Songwriting Books: Tear 'Em Up!

Don't be alarmed by the title of this post — I'm not suggesting that you destroy your songwriting books. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Books are one of the best tools available for aspiring songwriters who want to hone their craft. What I want to do with this post is share a technique I've discovered — one that helps me get more out of the books I buy, and which I'm sure would do the same for anyone who tries it.

The Ultimate Songwriting Book

Unfortunately, the ultimate songwriting book has never been written, and never will be. There are many great books out there, literally volumes of helpful information, but none of them cover every aspect of songwriting in complete detail. You may, like me, have a sizeable collection of books, each with its own take on melody, chord progressions, lyrics, and so on. The problem comes when you try to find something: Which book had that great bit about chord substitutions? I could really use that on this song...

You could end up looking through several books before finding what you need. If you're as disorganized as I am, simply locating the books might take a while, never mind trying to get any specific information out of them. But there's a better way.

To make information retrieval easier,
break up your books and store related pages together.

 

What I do is break the books apart — yes, literally tear them apart — by topic or chapter, and store all of the pages relating to a given subject together in a single notebook. I put the individual pages into sheet protectors and store them in a 3-ring binder, but you can use whatever method of storage you like (I've seen manilla folders and a file cabinet used, for example).

One advantage of this system is that you only store what's useful to you. A book may contain nothing about writing music that you don't already have, but it may have a great chapter on lyric writing. You can save only that chapter, and throw away (or better yet, recycle) the rest of the book, freeing up space on your book shelves.

Your Own Songwriting Encyclopedia

Thanks to this system, there's no guessing as to which book I need when I want to look up or review something. All of the information on a given topic is together in one notebook. You can even add your own pages, containing magazine articles, personal notes, or whatever else you'd like to include. Over time, you'll build a custom collection of reference material, designed just for you — your own "songwriting encyclopedia".

This technique can help even if you're not looking for anything specific. I don't know about you, but I can't remember everything that I read, and it certainly doesn't all get immediately incorporated into my songwriting. If I'm struggling with a song — maybe I can't seem to get the melody just right, for example — just browsing through my notebooks can be helpful. I'll often come across an idea or technique that's just I need, but which I'd forgotten about, when I do this.

The books also take up a little less space this way, not only because I store just those sections of a book that I find helpful, but also because I periodically go through and weed out pages containing duplicate information. Obviously you don't have to do this, but over time you'll probably find that you've collected pages from multiple books that all contain essentially the same information. It can take a little time to clear these out, but I think it's worth it, especially if you've collected information from several books.

It's Not Just for Songwriting

I've also used this technique with the large collection of cartooning books that I've amassed over the years, and you could probably do it with almost any collection of instructional or reference books. People often have a resistance to physically damaging any book (maybe it's a vestige of our being taught not to write in our books when we were in school), but it's OK - you own the book! Make the most of it!