Artificial intelligence has crept into almost every corner of music making. You can generate a lyric, a melody, a full arrangement, and a mastered track before your coffee goes cold. Which makes it a strange time to write a post about disciplined, human songwriting practice.
It also makes it the right time.
Scott Ashley recently posted a piece on songwriting.net called 6 Tips for Maintaining a Thriving Songwriting Practice. His core argument is simple and, I think, correct: creativity works like a muscle. If you want it to respond when you need it, you have to train it regularly.
Here’s his six-point framework, with a few thoughts of my own layered in.
1. Write consistently, even when you don’t feel like it
Ashley’s first tip is the one most writers resist hardest. Ten to fifteen minutes a day of something (journaling, working through a chord progression, sketching a lyric) beats waiting for inspiration to show up on its own terms.
The thing inspiration tends to reward is the writer who is already at the desk. Waiting for a bolt from the sky is a romantic idea, but a short daily habit is what actually produces finished songs over a year. The small sessions count more than the occasional marathon.
2. Build a dedicated creative space
His second point sounds almost too simple to matter: carve out a corner of your home for creation, and keep your instruments out of their cases.
In practice, this is one of the most underrated tips on the list. Friction is what kills more songs than any lack of talent. If picking up the guitar takes thirty seconds instead of five minutes, you’ll do it ten times more often.
A dedicated space doesn’t need to be beautiful or expensive. It just needs to be ready when you are.
3. Study the songs you love, properly
Ashley recommends taking apart the songs that move you. Not just listening, but examining the structure, rhyme scheme, chord movements, and melodic choices.
This is where a lot of writers leave value on the table. Active listening is a different skill from writing, and it needs its own practice.
A useful habit: pick one song a week that you genuinely love, and sit with it for thirty minutes. Where’s the first big melodic moment? How does the prosody work in the chorus? What’s the rhyme scheme actually doing? You’ll start to see patterns that quietly show up in your own writing later.
4. Co-write with other people
Collaboration, as Ashley puts it, breaks you out of your habitual patterns and gives you an instant source of feedback.
Writing alone is comfortable, and comfort is where your default choices live. A co-writer will push a chord somewhere you wouldn’t have gone, challenge a lyric you were quietly attached to, or suggest a structural move that reveals the song you were trying to write.
Even one co-write a month can open up territory you’d never have reached on your own.
5. Record everything, immediately
Never assume you’ll remember the idea later. Voice memos, a digital recorder, anything within arm’s reach.
A rough, out-of-tune phone recording of a melody you hummed in the car is worth more than the version you tried to reconstruct from memory three days later.
The one thing worth adding to Ashley’s advice: have a simple system for what happens to those captures. A folder, a naming convention, a weekly review. Otherwise your ideas quietly pile up in a graveyard of untitled voice memos no one ever opens again.
6. Embrace revision and editing
Ashley’s final point is the one most writers skip. First drafts are rarely finished songs. A thriving practice includes the willingness to rewrite lyrics, rework melodies, and restructure sections.
There’s a difference between finishing a song and finishing a song.
The first draft gets you to a complete lap. The revision is where the song actually becomes good. Writers who learn to enjoy that second pass tend to produce work that holds up over time.
Two bonus habits worth keeping
Ashley closes with two further suggestions that deserve their own mention.
Keep a songwriting journal or scrapbook for phrases, images, and observations that catch your ear during the day. And set a modest completion goal (one song a week, or one a month, whichever suits your life) regardless of quality.
Finishing things is its own skill, and it only gets built by finishing things.
The bigger picture
None of these six habits are complicated. None of them require talent, money, or the right gear. What they require is the willingness to show up in small, unglamorous ways, most days, over a long period of time.
A thriving songwriting practice isn’t really about writing hit songs every week. It’s about building a life where songs can keep arriving, keep getting finished, and keep getting better. Slow and steady is genuinely how this works, even when the rest of the industry seems to be sprinting toward the next shiny tool.
Source: https://www.songwriting.net/blog/6-tips-for-maintaining-a-thriving-songwriting-practice.
