Setting Realistic Writing Goals

To be clear:, I’m incredible at setting goals; I’m terrible at setting realistic goals. Maybe you’re there too. We get all of these amazing ideas in our heads.

I’m starting a composition #100daysofpractice or a #100daysofwriting whatever you want to call it - I’d just like to be more consistent. Well, I need a plan of some sort for where I’d like to be at the end of the 100 days (sometime in June) - and that’s where the problem lies. So, I thought “what if a student had asked me that question?” And well, we will see how it goes but here are three things I’ve come up with for setting realistic composition/songwriting goals.

1. Figure Out Appropriate Pacing

Take a look at your recent writing output. How much have you written over a certain period of time? You can probably expect your output won't be significantly more than that. Perhaps you finished 1 piece/song last month. You're probably not going to suddenly write 10 this month. Set a goal of finishing one piece/song, and if you get to more than that - Great!

If one of your goals is to be able to write more/write faster - then start where you are and work your way up incrementally. You can do this by setting Input Goals: "I will write 30 minutes each day." And if you want to build up incrementally: "Each week, I will add 10 more minutes to my writing time." Of course, all of that depends on your schedule and how much time you can actually devote to writing.

2. Factor in things that are writing adjacent.

I'll often work all day editing a manuscript and then feel like I didn't write at all that day. Which isn't true. These things that are associated with writing are critical parts of the writing process. These are things like Freewriting and Experimentation - where you are just playing around but not actually making progress on a project. Or maybe it's studying the work of another composer for their use of techniques. Or, practicing new techniques on your instrument - or figuring out with players what is physically possible or comfortable. Or perhaps like I mentioned, editing and revisions. All of these things are crucial, but they take time, and we need to factor in those things for setting realistic goals.

3. Set goals that are consistent with your long-term goals.

I have had periods where I wrote what I felt like I was "supposed to" write. If there's no one commissioning you to write a piece, there's no reason to spend time writing a piece you don't want to write. Make sure the things you are doing on a daily basis actually line up with your desired trajectory as a composer and songwriter. What can you write today that will serve as a stepping stone to where you want to go? Don't chase after every opportunity just because it's available. Set goals based on what is going to fulfill you artistically, and what is going to help you in the long run.

So, that's where I am today. Day 1 of 100. I'll be documenting this journey so make sure to follow along from now until June, and we will see where I end up.

Anyone Can Write Music

Writing music is a craft. It's not a rare gift only given to a select few. And because it's a craft - all musicians can and should write music. And today I’ve got an exercise for you to help you get started.

Writing Music is like Writing Language

Let's think about language for a second. That's what I'm using right now to communicate with you. I could have chosen to communicate with you through a series of colored dots - but that wouldn't have been as effective.

In order to communicate with language, you need to be familiar with that language. I can put together sentences of words and you understand them because I know a lot of words and their meanings, I know sentence structure, and I know what it is that I want to communicate. I'm not inventing any new words to communicate this with you - but I am writing. Well, speaking in this case - but I did write it down in the script before I started speaking. Well, and actually before I wrote this script I spoke these thoughts into my voice memo app. And before that, I actually wrote these... [It cuts off, I start the camera over] You get the point - these are thoughts that I am communicating, and I am capable of that because I have learned English. And these particular thoughts do not require me to revolutionize linguistics.

In the same way, all musicians have within them the ability to communicate through writing music - because they know music.

Composition is Just Expression

Just because you have it inside you, that's not to say you'll immediately be good at it. That seems logical enough. My daughter when she was learning to talk would put together sentences like "me want doing swing", but she kept practicing and now she knows that "I would like to swing" better communicates what she wants.

All composition is just a musical expression. And you "getting better" at composition is you getting better at communicating that expression. And like with everything else in life, that happens through practice.

There's never been more resources

And you'll need to practice quite a bit. But it's worth it. And you might say "I have no desire to compose for a career." But I think literally every single musician can and should regularly express themselves by writing their own music. I write a lot of English all the time despite not being a career Novelist. My goal in writing in English isn't to have my books read by the whole world. I wrote a text message a few minutes ago, and it doesn't mean that I have intentions of become Geoffrey Chaucer.

You've got a lot of resources to help you - more than there have ever been. Countless videos and courses on the internet that you can learn to write music. I had none of that 20 years ago when I was learning to compose.

Not only that. But there are so many resources for you to experiment and learn on your own. With DAWs and Instruments and what not. Spitfire Audio has a free version of their BBC orchestra library that gives you access to practice with a full orchestra. It's Crazy.

I've got a free resource for you today. I've heard from a number of my composition students that keeping track of the whole process of writing a piece is often overwhelming. So, I've got this interactive PDF that outlines the composition process step-by-step. It's got links to 16 additional resources that I think you'll find useful.

A Writing Exercise

If you're still thinking "well, that makes sense - but I already know that I can't write music," I want you to try this exercise. It's going to feel awkward. Fight against that feeling. Composition is messy. And here’s the thing. Our goal today isn’t to write a whole song, or a whole piece. The goal is to just write something. Here’s what I want you to do:

Step 1. Take out your phone, and find your voice memo app.

Step 2. Hum something to yourself. Anything. Long or short, doesn't matter. Don't worry about whether or not it is good. Don't overthink it. Just hum something.

Step 3. Do it again. You might as well leave that voice memo going - you never know what's going to happen. Try to get up to five.

Step 4. Listen back to your voice memo. Let's go ahead and quickly come to terms with the fact that it isn't a Radio quality recording and move past that.

Step 5. What do you feel like each snippet is expressing? Happiness? Confusion? Hunger? If composition is expression, what do the melodies you've come up with express?

Step 6. Identify some fragments that you really like. You're looking specifically for something you could build off of. Again, don't be too critical. You're looking for something that you like, not something you think is good. Or, even what you think other people might think is good. Your identification of things you like is a proof of concept that you can write music.

Step 7. Repeat this entire process quite a lot. Hum to yourself all the time. Eventually, humming a melody will be much easier. You'll end up liking more of what you came up with. And you'll better be able to say what your melodies are expressing.

I'd love to hear from you: do you compose music? If so what kind of music do you write? How did you get into writing music? And if you don't write music - do you want to? What obstacles do you see that keep you from it?

Introduction to the Composition + Songwriting Process

Why have a Process?

There are a lot of steps and a lot of moving parts when writing a song, or a piece of music. This is why it's really easy to get stuck and frustrated, or even to abandon a project entirely.

It's much easier to accomplish anything if you've got a plan. And for years in my own writing journey, I would constantly get stuck. Whenever I would begin a new piece, things would start off great, until I hit some sort of a wall, and it was like trying to reinvent the wheel every single project. So, I finally had to sit down and write out my personal process for writing a piece of music. Anything that I did that made writing a piece easier, or anything that if I didn't do - I'd have to come back later and do it anyway. Take all of that and put it in a nice linear format, and you've got yourself a bit of an algorithm for writing music.

Of course, it doesn't quite work that nicely. Composition is a messy art. It's not linear, and that's exactly why you need a map. Something you can go back to when you end up lost off the beaten path and unsure which way to go now.

Each and every composer needs their own personal process - we each have a different brain. Our field is an art. This is not a McDonald's, where the goal is to put out an identical product each and every time. We each have our own voice, and our own personality, and our own workflow which produces the results that we want.

However, I think there are four phases to the composition process, regardless of the composer; regardless of the style of music, or era of history.

This is the start of a Five Part series, taking an in-depth look at the composition process. Today, I'll just give an overview of the four phases, and then the next four posts will look at each of them in more detail.

What makes it a composition?

Let's start by defining a composition. There are many ways to write music, and a composition is a specific type of written music. All of the types of written music are valid and good, I'm not trying to elevate one over another, I'm just trying to focus all of us on the same idea. Disclaimer: These are the definitions I'm giving for the sake of this series, other musicians might have varying definitions.

1. A Composition is Original

A composition is a work of music that is new and original to the composer who wrote it. This distinguishes a composition from an arrangement, or a cover. With arrangements and covers, (generally) another composer wrote the source material, and you are just putting your own spin on it. This takes a great deal of skill and consideration, but it's not what I'm talking about in this series. Maybe we'll do a different series on how to do a cover.

So, a composition then, is a work that all of the material is original to the composer (or composers, in the case of a co-write). That's important for our purposes because it gives a composition its own specific process.

2. A Composition is different from an Improvisation

The fact that a composition is planned separates it from an improvisation. You'll often find musicians who have a propensity towards one or the other. I am on the composition side. I have very little ability to improvise. I find that it is very similar to those who can stand up and give a rousing speech of the top of their heads, versus those who do much better to sit down and carefully craft a novel. It's often two separate skill sets.

There's also no editing an improvisation - you know, by definition. Once you've played your saxophone solo, it's over - there's no redo. Of course, once you get into the recording studio with jazz musicians, the line between composition and improvisation starts to blur.

But here we are talking about a planned, crafted, and edited work of music - known as a composition.

One other note: Some might make a distinction between a composer and a songwriter - but I do both and they both have the exact same process for me. So, these four phases apply to both songs and instrumental compositions.

A Free PDF

For this series, I've made an infographic PDF of the entire composition + songwriting process that we're talking about - and it's free when you sign up for my email list. It's also an interactive PDF, so it has links to 16 additional composition resources. You can get your free copy of it here, and follow along as we go the next four posts.

The Four Phases

So what are these four phases? You can break the composition process into the Planning Phase, the Writing Phase, the Editing Phase, and the Transferral Phase.

Planning Phase

Like I mentioned earlier, a composition is planned. Even if you start with a template (say "Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus"), that's still a plan. You're deciding a number of things about the piece before you actually get into the writing of it:

- What's it going to be about?
- What instruments are involved?
- What compositional techniques are you going to use?
- How long will it be?
- What emotions do you want to portray?

And maybe you don't know the answer to some of these things to begin with, but I have found deciding on some of these things before I start writing makes the process go a lot smoother.

The planning phase can look vastly different depending on the style of music. If you're writing film or video game music, the planning phase is very different than a piece that is not written for picture.

Writing Phase

Once you've got a pretty good plan, it's time to start writing. I have found this to be the least linear phase out of the four. I often like to think of the steps in this phase as a checklist rather than a progression. I'll work on a lyric here, a melody there, go back and work on that lyric, then oh, I just had an idea for the B section. It's a rather messy endeavor. This particular section is the place where I get lost most often - but that's why I developed a process. I can always go back and look at the process, and I can also go back and look at the plan I made during the planning phase.

The goal with this phase is to end up with a first draft. I tend to not try to do any fixing during this stage - just get it all out of my head as quickly and as orderly as possible.

Editing Phase

Three main things happen for me in this phase.

1. A music edit. I go back and listen to see what isn't working. A horn part that is not playable. A section where the pacing is too slow. A lyric that's clunky and a little cheesy. A transition that was too abrupt. Those sorts of things

2. Go look for feedback. Composition can be a lonely sport. You've been in your own head the whole time, it's time to bring some other brain into the process.

3. A Notation edit. Unlike the music edit, I'm just looking for things that are out of place in the score this pass. That dynamic marking is in the wrong spot, these two staves are too close to each other. Are my page margins wide enough? Super tedious stuff. Also, something that you may not need to worry about if your goal is to recording.

Transferral Phase

This one might need a different name, but it's the best single word I could find to describe this part of the process.

So we have our final composition - there are typically one of two goals:

1) Record it for audiences to listen to
2) Write it down to hand to players who will perform it for an audience to listen to

Obviously, this particular phase might depend on which style of music you're writing for - as more classical music tends to be the second option, and more popular music tends to be more of the first option.

Of course, there's always that third option where you're going to both write it down, and record it.

The point in all three of these options is that you are taking this idea that was in your head, and you are turning into something that can be understood by another human.

The Series continues...

So, that's a quick overview of the composition process.

Stay tuned for the next four posts where we will look into each of the four phases in detail. Starting with Planning Your Composition.

In the meantime, make sure to get your copy of the Beginner's Guide to the Composition Process.

Should You Update Your Old Music?

I’m entering year 12 of my composition career. And here’s the thing: a lot of the music I wrote in those first few years is not quite up to my current standards. I’ve improved a lot - which is definitely what you want. A lot of that early music got one or maybe two performances and they’ve kinda just been collecting dust ever since. Or, maybe it’s a song on an early album that receives exactly 2 streams per year. 

I was recently asked if I have any works for a particular choir voicing - and I did…but it’s one of those old pieces. I’m not exactly sure I want to hand that piece to an ensemble. We probably all have those moments where we look back on our past work and think: “what was I thinking? Violins don’t even have that note”, “these lyrics sound like they were written by a 3rd grader, and what’s with this guitar part?”, “I don’t even remember writing that”, or, “I’m confident the sopranos hate me for that - and they have every right to”. 

That sent me down a rather deep rabbit hole: should I update my old music? Both from a practical and philosophical perspective. Should composers, in general, go back and fix the mistakes of their earlier works? If so, what exactly should they fix? Minor errors? Complete overhauls? All the above? 

Today I want to look at the pros and cons of updating your old works, and I’ll let you know what I concluded about updating my own old works. 

First let’s look at a few benefits of revisiting and revising your old music: 

1. Make an unplayable piece performable. 

Pieces that I wrote back in the day on the free version of Finale lacked any sort of regard for whether real life musicians could play that part. If a piece actually made it into the performer’s hands, they would usually tell me if a passage was awkward - or impossible. But that doesn’t mean that we always end up with a smooth, idiomatic part for all of our players, there’s a difference between “playable” and “comfortable”. Once I had a horn passage that was technically in the correct range, but it was the highest part of the range, and it stayed there for quite some time, and I forgot to include any places for the player to breathe. I think the guy’s lips fell off during one rehearsal. 

If you’ve got a piece that you like but it has some problems like this, revising it could give the piece new life, or at least a longer life. This is especially important for composers that are self-published as you are your own editor 99% of the time - all mistakes in the score are your fault. And honestly, errors are like whack-a-mole - you take care of one of them and five more pop up in its place. 

2. You didn’t have the resources at the time

Maybe you didn’t have the best quality microphone when you recorded it the first time. Maybe your voice has improved. Maybe you’ve gotten better at guitar and so you could record that solo the way you heard it in your head. Maybe you wanted a string quartet, but all you could find was a violin, a clarinet, and a tuba - so you went with that. 

Revisiting an old piece can improve the quality of the piece if there are more resources available to you now. If you’ve been dissatisfied with the way a recording or a piece turned out the first time, and you feel like your artistic vision wasn’t fulfilled, this might be a good option. 

3. Your artistic vision changed. 

Now, this one is perhaps controversial from a philosophical point of view. But if you’re okay with doing a complete overhaul of your work, you might revisit a song because your vision has changed. Maybe you really like the original idea you had, but the execution of it back then is nothing like how you’d do it now. As you grow and evolve as an artist, your creative vision will change, and you can bring your old music in line with your current direction. 

On a similar note, I’ve often been curious what it might sound like if some of my favorite artists took their earliest hits and did a “if I wrote this now” version. What if Toto wrote “Africa” today? What would that sound like? Some music (stylistically) is really the product of the time it was written and might not translate well to current styles, but it might be something worth trying with your old stuff. 

Drawbacks to updating your old music: 

1. It takes time away from new music

With all of these benefits listed above, you do have to consider the price: revising your old music takes time. And if you’re like me, you already find that 24 hours simply is not a long enough day. You’ve got to analyze whether the benefit of revising an old piece outweighs the cost of not working on a new piece. 

2. For some, Philosophically, this is like “rewriting history” 

For a number of composers, they feel like their entire life’s work should effectively serve as their musical auto-biography. In that sense, it would be like “rewriting” your personal history if you change past works, especially if it was just to bring it in line with your current vision. 

And yeah, I kinda see that - if there is a lyric, or a musical moment that came out of a very specific moment in your life - it would change the meaning if you revised the piece. 

3. Your fans might not like it. 

Certain old music has a particular charm. Many people miss the noise that comes from old vinyls on the new digital music. If you’ve got a piece or a song that is well-loved, it might not be received well if you change it. Not that everything you do has to be to make the fans happy, it’s just something to consider.

Furthermore, you may not like it. You might spend all of this time revising, only to find out you like what you did in the first place better. Sometimes it is hard to capture that magic a second time. But also, it might not be fixable. There’s a profound frustration that festers from trying to resuscitate a piece that is already six feet underground. 

So, how much should you revise? 

This takes into consideration all of the pros and cons we just talked about. If you go with a “fix the errors” approach, that won’t take nearly as much time as a complete overhaul. I’d also argue that fixing minor errors doesn’t change your past artistic vision. 

And if you do decide to revise a piece now, is there a point in the future that you’d want to update it again? Maybe that would be a waste of time…or, maybe it would be a cool series throughout your life to just update the same piece every 10 years or something like that. 

Ultimately, it’s up to you. You know your own artistic vision and goals. So, what am I going to do? I’m going to fix enough errors so that all of my previous works are playable, and enjoyable. But, I’ll leave major structural changes in the past. Did I write a low F for a violin? I’ll fix it. Did I incorrectly place syllabic stress in a few places? Those are getting left alone. 

I like the work that I’ve done, and I’d like for those pieces to continue. But I also stand by what I wrote back then, even if it isn’t up to my current standards, or what I would have done if I wrote it today. 

So, what do you think about revisiting and revising your old music? Let me know in the comments!