would have been able to create on his own.

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Songwriting For Guitar is a power house team of high level songwriters and producers who bring decades of collective experience along with hundreds of placements and various songwriting accolades.

We help songwriters, just LIKE YOU, gain insight on what actually works in the new music business. Wherever you are, we build on your existing skills and songwriting ability, so you can hone, refine, and unlock your next level!

The Signals Theory and Songwriting Course is designed to teach you music theory and composition skills as quickly and efficiently as possible! This course is taught on guitar, but is practical for ANY modern-day songwriter or composer.

The riff is in B phrygian. I also had an idea to alternate some of the notes between the two guitars. I record rhythm twice and pan one to the left and one to the right for a fuller sound. Here is the same idea with the alternating parts:

This is probably the part people tend to struggle with the most. There are a few different ways you can approach this. Again its something where you have to just keep trying different things to find what works best for you.

Lou Reed named this alternate guitar tuning after an early song of his. When he showed this to John Cale, Cale was so impressed he wanted to form a band with Reed, and yada yada yada, the world was given the Velvet Underground.

Usually, Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore are tuned differently in the same song, which seems counterintuitive, until you realize they each take different approaches to playing the guitar, with Lee being a more traditional guitarist and Thurston being more of a visual player who thinks in terms of physical patterns. At any rate, there is something for every kind of player at every level of ability in their tuning systems, which can all be found here.

Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, founding editor of Acoustic Guitar, is a grand prize winner of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and author of The Complete Singer-Songwriter, Beyond Strumming, and other books and videos for musicians. In addition to his ongoing work with AG, he offers live workshops for guitarists and songwriters, plus video lessons, song charts, and tab, on Patreon.

Many guitarists, after about six to twelve months on the instrument, can create original riffs and lead lines without much difficulty. Good guitar teachers always stress improvisation as an essential skill to learn, since it gives the guitarist the ability to jam with friends and begin to create an original style. However, there is a knowledge gap between being able to create original guitar riffs and being able to write complete songs. Take it from Vivian Campbell, a guitarist currently with Def Leppard. When he first hooked up with Ronnie James Dio, he was a great guitar player, but by his own admission, he couldn't write a complete song. He just had no idea how to proceed from riffing to structuring a song based upon those riffs.

This article is directed toward guitarists who have either not yet begun to write songs, or are just beginning compositions and are looking for another songwriting method or set of tools to assist in the song construction process. Every songwriter or composer has a slightly different method of writing songs; they all work, but some methods work better than others for some people. I hope this method will help those guitarists who wish to compose music in the rock instrumental style. You could easily write lyrics to go with the songs you write with this method, but as I am personally unfamiliar with lyric writing, I am concentrating this article on the instrumental aspects of the songwriting process.

My method consists of beginning a new song with what I call a 'song structure'. A song structure is nothing more than a template or initial framework for a song which can include some or all of the following elements:

Writing song structures works well for musicians who are what I call 'note takers'. In other words, musicians who love coming up with riffs or short melodies, and simply record little bits and pieces onto a cassette or a digital medium. They can write several song structures and then go back through their tapes of original riffs and rhythms to find something to fit into a given section of the song.

To test out the idea of writing songs away from my instrument (something I had never tried before), I took out some paper on a plane trip from Chicago to Raleigh, and in an hour I had sketched out seven song structures. For me, being away from my guitar gave me a new freedom I had never experienced before. I was letting my imagination structure the song, instead of my fingers. On these particular songs, I was not specific about chord progressions; I simply designated entire sections by a single chord. For example, I would designate the first section of the song, "the E minor section", followed perhaps by a 12-bar section in A major. My idea was to put off until later the choice of a chord progression to fit the section.

So after this song structure was completed, I knew I had a song of about 164 bars, mainly in the key of Em, with a 16 bar solo section that modulated through 4 different keys. On this particular piece, a lot of the details of the song and its final instrumentation were left for later. Notice, I did get specific in some areas about the guitar sounds I wanted to use or the type of rhythm guitar I wanted to try. I also included a note about using the Dorian mode for the melody in one section; the purpose was to make sure I tried something I normally wouldn't do if just grabbed the guitar and started jamming. It forced me to go home and figure out exactly what the Dorian mode is, and how to use it over A major!

See, brainstorming with your pen is a major benefit for songwriters who begin to get stuck and can't seem to write something new. You can write down anything you want. You can write down things that are odd or concepts you have no idea how you will make work, simply to get yourself to try something new. For example, on one structure I wrote, I put a note for one section that read, "Do something Chinese here." On another I stated, "Make the last two bars of this sound like World War III, using just the guitar." Another read, "The melody here should be oceanic". My goal was to give myself something to think about when I finally go into the studio to flush out the details of the songs.

I also kept in mind that good music is usually equal parts surprise and predictability. When I designated a section as the 'A' or 'B' section, I intended to repeat those sections at different points in the song (with some variation) to make the song more memorable. Some sections like intros, breaks, guitar solos, and bridges (a non-repeated section, typically placed before the solos), were intended to occur only once, providing the surprise elements and adding interest.

Of course, once you begin creating the actual chord progressions and melodies, you are free to change any and all of what you had come up with originally. The idea of the song structure is not to 'box' you into a very restrictive creative corner, but to put a few limits around the infinite possibilities one has when starting a song from scratch. However, it's fun to see a bass player or drummer try to put into real music a section which is labeled, "New Orleans Industrial at stepped-up tempo". If all the musicians try their best to actualize what you have brainstormed into a song structure, you may be amazed at what you finally come up with.

The next action I take, after I have several song structures, is the demo phase. My goal here is to write and record all of the melody, rhythm, background, and solo parts. In order to make make this step go quickly, I don't concern myself at all with the overall sound or performance quality of the parts. Obsessing with perfection at this stage will only lengthen the process. I write music as I play it, so this works great for me; as soon as the idea for the melody strikes me, I record it. As long as there are no real clunkers in the performance, I move on to write the rhythm parts or work on the bass parts. Working in this way allows me to demo songs rather rapidly, as I spend most of my time choosing the best versions from the various parts I come up with, instead of concentrating on perfect technique or timing.

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