Steps and structures to use when songwriting

My Notes, Workflows, and Hooks

This page serves as a direct notebook, containing the steps and structures I use when songwriting.

When songwriting I concentrate on the storytelling side first. This allows me to get all my thoughts and ideas written down, including full sentences and paragraphs. I always aim for a thousand words, it sounds a lot, but the more you write down at this stage, the easier the next stages become.

Then I start to remove, and format the lyrics to form the song structure. I map out the intro, verses, pre-chorus, chorus, drops, hooks, bridges, interludes and finally the outro.

Everyone knows what an intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus and outro are. These are the main lyrical and structural formats to any song. I can look at adding the drops, hooks, bridges, and interludes later, when I start to write the music.

Drafted song-written lyrics

Now I have my drafted lyrics, what next? I certainly do not share them anywhere online. Remember these are my songwriting tips, you can do whatever you like with your songwriting.

If you choose to share your new lyrics with the world before they're officially uploaded and processed through your distributor, you're at risk of someone, somewhere stealing them. These tricksters are highly intelligent, they know that the song hasn't been released yet. They can easily find out if it's been officially processed or not.

So everything goes to plan, you've hidden your lyrics from the world. You've uploaded the track through your distributor, it's officially processed. If you submit your lyrics for publication too early, the web scrapers find them and will use them. This was a great tactic for exposure a few years ago, but not anymore.

Your song releases, it flops from day one. Just ignore the pain and heartbreak this causes 99% of all artists for 2 to 4 weeks. Now is the time you can actually do something about it. Publish your lyrics, this will take a few weeks to circulate. Download the original uploaded track from your distributor and check the audio metadata. Fix any issues you find and replace the original with the updated version.

If writing isn't for you, don't worry

Get some friends together to help you, hire a professional songwriter, cheat and use AI or get genuine inspiration from poets. Poems make great content for songwriters, they normally rhyme so that's the chorus element taken care of.

If you search for and read enough poems, one thing will become so clear. You will start to hear those poems in the top artists' lyrics.

More useful songwriting advice can be found on wikiHow.