My Lyric and Songwriting notes

I recently just made my songwriting notes available for purchase. They are a collection of lyric and songwriting knowledge that I’ve learned or came up with on my own, and I thought I should explain them and how they came to be.

If you want to purchase them, simply go to products.

How my notes were created.

The way I created my notes is all based on how I turned one of my greatest weakness into a strength. I always struggled in school so I had to work around it by creating my own notes that were much more simplified and easier to read than anything i would find in textbooks.

Growing up, I always struggled with keeping up and learning the material in class because of things like what I thought was dyslexia. But back in 2019, when I was studying sound engineering, the material was way too technical for me to understand.

So, to remember and understand it better, I would use a notebook that was made for drawing and sketching, a fine liner pen, never a pencil or a normal pen, and I would sketch my own images to create a more visual explanation, with one or two sentences containing the most crucial information, so that I could understand it better.

Many people who would read my notes would also mention how engaging and easy to read they were. And the notes didn’t just work for me, they would work for other people, creating a visual explanation and quickly remembering it.

Then came 2020, when Covid started, and I was studying lyric and Songwriting. During my first trimester, I had to do Music Theory, and since we were all learning from home on Zoom. During the class, I would write notes of key information like the Base and Treble clef, the wheel of fifths, the major-minor degrees and the types of chords, and I would stick these notes above my computer so if I was asked a question like how many sharps are in B major, I could say 5 quicker than anyone else could.

My mum offered to take all of my music theory notes, scan them and put them all on a single page. Some of the notes on the page were repeated twice, and some were related to ear training rather than music theory, but I appreciated the thought. It gave me the idea to get an A4 sketchbook and a fine liner, and I wrote down all the music theory information I needed on the first page.

The page was so easy to understand and satisfying to read that I could spend 2 seconds looking for the information I needed to understand the theory. When it was later in the year, and lockdowns were getting less strict, I was coming in contact with people again. Since it was mostly for songwriting-related reasons, I would bring the notebook with me, and the people who read it would understand it and enjoy looking at it because it felt like looking at a piece of art. I would also let people take photos so they could get them through what they needed to know during most theory-related tasks in music.

Pat Pattison

During my course, I learned songwriting from videos and material by Pat Pattison. He’s a Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and an Author of books like Writing Better Lyrics, Songwriting Without Boundaries, Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure, and Essential Guide to Rhyming. He even Taught John Mayer how to write lyrics. He would also travel to Australia to teach at my University at least once a year. But, because of the lockdown, I could only attend a Zoom class he was teaching.

I bought one of his books, Writing Better Lyrics, and I read as much as possible. I don’t have the book on me now. I lent it to a friend who hasn’t returned it, but much of the book’s material was songwriting exercises and explaining specific techniques that improve your ability to write.

It’s a great book, and even though I would recommend it to anyone interested in songwriting. i wouldn’t say i would 100% agree with the subject of the material or how it was being presented. I’m probably really biased against songwriting exercises. I never saw a point to them, and I know that everybody is different regarding how they think. I would mostly say if songwriting exercises work for you, go for it, but if they don’t, don’t waste your time.

And I always hated how most books around education were mainly filled with overcomplicated explanations as to why you need to know a subject instead of just presenting the essential information upfront so you can have an easier time maneuvering around it. Because, unlike most subjects in university, songwriting isn’t rocket science. It often felt like they did it to fill the pages instead of being straight to the point and making it easier to understand.

I appreciated my notes more than any book on the subject because they didn’t contain any explanation of subjects that I already knew, didn’t discourage my thought process or made me waste time trying to navigate to where I needed to be. It just presented the exact information I required to easily maneuver my way through lyric and songwriting without any difficulty.

How it developed over time

during my third trimester, I started writing music for ensemble performances, and when I wrote music, I would sometimes discover something new, like writing songs in Lydian or Dorian, and I would be fascinated by how it worked; my university did teach me this kind of material, but it was done in the most technical and boring way, that it was too hard to understand or appreciate. It made it feel like something i needed to learn for a curriculum and not for the diversity it brought to music.

So, I would do my own research outside of Uni and create my own notes that were much more straightforward, informative and helpful than what I was learning in class. Most of my notes were my research instead of what I learned in class. And some of them were notes that I’ve created to battle specific problems I had when writing music. As I was creating them, I believed they could make songwriting easier, not just for me but for everyone doing it, so that we could have the ability to write anything we wanted and come up with new styles and genres with them.

Lyrical Elements

One of the most appreciated parts of the notes would probably be the lyrical elements, which started in a class called lyrical influences, taught by Charles Jenkins, an Australian songwriter and musician with an impressive career. He taught me about them in the first place, and I would feel guilty not mentioning him. He had the version that he taught to the class, and I wanted to include it in my notes and credit him, but I didn’t want to plagiarise his work, so the lyrical elements I have are from the research I’ve done on my own. And I’ve included literary elements as well.

list of words

The list would’ve probably been the most tedious and time-consuming thing I’ve created for these notes. It started with me creating a list of all the emotions, Positive and Negative, because emotion is important, and it gave me the idea to create other lists for song topics and ideas; it went through a lot of versions, but after a few years, I managed to compile a list of 4000 different Nouns, Verbs, Adverbs and Adjectives. that could all be related to topics to write music about. And I’ve added pronouns and contractions and learned the definition of Determiners and Conjunctions.

Conclusion

There is more to include to the songwriting notes, and I intend to add them down the line and learn about music so I can create more notes around it because I’m never gonna be done learning, and neither will you. I might add types of melodies, rhythms or basslines, but I would probably need to figure out how to simplify it into simple cheat notes first. But if you want me to add something, please let me know because any suggestions could help many people who buy the notes. And having a reason to update them is always exciting to me.