As songwriters, we all have unique assets that we bring to the process of creating music. While the quality of your voice or your knack for writing hooks might come to mind first, the way you funnel emotional intuition and passion into your music shouldn’t be ignored. Feelings are some of the best music-creation tools a songwriter has. Learn to embrace and apply them to your music. In doing so, you’ll have a powerful way to connect with audiences by making your work relatable and human. But by ignoring your feelings or trying to artificially change them to make your music more palatable, you’ll make your life as a songwriter much harder than it has to be.

For songwriters who want to explore their creativity in meaningful ways, changing up old habits and taking risks over and over again isn’t an option. However, it’s not easy, especially if you’ve been making music for a long time. One of the most frustrating things about songwriting is that the routines you build can be both helpful and destructive for your process, depending on how you spend your time writing. Constantly renewing your creative curiosity with exercises like these will help you to write consistently, but in ways that are new and challenging. 

Technology is a double-edged sword when it comes to music creation. On one hand, technology gives us the tools to write, record, and produce in ways we couldn’t have done otherwise. Yet, leaning too heavily into the convenience technology offers can be bad for our music. This especially goes for writing and performing with MIDI instruments.