In this tutorial, I wanted to share how I use TextMate to write and analyze lyrics, including tips for finding the perfect rhyme and spotlighting important ideas.

You may also be interested in a previous tutorial on finding lyrics for your MP3s.

Watch on Viddler:
How To Write And Analyze Lyrics Using TextMate by Graham English
Watch on Vimeo:
How To Write And Analyze Lyrics Using TextMate by Graham English
Watch on YouTube:
How To Write And Analyze Lyrics Using TextMate by Graham English

Here’s what we cover in this issue:

• The inner game of songwriting. Five common songwriting problems — which ones do you want to overcome?
• The Samurai Songwriter Code. How you could be breaking trust among your fellow musicians and what to do about it. And how to attract musicians that want to work with you.
• Four essential songwriting tools. These are tools that can drastically improve your songwriting workflow and productivity, as well as generate tons of ideas.
• You’ll learn some practical songwriting techniques. These are strategies that you can use to improve your songwriting immediately.
• The songwriting tool sheet. It’s purpose is to find out how the greatest songwriters do what they do and show you how to do the same. Extremely powerful.
• We take questions from songwriters. These are the answers you’ve been looking for.
• A real-time analysis of a hit song. We study the melody, chord progression, lyrics, rhythm, and song form of a top 10 hit so you can learn how the pros do what they do.
• Learn where you should put your songwriting priorities and why.
• Discover common rhyme mistakes, ways to give your chorus a lift, the best ways to create contrast between your verse and chorus, and so much more!

The cost for a single issue is $27. Subscription price begins at $9.95. Doesn’t it make sense to join today?

Use these five rock solid songwriting techniques to make your next song title more memorable.

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• The rhyming syllables have the same vowel sounds
• The consonant sounds after the vowel (if any) have the same sounds
• The rhyming syllables begin differently

A good substitute for Perfect Rhyme is Family Rhyme:

• The rhyming syllables have the same vowel sounds
• The consonant sounds after the vowel are phonetically related
• The rhyming syllables begin differently

In Family Rhyme, there are three phonetic families:

• Plosives: b, d, g, p, t, k
• Fricatives: v, TH, z, zh, j, f, th, s, sh, ch
• Nasals: m, n, ng

You can substitute members of the same family: cut/luck, rich/wish, fun/sung. Use this chart to help you find family rhymes:

In the future I’ll talk about how to use rhyme to control the pace and flow of your lyrics, use rhyme to balance and unbalance your verses, and a lot more. Remember that rhyme is a powerful songwriting tool to help you say what you mean.

The technique is called Object Writing and it’s so ridiculously easy that you’ll be pissed you didn’t know about it sooner. I learned it from Pat Pattison.

Here’s how it works:

First, gather your materials. You’ll need tools for writing like a computer or pen and paper. You’ll want a thesaurus or dictionary or any book that you have lying around. Object Writing works best when you have a timer.

Second, open the book you chose earlier and randomly pick any word. Alternatively, you could write about any object you see around you.

Finally, write about the word you picked using the following guidelines.

• Write from your senses (touch, taste, sound, smell, sight). In other words, avoid abstract ideas. Keep it real.
• Write with a timer. Keep the time short. 2 to 5 minutes is best. 10 minutes max.
• Don’t stop writing. It doesn’t have to rhyme or be in complete sentences. Keep writing rapid-fire.

That’s it. It’s simple. Now here’s why it works.

Sensory language is what connects the listeners to your writing. It follows the writing principle “show, don’t tell.” If you want your song to speak to your listener’s emotions, then you have to use language that resonates in the body. Emotions are embodied. You feel emotions. Emotions aren’t ideas that you think about. They are experiences. And experiences are real. So keep your language real and concrete. This is especially true for verses. Choruses can be meta to your verses. They can talk about the verse or the idea of the song. But your verses are the blood of the song. They live and breathe and the language should reflect that.

Object writing is the tool to develop your unique perspective. Only you can make the connection between an orange maple leaf and the smell of your lover’s wool sweater. With object writing, you tap into your personal experiences and memories and find your own unique perspective about life and the meaning of things. Object writing comes from your heart.

When you need quick stimulation, object writing allows you to dive in to the depths of your experience and pull out the relevant details that will make your writing interesting. It’s instant. And it gives you more choice because you have a vault of wonderful details to consider on the other side of your 5 minutes.

Here’s what an object writing session could look like:

Object: Leaves
Crunching under my feet I look down and see leaves of gold, burnt orange, and blood red. I imagine nostalgic moments of youth in the fall – argyle sweaters and jean jackets. Walks meant to soak up the last of the luke-warm sun and to hold hands with a young girl. Football and underage drinking. Parties too cold to be outside but too much in love to care. The leaves fall from the trees and they seem to stop in mid air as I imagine a September wedding…time stood still…I look around at the guests and they’re motionless, smiling, frozen in a conversation, and I feel blessed to be alive witnessing this moment of wonder and awe at the gifts of the heart. It’s my wedding day and the woman who these people are here to help me celebrate with is hiding in the house. Perhaps she’s peaking out of a window and maybe time is standing still for her too. And I wonder if she was the girl that some lucky boy held hands with in the fall of her youth. I can see them happy walking among the leaves on the sidewalk. The air is crisp and fresh. The sun falls to the west and my heart rises in the east. The past is romantic and the future is hopeful. The present is transfixed in an absolute moment of this – a celebration of love and happiness. A union of leaves to ground and separation from the tree. The aging bark is flexible and sways in the breeze and the scene begins to move again…leaves slowly falling, voices laughing, glasses clink and hearts open to the possibility of forever and ever.

See how simple it is?

Object Writing Hacks:

• Start your day with 5 minutes of object writing. Once your inner writer is awake, it stays with you all day.
• Object write from all parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
• Whenever you get stuck in a song, stop what you are doing and object write for a couple of minutes.
• The more specific the picture, the more emotion it creates.
• Before you begin, write your senses across the top of the page: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, body, motion.
• Ignore rhyme, rhythm, and sentence structure. Your writing doesn’t have to be polished at this stage. Let it be ugly.
• Let the object take you wherever it wants. You don’t have to stay focused on the object. Follow the thoughts that arise.

Go ahead and take 2 minutes to do some quick object writing right here in the comments section. I’ll even get it started.

Here’s my top 10 lyric writing insights:

1. The rhythm of your melody and the rhythm of your lyrics should match.
Rhythm has *strong and week beats. So do words. When you speak to someone, you use conventional stresses–found in the dictionary–to communicate your ideas as efficiently as possible. If you spoke with the ac-CENT on the wrong syl-LA-ble, people would have a hard time understanding you. Yet this happens over and over again in lyric writing. Match your stresses and your listeners will get what you mean.

2. Show, don’t tell.
Compare “I was nervous” with “My palms were sweaty” and you’ll get the picture. The first example is about the experience while the second example is from the experience. The easiest way to do this is to stimulate your listener’s senses by using sense-bound language. Write from the 5 senses and you’ll find interesting details that will keep your listeners captivated and emotionally involved.

3. Use prosody. Support your meaning with your lyrics.
How you put your lyric together should support what you have to say. You can create prosody with:

Form: Organize your song functions into effective song forms, e.g. verse/chorus, AABA, and verse/prechorus/chorus, etc.
Musical Stress: Put words in relation to each other according to its relative stress in the bar and its relation to surrounding notes. Put the most important word in the most important stress, beat 1 of bar 1.
Line Length and Number of Lines: You can balance or unbalance a section accordance to its meaning by having an even (balanced, stable) or odd (unbalanced, unstable) number of lines. You can also match line lengths perfectly (balanced, stable) or match lines imperfectly (unbalanced, unstable).
Rhyme: Perfect rhyme and Family rhyme will support a stable or resolved meaning. The more remote rhyme types (assonance rhyme, consonance rhyme, etc.) will support an unstable or unresolved meaning.

4. Create contrasting sections.
Lyrically, line length is one of the most effective tools to create contrast. Create contrasting sections using one or more structural elements, i.e. contrasting ideas, number of lines, rhyme schemes, etc. Ask yourself, “What have I got? What’s different than that?”

5. Consider when to balance and unbalance your lyric.
The main point of balancing and unbalancing is, again, prosody: supporting your meaning with your structures. Do you need stability or instability to support your meaning? Combine all four structural elements–number of lines, line length, line rhythm, and rhyme scheme–to balance and unbalance sections.

6. Use fresh metaphor.
To see one thing as though it is something else is your unique ability. To make sure your metaphors aren’t cliche, use the “duh” method (I got this from Shane Adams). You start with your first object, cake. Think of the most obvious characteristic of the object, as in the cake is round. These are called the “duh” descriptions. Now take the “duh” description and think of something else that has that quality or characteristic. The cake is round…duh…what else is round? The moon. Now think of a “duh” characteristic of the second object, the moon glows, the moon is distant. Now plug those new traits into the original, the cake glowed like a distant moon. Now that’s original.

7. Develop your verses.
Develop your song idea from verse to verse making sure the chorus gains meaning and interest each time it is repeated. Give your final verse a “pay off” that rewards your listener for their attention. Think of how you tell stories to your friends. Usually, the point of the entire story comes at the very end. Where you begin your story and how much you share depends on what material is relevant to the understanding of the song’s climax.

8. Control the song’s point of view and verb tense.
Discuss a song’s story-line from the singer’s point of view. This solves a lot of problems: verb tense, setting, point of view, gender, etc. Write from the perspective of the singer of the song.

9. Use fresh rhymes.
Rhymes occur at the ends of lines. These positions are natural spotlights. Since your listener has time to consider what you just said before the next line begins, make it worthy of the spotlight. Avoid cliche rhymes and boring rhyme schemes. Learn how to find fresh rhymes that stick in the mind of the listener and that help you say what you mean in a unique way.

10. Spotlight important ideas.
Certain positions in a song spotlight important ideas. These power positions get special attention:

Opening lines
Balancing lines
Unbalancing positions

When you have something important to say, these techniques can help emphasize the point:

Shorten lines to spotlight important ideas
Lengthen lines to spotlight important ideas
Put your important ideas in opening lines, balancing lines and unbalancing positionsAnd use power words (action verbs, sensual adjectives, unique words, etc.) in your power positions.

Rules are definitely meant to be broken. But please learn the rules first.

*This relative pattern of strong and weak beats, from strongest to weakest:
In 4/4: Beat 1, Beat 3, Beat 4, Beat 2, Beat 4&, Beat 2&, Beat 3&, Beat 1&
In 3/4: The only strong beat in a bar of 3/4 is the downbeat. The second and third beats are weak. In order of strength, the beats line up like this: Bar 1, Bar 3, Bar 2, Beat 1, Beat 2, Beat 3, Beat 2&, Beat 3&, Beat 1&
In 6/8: Think of it as two quick bars of 3/4. In order of strength, the beats of 6/8 line up like this: Beat 1, Beat 4, Beat 6, Beat 3, Beat 2, Beat 5

First of all, I give MasterWriter two big thumbs up. It has been an invaluable songwriting tool for me since the day I bought just over a year ago.

MasterWriter is a powerful Windows and Mac compatible suite of songwriting tools. MasterWriter is an educational, creative and organizational powerhouse for the professional songwriter and songwriting hobbiest.

When you open MasterWriter, you’re presented with a database of your songs. There’s a robust search engine with filters and grouping capabilities – I’ll be extremely happy if they add Mac OSX Spotlight support. A simple double-click on the song title and you’re in the Lyric area – a fully-functional word processor. You can see your completed lyric sheet or go straight to the Sketches area where you can write and store bits and pieces of your lyric. You can screen-split the completed lyric and the lyric sketches for better editing.

But what I like most about MasterWriter is the Collected Area. Here is a special window that shows your completed lyric or lyric sketch and all of the rhymes and words you’ve collected in MasterWriter’s thesaurus and many dictionaries. The Collected area is where most of your writing will be done. It’s laid out well visually. All of your lyrical choices are right before your eyes.

The rhyme dictionaries are fantastic and thorough. I still pull out my trusted Roget’s Thesaurus from time to time though. There’s something about looking through classes of intellectual thought and the kinesthetic feeling of paper under my fingers that stimulates my creativity. With MasterWriter, you can search rhymes for any word in a number of categories. MasterWriter filters rhymes by Primary, Secondary, Pop-Culture, and a list of your favorite rhymes. It even gives you alternate pronunciations for even more rhyme choices. MasterWriter’s unique rhyming feature is “Sound-Alikes” – a family rhyme tool. MasterWriter also includes rhymed-phrases, an alliteration dictionary (the only one in existence), a pop-culture dictionary, a thesaurus and more.

I also use the stereo hard disk recorder to capture ideas. Unfortunately, you’re limited to 5 minutes of audio at a time but you can record multiple takes. It’s great if you don’t feel like booting up another program and you need to capture an idea fast. Plus, it keeps all of your audio within your song file which is nice for organization. You can even set audio markers for quick location and there’s a MIDI drum loop player with quite a few useful loops (over 250) to keep you inspired.

Another unique feature of MasterWriter is Songuard, their online date-of-creation song registration service. You can keep track of all your song publishing and copyright information in one place and feel secure that you have a solid record of creation.

If you’re serious about becoming a better songwriter, MasterWriter can definitely help. The flash tutorial that comes with MasterWriter is very inspiring and will get you using the program in only minutes.

Best of all, I’ve negotiated a $50 discount for you when you use discount number 2070. Download a free 30-Day Trial at http://www.masterwriter.com or call Toll Free 1-866-892-8844. Remember to use discount number 2070. Full Disclosure: I get a kickback when you use my code. But I seriously use it every day! So if you don’t want me to get the referral, just don’t use my code. But if you appreciate my review, maybe you can help me pay my hosting bill. Cheers!