Ten ways that studying Songwriting online will transform your skills

Of course, everyone who writes their own music no doubt has some ambition that they’re going to hit the big time eventually, but most recognise that even if they never get that big break, songwriting can still have countless benefits.

Even if you never make a penny from your music, here are just some of the ways that writing could transform your skills and benefit you in ways that you may never have thought about.

Music Theory

While a lot of songwriters have no time for music theory and feel it is boring and can stifle their creativity, it’s still very important to know about.

Studying songwriting online helps to teach you the rules and building blocks to creating a song and while you don’t have to stick to these rules if you don’t want to, you’ll definitely create a much more polished end product if you do have an awareness of them.

Improves Your Ear

The more and more that you practice songwriting the more your ‘ear’ for music will improve.

What we mean by this is that you have a grounding in the basics of songwriting, you’ll find it much easier to pick up on random chords or melodies that you hear and identify them.

The better that you get at this, the easier you’ll find it to incorporate these elements into your own songwriting.

Building Your Own Style

If you stick to learning and performing songs written by others, you can become a very proficient musician yourself, but you’ll always be lacking your own distinct ‘style’.

It can be very easy to get stuck in a pattern of just mimicking your influences, but trying to write your own songs will definitely encourage you to open up to different styles and genres and develop your own voice.

Feedback

Trying to write your own songs on your own is fine, but one of the key benefits of learning online is the personalised feedback that it offers you.

Here at the ICMP, our online music courses have a number of support elements in place to give you tailored advice and guidance to help you improve on all areas of your music education.

With small class sizes and personal tutors, including input from industry experts, learning online is a much more rewarding way of songwriting with invaluable feedback that will help you grow as an artist.

Recording

If you’re serious about songwriting, you’ll eventually need to commit your compositions to record.

This is a whole skill within itself and learning how to actually record your own song is invaluable if you have hopes of embarking on a career in the music industry.

What’s more, it’s becoming easier and easier to record your own music at home using the likes of USB microphones or even just your mobile phone if you’re struck with inspiration and have no other equipment available.

Develop Your Music Comprehension

As a music fan, it’s easy to know what you like to listen to, but once you start to learn songwriting yourself you start to gain a much better understanding of exactly why those songs are so great.

Once you start to learn the process and exactly what goes through artists’ heads when writing their songs, you start to get a much better understanding of music and give you a much greater appreciation.

Creativity

This one pretty much goes without saying, but songwriting is an inherently creative task, which engages the right side of your brain, which is responsible for the more creative and artistic functions.

This doesn’t just help you develop your songwriting skills but should hopefully also help to boost your creativity in all other areas of life too.

Brain Functions

As well as encouraging your brain to be more creative, learning to write songs also helps to improve the brain in a whole host of other ways too.

For example, it’s also been said that writing music can improve your memory, speech processing, motor skills and even improve upon your mental health and self-esteem.

For more information on the specific ways that learning music can improve your brain, check out this article.

Improves Your Music Vocabulary

If you’ve never had any formal musical training, then you might sometimes feel a bit lost with some of the language that gets used by your fellow musicians.

Studying online will widen your music vocabulary and make it much easier to converse with your fellow musicians and explain your ideas to them a lot easier.

Expressing Yourself

If you’re a naturally creative person, you probably have great ideas running through your head all the time, but it can be frustrating if you don’t have the tools to actually put those ideas into something tangible.

Being able to express your thoughts and feelings and have them down on paper or properly recorded isn’t just a valuable skill, but it’s also extremely satisfying too!

These are just some of the ways in which studying songwriting online could help you improve on skills that are relevant not just to music, but life in general, so if you’re feeling inspired to give it a go for yourself, why not read more about our songwriting courses here.