Song writing is arguably the most important part of making a song.

More than recording, mixing, or mastering.

It's the core and essence of the music making process. Naturally, I want to help you guys get better at it, and get the most out of your talent. Here are 6 songwriting tips for the everyday musician:

Make An Interesting Arrangement

You might have a great guitar riff or vocal melody, but that's not enough to make a great song.

What you need in addition to that, is good arranging. Even if you have awesome verse and chorus written down, believe me, they won't sound this great if you just repeat them 3 times in your song.

You have to keep things interesting, different.

A nice rule of thumb is to plan out your song structure in a way that sounds like the song is building or progressing.

However, every instrument, part, or section must have a purpose, a place to fill.

Don't just pile up layers of instruments and tracks without any thought behind it.

Feature The Hook A song's hook is the thing that catches the most attention of the listener.

It's that part that gets stuck in your head, making you hum it all day long. It can be a guitar riff, a vocal line, a drum beat, or even an entire chorus section. Whatever it may be, the key is to find and recognize the hook in your song, then making sure your song structure, arrangement, and instrumentation are featuring it.

Find The Right Tempo When you write a new song, play around with it and try out different tempos.

Sometimes even a 5 bpm change can make a big difference to the song, or even inspire your writing and playing. It's a simple move to make sure your getting the most out of your ideas.

Keep The Chord Progression Interesting

I don't mind if your chord progression has 3 chords in it or 30.

But if it repeats itself throughout the entire song without changing, that's probably a bad sign. There are always exceptions, but most of the time you want your chord progression to change throughout the song, to stay interesting. So if you find that your entire song has the same chord progression, there's nothing wrong with that, just make sure it really what this song calls for.

Play With Other Musicians

It's no secret that playing with other musician is super inspiring, much more than playing all by yourself.

If all you do sit in your room and play your instrument, it's all nice and well, but you're missing out on a lot.

You should definitely go out and meet some other musicians.

Even if you don't end up playing with them, just talking about music, sharing yours and listening to others, is enough to inspire you in ways you can't get anywhere else.

Don't Rely Solely On Vocals

In most of today's modern music, vocals are the most dominant instrument.

They often carry the entire song, and get the most attention from the listeners. And because of that, I want to bring your attention back to the music.

What do I mean by that?

Very often I run across songs that have a great vocal performance, but a mediocre backing music.

And only because lack of attention and effort.

I don't want you to create songs with a good vocal performance that "covers up" bad backing music.

I want you to create songs with great backing music that will feature and compliment the great vocals.

So when you're working on your song's arrangement, or even during the writing stage, take a break from the vocals, mute them, and pay attention to the rest of the instruments.

Take a listen and make sure the song and arrangement are still interesting.

See if the song suffers or falls apart without the vocals.

Check if what's going on behind the vocals actually sounds good.

But don't take this the wrong way, you're not doing this instead of the vocals, you're doing it in addition to them, don't forget that as well.

If you paid attention you might have already realized that I'm not teaching you how to write a good riff, or how to come up with ideas. All of these tips are ways to get the most out of the songs and ideas you already come up with.

I'm giving you some points to look for and some things to try, to help you use your full potential.

Did any of these tips help you?

Do you have any songwriting tips of your own?

Let us know in the comments below!