Songwriting Schematics

Five years ago I started studying songwriting by devouring book after book. I continued finding the same information, over and over. Since then I have read hundreds of books, with the purpose of creating a repeatable method for writing a quality song. It wasn't until 2015 that I realized I had been going about it all wrong. I was trying to develop a general overview of songwriting, but I had never truly understood how the most intricate and important details shared common themes. This was an absolute breakthrough for me. By mastering those concepts which are shared by different areas of my songwriting, I could manipulate every part of a song to suit my vision for the song itself. The most astonishing discovery I made, was also the most important. We can utilize the Gestalt principles of psychology to create an audible work of art. We can craft our song with the same visual design elements that the artist uses to craft their canvas. We also teach using the 80/20 Pareto principle. This means that a small number of your songs parameters will have the largest effect on the overall quality. First, we identify the most important concepts by observing which of those concepts repeat the most throughout the structures of a song. These concepts are then the most important, so while 20% is a nominal number, it will nonetheless serve to show us where to focus our practice for the fastest results. Our method uses memory chunking to help us remember important concepts. More importantly, chunking will allow us to understand how our listeners perceive our songs in groupings of two or three objects. We focus on declarative memory when writing, to create easy recall of our fundamental focus points. Procedural memory locks us into a pattern and stifles creativity, so we try to avoid this wherever possible. If you're interested in learning our method, join our email list at We hope to see you soon!