5 Proven Tips For Coming Up With Song Ideas

I find that songwriting is a muscle like any other in the body, the more you work at it, the more easily it comes to you. That said, even with practice it can be difficult to flip the songwriting switch in your brain just like that. With that in mind, I’m going to share some reliable tips you can use to come up with song ideas.

How to Come Up With Song Ideas

song ideas

Before we get into individual tips for coming up with song ideas, it’s a good time to mention you should ALWAYS have some way of recording song ideas as soon as they come to you.

Most of us have a voice recorder as a stock app on our phones which works great. Basically you just need to be able to quickly pull that up so that you can hum out a melody when inspiration strikes.

Modern voice recorder apps also allows you to punch back in or make edits to existing recordings, so you can revisit that same idea moments or days later as you flesh out more of an existing idea in your head.

With that way of recording song ideas handy, let’s now get in to some song idea generators.

Pause a Song You’ve Never Heard

This first one is a tip/trick/exercise to kick-start the songwriting process which comes straight out of my complete songwriting tutorial How to Write a Song – The “No BS” Songwriter’s Bible.

Essentially you play a song you’ve never heard before (within the genre you’re writing for), then pause it right before a section change. I like pausing a song after the intro or before the chorus hits in particular.

You then force yourself to imagine where you think that song will go next either musically or vocally and record yourself humming or singing it out.

I particularly find it easy to hum out a scratch vocal melody which I can imagine either playing on top of that intro instrumental, or I’ll imagine the vocal melody which would come out of that section.

You can do this with songs you’ve heard before, pausing before a chorus and imaging an alternative vocal melody, but I find it works better when you don’t know what’s coming next as is the case with songs you’ve never heard before.

With music streaming services being the number one way people consume music these days, this trick has never been easier or more relevant to implement.

A good way to find a suitable song match is to play a song you already know well that you’d like to write in the style of.

Most music streaming platforms are adept at playing similar/relevant songs immediately following the first song. Just keep skipping until you both find a song you haven’t heard before and one which sounds like it’s in the vein of what you want to write.

This “anticipation” method saves you from arguably the hardest part of songwriting which is starting from scratch because here you’re working off of an existing idea.

When you eventually resume playing that existing song, you’ll likely find it sounds nothing like what you came up with, and just like that you’ve got the genesis of a new song idea which you can build off of!

Force Yourself in a Box

Part of the beauty of songwriting is that a song can be anything you imagine and can go in any one of seemingly limitless directions.

Sometimes having too many choices is counterproductive and can make completing anything seem like an immovable mountain.

This is why I like to force myself into a (songwriting) box and challenge myself to write a song with very specific constraints.

Writing a song about a very specific theme (a love song, a song about your cat, a song about a certain type of day), within a very specific genre, or modeled in the style of a very specific artist can be immensely helpful at slaying the writer’s block demons.

The latter example of forcing yourself to write a song within the style of a specific artist is especially helpful because it gives you a lot of framework to write within.

A few more examples to limit yourself to would be writing in a certain key, at a certain BPM or time signature (have a metronome on hand for this one), or using a specific chord progression.

The guardrails will take away that feeling of being rudderless and will give you the direction you need to come up with a song idea.

Play a Drum Loop

A drum loop on its own with no other accompaniment, chords, etc. makes for a very fertile bed for songwriting ideas.

kick drum

Whether you’re coming up with a melody (musical or vocal) or a chord progression, a drum loop is a great “blank” canvass.

The more complex the beat, the better, so explore the stock beats section of your DAW to loop some interesting drum beats to help jump start that creativity.

In the same vein, that same folder or adjacent to that same folder you found the beats in will likely contain a number of stock melodic instrument samples, as well.

Looping a piano melody (for example) can work just as well as the drums.

Put them together on the timeline to put together some bedrock for a rudimentary instrumental verse or chorus which, just like in that first tip, begins to take away that initial handicap of starting from scratch, making a unique melody that much easier to come up with.

Write From a Title

Another tip taken from my book on songwriting. If you ask 100 songwriters, virtually every single one will tell you they write music first, then write the lyrics secondary to fit that music.

It’s a much easier process, especially considering that in most genres the music is the number one priority.

One exception is when you’ve got nothing and you’re looking for song ideas from scratch – come up with a title.

If you don’t want to come up with one on your own or want something completely random, use a free song name generator.

That generator creates song titles from a genre and mood combination which you input to instantly generate dozens and dozens of fresh titles.

Once you have a title you like, sing out the words of the title with different melodies, possibly imaging the energy and instrumentation of the music underneath it.

If you like one of the titles but the lyrics aren’t quite syncing up how you’d like, you can click “Similar” under that title to spin that title into a number of parallel alternatives which might work better.

Once you land on a melody you like, you can build out from that to complete that section, then go into the next adjoining section until you’ve finished the song.

As I’ve said multiple times, the hardest part is coming up with that initial song idea kernel from scratch. Once you have something you like, it’s just about building off of that and making connections which work.

I like this method in particular because this is a great way to write that main hook of your song for the chorus (see how to write a chorus). Once you have the chorus hook which is literally the most important part of any song, everything is a lot easier to write by comparison as the stakes are a lot lower.

Find Your Songwriting Sweet Spot

This last one is more a general tip to help facilitate the songwriting process: find your songwriting sweet spot.

After years of experience, I’ve found that ideas come to me much more frequently when I’m driving in my car, particularly on longer drives (i.e. more than a trip to the store). It was no coincidence that when the pandemic hit and I wasn’t driving nearly as often that my songwriting well dried up. I didn’t make the connection until I got my first song ideas in over a year when I was back in the car for my first long drive in just as long.

Your songwriting sweet spot may not be driving in the car, but it’s likely some time when you aren’t preoccupied with other things.

Anytime you have some time alone to think works well. For you that may be commuting to work on a train, in the shower, or when you lay down for bed at night.

The point is to hone in on when song ideas come to you and make that work for you (just make sure you have your voice recorder handy!).

If you’d like dozens of more tips, tricks, and strategies for coming up with song ideas, definitely check out my complete resource on songwriting: How to Write a Song – The “No BS” Songwriter’s Bible.

Happy songwriting!

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