Patterns for writing music lyrics?

Okay, you've had 8 hours to change your subscription to my work related category to avoid this kind of nonsense - times up. I'm just kidding ... I know no one actually *subscribes* to this thing :D

For those of you who don't know (and many of you don't), I'm actually a closet aspiring singer-songwriter. I have enough gear (acoustic/electric/bass/classical guitars, keyboards, drum kit, harmonicas, etc. and plenty of recording/mixing equipment) for a 4+ man band, but don't really have any aspirations to put together a band. I'd like to do it all myself, but I don't have any formal training in music. Quite a dilemma, huh? Oh well, challenges help you grow, right?

So one of the things I find the most challenging is writing song lyrics that have a compelling message/story and have the right level of transparency at the same time - yeah, and rhyming can be good too. This is most disturbing to me because I really like writing and have always kinda prided myself on my ability to write ... despite my use of non-existent words like "kinda" :)

So on the way home from work today and my brain was somewhere between work and home and I had and idea - kinda like when the chocolate fell into the peanut butter :)  I started thinking about certain questions I ask myself when I'm trying to work out a particular problem I'm having with a lyric. For example, I have a complete song I wrote about my youngest daughter, but because I wrote it without a melody in mind, I'm *really* struggling to find an appropriate melody. I started thinking that it would be a good idea to start compiling a list of these questions I can ask myself that will help me work my way out of certain problems. And then it dawned on me: Patterns.

As you may know, patterns are a type of written guidance that represent and name known solutions to recurring problems. Certainly I'm not the only [aspiring] songwriter that struggles. Certainly we must all struggle with similar challenges. Wouldn't it be awesome if there were a wiki like patternshare.org specifically for writing song lyrics. Heck, I'm sure an appropriate sister site would be one for writing the actual music ... heck, that's all music is: a bunch of patterns all glued together.

Of course I did a little searching and found nothing related. That's the funny thing about music and the Internet. Musicians aren't too forthcoming with their knowledge when there is no money being transferred their way. Don't get me wrong, there are some fantastic music-related sites on the 'net (Olav Torvund's site was the first that came to mind - wholenote.com is pretty killer too) ... I just don't see a bunch of professional (or even semi-professional) songwriters helping put together a collection of patterns that collectively represent their hard-earned years of trial and error. But I can't say that I blame them :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 13, 2006
  Check your stats.  You should see plenty of RSS subscription pulls.
• Anonymous
  July 13, 2006
  I've been thinking about setting up a little home recording studio just for fun. I don't have any formal music training/theory either.  I imagine I should be able to use a PC with some form of multitrack recording software and a firewire audio interface to the PC for microphone, guitar, etc.  Just curious if you could recommend a decent software package to do the multitrack recording/mixing?