“I’m An Adventurer, I Like Invention, I Like Discovery” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

 

Outside The Box – Songwriting Techniques

 

There may be times when you want to experiment with your songwriting and go beyond the standard means and practices of the time and genre. Here are a few outside the box songwriting techniques that may help your creative process and add some experimental aspects to your songwriting process and finished tracks:

Oblique Strategies

Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975, Oblique Strategies are a set of cards that offer challenging constraints to help the artist. They help break creative blocks and encourage lateral thinking. Some example includes “Use and old idea”, “Try Faking It” and “Only one element of each kind”. You can purchase the full set of cards from Amazon or there are websites that give an interactive version for free. Search “oblique strategies online”.

Xenochrony

A technique used by Frank Zappa, Xenochrony is a studio technique that can be applied to the songwriting process. Zappa would extract guitar solos or other musical parts from his work and place it out of context in a new piece of music. You can also try this technique in you song. For example, if you are writing a love song (Song A) and a protest song (Song B). Try taking the lyrics of the first verse in Song A and make that the middle 8 of Song B. Take the chord progression of the outro in Song B and make it the introduction to Song A. This process requires a lot of trial and error to get any noticeable results, but you will find that the possibilities are endless.

Aleatoric Music

This is music by chance. Many experimental composers of the 20th century would use a set of dice to compose their pieces. If you are stuck for a song structure, assign each section to a side of the dice (so verse = 1 chorus = 2 intro = 3 etc) and start rolling. You can take this even further by assigning a number to a chord or note duration. Online number generators are also available for this technique. For example, if you have a set of ten lyrics, you can label them 1-10 and then set the parameters on the generator as 1-10 and then let chance decide the order of lyrics.

Music Generators

The internet offers a host of great resources for any aspiring songwriter. With the right sites you can write a full song without using any of your own mental abilities. Searching “generator” after the terms lyric, chord, melody or structure will give you websites that can generate a full song for you. Certainly the resulting piece may be average at best, but it is better than nothing. Certainly, some purists may deem this as “cheating” but no one would know if you wrote your song using this method. For all we know a top ten hit could have been written using only music generators.

These are just some of the songwriting techniques that allow you to think outside the box. If you have anymore suggestions or have used one of these techniques when writing your own pieces of music then get in touch via the contact form below and be sure to subscribe to stay up to date with our latest posts.