Originally Posted By: Guitarhacker
Do you surf? How does a surfer ride the wave? Does he/she, have a planned route? Essentially they want to ride it as best they can.....

Nothing in a wave is ever fixed in stone. It's always a fluid, ever moving, ever changing world.

So too, I believe, with song writing. When I start writing a song, I have an idea where I want to take it, but that path is constantly changing in the writing process. The key, the tempo, the groove, the style, the lyrics, the melody, the chords..... all in a state of constant motion until nearing the very end of the process.

It changes even further as I start to lay tracks for that now completed song in my studio. Once again, nothing is ever fixed in stone. I "go with the flow" and more often than not, the end result is actually better in many ways than I imagined it would be.

Very few writers, I believe, know exactly what the song will sound like before it's written..... what we hear in our heads rarely translates exactly to the DAW.

As far as the unfinished tunes in the folders.... pull them out and just roll with the flow and see what happens. Needless to say.... every year, I start a new "catch all" folder I call my song tank... I name it Song Tank 2014 or whatever year it represents. All my ideas go into that main folder. Some get finished during the year and some actually get deleted. I normally end up with about 80% of the ideas in there not completed. Don't lose sleep over it, just come up with more ideas and according to the rules of statistics, some percentage of them will get done. Of those, several may actually be much better than what you originally envisioned.

Also, the more you work with BB/RB, the better you will become at translating the sounds in your head into sounds coming out of the speakers being similar to what you first imagined.


Great analogy with the surfing. Same goes for skiing. My 'song tank' is more of a lyric and melody snippet tank - it's in my iPhone. I will speak lyric snippets in, or hum/sing melodies that I want to develop further. Sometimes I remember that I have that tank and will draw from it, sometimes I don't.

Look at it this way, not every song is a hit - even with a very broad definition that a hit is getting something to sound like you hear it in your head. This is the premise of the February Album Writing Month challenge at www.fawm.org

Be prolific in your songwriting. Now and then, a gem comes out of the process. The chance of a gem is much higher if you simply make a habit of documenting your efforts, whether that's in a BIAB/RB song-structure, a hummed melody, lyrics scratched down or spoken into a recorder, etc. Don't let the muse slip away - we have all kinds of technology to trap muse sightings.

Jim, to break any habit of over thinking a song, please join us at the February Album Writing Month site. If it's not yet live for 2014, it should be before the end of January. www.fawm.org

Make sure to go to the .org URL extension. You have been warned!

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