I’ve got some bad news for you. Not every song you write will be good. In fact, you probably will have to write some crappy songs just to even get to the good ones. It’s a sad truth about songwriting that all of us must embrace at some point or another. The sooner you can come to grips with the fact that not every song is good, the sooner you can have the guts to cut your losses and throw away the bad ones; even if you spent a day of your life writing like I just did.
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
I find that my songwriting skills are not yet up to par to what my ears are accustomed to hearing(years of good music), so i discard most of what i create. From watching and learning and from inspiration here on TRR i’ve gotten significantly better though. Just have to keep grinding. I appreciate all the inspiration. Is this a new camera or perhaps a new lighting technique?
again good points graham. i’ve been following your channel for over a year now. you helped me a lot, brother. but i think you should reconsider your lighting. This ring light makes you look so much older and more tired. i prefered the old lighting.
greets cenko
It’s hard to let go. I recently had to discard a song, and it was a tough decision because I spent time on it, and it did have some interesting ideas. But overall it was dull, I had to admit it to myself.
March 31, I’ll be there!!
PS: I’d totally follow your 3 month challenge if I hadn’t just released my own EP last week. But I’m taking notes and will totally come back here for the next one. Great content as always Graham 😉
Had fun mastering it my friend!
;-D
Great Post! I totally agree with it Graham. I’ll put the subject a little further and say that not everything you do sucks too. Don’t be too confident but don’t hate everything you are doing too. The best is to have a friend or someone near your that is objective. My mother is not, she loves everything that I do, my wife is more objective so she always have the first to listen to my songs.
Have a good day!
Interesting stuff, Graham. I like the idea of scrapping a song if it’s not working out… something that I’ve experienced when being in a band. A guy that I kinda look up to is Martin Atkins; there’s a video he did with PreSonus where he says that for writing an album “[you should] write 20 songs, and 10 of those songs will be better than the other 10. You just have to work 10 times harder than you thought you ever would”. I think this a great philosophy to go by, and going back to your post where you say that you shouldn’t wait for inspiration to strike you, reinforces that you just need to work hard on your music if you want to make it sound great.
I shelf songs all the time when writing new material (I have a shoe box full of old songs: some with great lyrics but bad melodies, others have cool lyrical ideas but they seemed “forced”). I’m trying to create one song I could give away for free by March 31st, and so far I think the creative flow is kinda there, but for the most part I am just working and putting in the time to finish this challenge (Still in the songwriting phase, but I’m making progress)!
Thanks for the tip Graham! 😀
For all those composers and music enthusiasts, Sony recently released a gadget that will simplify your live. check out this Music video recorder and let me know what you all think:
http://avcstore.com/sonyproductpage/hdr-mv1-music-video-recorder
Hi Graham
Your videos are fantastic and a real inspiration. I like the fact they are very direct, real and practical and recognise the challenges certainly I feel in trying to make and record great music when it is my passion but not my “day job” and juggling with other commitments. I for one am trying to make that extra time in a busy schedule to make progress! Getting up earlier is one of those.
I was working a new song last night and knowing whether your song is great or lame is a really interesting challenge and the question is who is the judge. I suppose you certainly have to satisfy yourself to increase your chance of satisfying others with what you create?
I look forward to reading more and maybe even subscribing to one of your course packs.
Craig
I have been writing and recording music for somewhere around 35 years. I’m certainly passed my prime in terms of ‘making it as a rock star’ or anything like that. However, the love of playing, writing and recording music is still very much a part of my life. I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written over the years, but I’m sure it would be somewhere in the hundreds. In the last year and a half or so, I’ve written, recorded and mixed five CD’s, each with nearly 80 minutes of music each. I like to try and fill that media up as much as possible, this was true back when I was recording to cassette tapes as well. Why leave blank space? I say.
I believe in my case I am probably both my own best and worst critic. I don’t think anyone is harder on me than me, and yet probably no-one is more forgiving either. It’s an odd mix of personality traits to deal with at times, but my guess is that it’s true of a lot of people.
I’m going to try and cut to the chase with what I wanted to say here. And that would be that it is very rare that I throw something away. What I will do, is often spend a lot of time working on a piece if I feel it isn’t measuring up in some way. I guess it’s kind of the idea that there really aren’t any (or many) bad ideas. Now being that music is a subjective experience, others may disagree as to whether the results of this philosophy are worthwhile. And I certainly don’t want to claim that my way is the only way. It’s possible that I may even benefit from considering what Graham puts forth in this video. Maybe I should be more willing to toss a song out if it isn’t rocking me. I just wanted to add my two cents to the conversation. Rock on!