50+ Great Lyric Writing Resources
Aug 12th in Web Roundups by Joel Falconer
Want to get started writing your own lyrics? There’s a long way between the beginner’s "violets are red" debut and award-winning wordsmithing, so here’s a bunch of great resources to help get you on your way. Includes tools, how to guides, communities, recommended books and sources of inspiration.
- Rhymezone is a rhyming dictionary and thesaurus that sorts its search results by the number of syllables.
- An online dictionary, since Rhymezone is bound to give you results that might work, but you’re unsure about.
- If you’re not interested in using Word to write lyrics, there are dedicated apps like MasterWriter out there that integrate rhyming dictionaries and the like.
- For singer-songwriters in particular, this tool page may beat all the others since, alongside the rhyming dictionary and thesaurus, it has a chord finder.
- This Hotsource article gives some basic pointers for getting started with a lyric.
- Robin Frederick’s How to Write a Song is one of the very few similarly titled articles out there that actually touches on all the basics.
- Quamut offers an introduction to basic song form and structure.
- Carla Starrett goes into adapting poetry into lyrics.
- Berklee Shares has a free PDF on Basic Lyrical Elements.
- This series of videos teaches you how to write an alternative pop song—some videos are about composition, but there are several on lyrics.
- The BBC presents a page on lyrics in its songwriting guide, including interviews with successful lyricists.
- Rock Guitar World gives an overview of the entire songwriting process with a focus on lyrics and structure.
- Ken Hill has 21 tips on songwriting at Music Biz Academy.
- The Muse’s Muse, a songwriting site that’s been around for ages, has an extensive beginner’s resource section.
- If you like online courses, SongU.com has several on lyric writing.
- There’s a selection of similarly priced songwriting courses at Musician University.
- Lyrical Line has an extensive set of articles on the topic.
- Music Radar has a piece suggesting 24 lyric-writing tips.
- The page may still bear a design from the 90s, but Charles Wolff’s article is a fairly long and extensive introduction to the craft.
- Your attitude to songwriting is just as important as your technique—Andy Roberts talks about which attitude is the right one.
- And of course for the ultimate guide to songwriting, Scott Adams shares his advice on the Dilbert Blog.
- This article is on dealing with rhythm in your lyrics, though I suggest copying it into Notepad to read it (the colors are terrible).
- Berklee Music Blogs has an interesting career songwriter blog.
- Performing Songwriter has a bunch of case studies looking at how hit songs were developed.
- Great Songwriting has a community for songwriters who wish to have their lyrics critiqued by other songwriters. The cost of entry is to critique lyrics for other songwriters.
- The Hip Hove Ave forums are a place for rap and hip hop lyricists to improve their skills, critique work and engage in online battles (doesn’t that take the fun out of it?).
- Here’s a free songwriter’s forum with a particularly active lyrics section.
- The Songwriter’s Forum has a wide range of message boards ranging from lyrical technique to lyrical business, and has a contests section in case you feel competing with other writers will help you improve.
- The SongStuff Music Resource Web site has a forum with an active lyrics and songwriting board, and this one may be a good choice to get involved with over the others if you want a community that will cater to lyricists while giving you a place to talk about studio gear, instruments, synth design and so on.
- The Just Plain Folks community claims to have a membership of 51,000 songwriters and music industry professionals.
- Lyrics: Writing Better Words For Your Songs
by Rikky Rooksby
- The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook
- Songwriting For Dummies
- The Craft & Business of Songwriting
- Songwriters on Songwriting
- Songwriting: Essential Guide to Rhyming
- The Business of Songwriting
- Popular Lyric Writing
- Prince
- Joni Mitchell
- Elvis Costello
- Brian Wilson
- Leonard Cohen
- Paul McCartney
- John Lennon
- Tom Waits
- Bruce Springsteen
- Neil Young
- Bob Dylan
- Billy Joel
- Eric Clapton
- Jimi Hendrix
- Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s lyricist)
Tools
How To
Communities
Books
Sometimes reading articles on the web isn’t enough—you need an immersive, in-depth and comprehensive book to get you started. Here they are.
Inspiration
It’s often said that one should learn from the masters of a given field, and this is especially true of songwriting. You should dissect and rip apart every hit song you can get your hands on. To get you started, take a look at the lyrics of some of these songwriters, who are considered among history’s best. All the masters give this advice: study the greats. Nobody takes it seriously because it seems like a cop-out answer, or because it’s too hard to get out a lyric sheet and analyze it for yourself when you could simply read an article.
Take this advice seriously, and do it.
These are links to lyrics sites; if there’s a small child sleeping in your house, watch out for the noisy banner ads!
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Eric Shafer August 12th
Freestyle singing in the shower or in the car is my ultimate songwriting resource.
Great stuff here though Joel, didn’t know about some of these. I think Ryan Leslie deserves a mention under songwriter inspiration though.
( )Sandra August 12th
This is a thoughtful article with some great info. Thanks!
( )vince August 12th
“# For singer-songwriters in particular, this tool page may beat all the others since, alongside the rhyming dictionary and thesaurus, it has a chord finder.”
http://www.chordfind.com is a much better site, because it offers chords for not only the guitar, but piano, ukulele, mandolin, etc. in the same way.
( )SoundOfPhilly August 15th
AudioTuTs rocks…this is a treasure to be found…glad to be one of the few who have discovered before it blows up…thanks for the info. Singing freestyle in the shower is in fact the easiest for me too…It’s also my best time of the day for creative ideas.
Thanks!
( )Skellie August 16th
@ SoundofPhilly: Thanks for the kind words about the site
We’re doing our best to give it a helping hand in the blowing up stakes, but right now, it’s not so bad to be a semi-undiscovered gem 
.
( )sarki sozleri September 6th
This is a useful article with some great info.
( )Singh May 24th
WOW ! the best tutorial i’ve come across here, lyrics and writing them seem to be something that is VERY hard to explain for me, The resources here really help out !
Audio Tuts do your thing !
( )Art September 7th
Joel, excellent review of lyric writing resources, But, I think you missed the absolute best tool for lyric writing. I’ve found that Lilac Writer http://www.lilacwriter.com is fantastic. It’s online which allows my co-writers and me to work seamlessly together. Been finding the rhyming results more usable than MasterWriter or Rhymezone too. It’s even currently free.
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