Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Comments
Sing everything like Elizebeth Frazier and then the words don’t really matter beyond how they sound
Good luck with that
I know what you mean. For instance, it’s hard to hear the word “imagine” without “there’s no heaven” following it nor without that melodic motive based on thirds. You could write down the other band’s lyrics from a few of their songs, use the cut-up method, and form a new song out of them. That “Word Palette” app Richard found is another solid choice.
You can also lift a musical motive from the few notes of the chorus of a song and apply retrograde, inversion, and other note-bending techniques to it, and apply that to the chord progression of your song’s verses. Find another song with a good-sounding motive from the verse, and apply it to the chorus of your song. You could even base a chorus melody off of a great guitar solo.
All that to say, “You can still be creative without being too clever about it.”
I mean, it would explain the state of the top 40 pop chart. 
Remember that rut I was in a year ago around which I based an entire topic? It still took me a while to rediscover my groove, but I did exactly this “patchwork” method to create a couple of throwaway songs to get me back on my feet.
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/464677/#Comment_464677
I think we both are in agreement.
However, always warn against cliches when suggesting metaphors and similes. We want to avoid “my love burns brighter in the sun” tripe after all. 
It's practical, it's free, and if you walk with the intention of creating lyrics, it works. I have notebooks full of lyrics that prove my point - no whimsy or muse about it. Yes, you do have to have an intention to do so - I didn't mention that as I assumed this was a given. Sheesh...
Awesome. I will try it out later. Free! with the best IAPs! More devs should offer those IAPs.
The thing is, everybody’s brain is built differently. Having several notebooks full of lyrics and ideas doesn’t prove anything except that “walking with the intention of creating lyrics” works well for you. For others, especially those who suffer writer’s block, walking “with the intention of creating lyrics” may not churn out anything and instead may end up as an exercise in self-defeat and self-doubt. “Was I concentrating hard enough? I’m sure my intentions were strong enough. I walked 5km, so why can’t I write anything?! I’m so stupid.” Walking stimulates thought, but it doesn’t stimulate thought the same way for everybody.
At least with the methods I shared, which are also practical and free thank you, there’s at least a chance to get a couple of sentences down on paper. I’m going out on a limb and saying that all of our methods are practical to one degree or another, but I’m of the opinion that “walking with the intention of creating” is far less tangible and less methodical than the strategies I’ve mentioned already.
Titus Andromedan says that lyrics are the least important part of a song. As long as they rhyme, no one cares what the words are. Hard to argue with his results:
Jeremy Kyle..... from any door.
Yes, you're right - it's neither methodical nor strategic.
Mmm, yes – good point. Don’t just describe, hand it over to marketing and see what comes back.
I used that app at lunch today and it successfully got me past a block, with the output (hopefully) coming soon to a SOTMC post near you! This method works great for me.
The thing is, that’s more or less how I’ve always done my lyrics – go for a walk, take a voice recorder or a video camera, and say stuff over and over until it seems to scan and fit and perhaps rhyme.
I certainly get the lyrics done that way, and it works.
However, I don’t think it works well enough. I don’t think it works the way a professional would want. I don’t think it has consistency and reliability and a high enough yeald and all those other metrics. It produces words, it fills the page, and for decades I’ve been satisfied that ‘the lyrics have been written’ with what I saw from the results. The more I think about it now, the more I realise I was being too soft. The results were not high enough quality, and it took too long and too much effort to get that far each time. Arriving at lyrics doesn’t mean I’ve arrived at the best lyrics I could have done, given the time I’ve put in. If my living depended on it I wouldn’t be doing it that way. What way would I be doing it, then? That was essentially the question of this thread.
Yes, I'm sure there is an approach to this that will work for you in your professional endeavors. I'm not a "professional" musician, but I know people who are/have been and they don't/didn't use these methods (obviously though, I don't know every professional musician - I'm sure some use a particular methodology). I'm not convinced that these methods will produce results of the higher quality that you are looking for. But, ...whatever floats your boat. Good luck to you and all.
Good topic. I've tried to add a comment to the thread several times, but decided it was rubbish and canned it. This is pretty much my lyric writing process, too.
I am curious as to why you guys seem to consider lyrics as a priority in your song writing. It seems to me that today, even in genres where lyrics were once considered important, that lyrics don’t matter all that much. At least for the popular stuff, which is also recognized as the professional stuff.
I’m not trying to argue that lyrics don’t matter, but I think I have stopped listening to them. It’s just that lyrics are so terrible now, they are never the reason I like a new song. It seems like rhythmic patterns and catchiness of the lyrics are all that matter anymore, not content or any sort of literary standard.
I probably prefer songs with good lyrics in the old fashioned sense, but they are a chore for me to write. What motivates you to expend the effort to come up with good, meaningful lyrics when most people wouldn’t care if it were just some childish gibberish?
Alcohol and stimulants, but I'm a classicist.
See, and that’s what I figured you were getting at with your question. These methods I mentioned may not work for you either, but there’s no harm in trying. I remember when I thought I could write awesome lyrics, only to find out a few years later that most of the lyrics from that era (2002-2006) were either basic, stupid, embarrassing, or clichéd twaddle. There was only one song that was accidentally good - an Irish jig I wrote called “The Clothes My Grandfather Wore”. The other songs from that era that were any good (despite the poor production skills I used to have) were instrumental dance tracks.
These days, if I want to add a cliche to invoke another time and era from the era when said cliche was a popular trope, I can do so. If I want to avoid cliches entirely, I can do so. However, I’m sure there’s plenty more to learn. Did you see the Coursera link to the free songwriting class mate?
Because I want to actually be proud of something I write rather than sell out my artistic integrity. Because I want songwriting to remain a craft rather than evolving into a computerised process where the most banal twaddle is pumped out. Because I actually give a shit. Because I don’t want my music to sound like a kindergartner wrote it...
(Yeah,
f-ck Post Malone. “Rockstar” is more repetative and far less clever than what I remember the Teletubbies used to be.)
Even if I write a shallow pop song with the title repeated a couple of times in the chorus, I make sure the verses support the chorus.
Are you going to sign up for it and do it? Anyone else here thinking of? What if a bunch of us did, we could group together (if there’s any group exercises, there often are for coursera courses, though this might not benefit from it).
I once woke up with a great idea. Feverishly scribbled it down, and began to work out how it would develop. About then a nagging familiarity entered my mind. A minute or so later I realised I’d invented Tommy.
But lyrics and ideas for genuinely new stuff has never been a problem when awake.
I’m not going to sign up, because I already did yesterday after finding it.
I can stand to learn new methods and tricks I may not know yet. I’m hoping more here will be on board too. Should be fun! 
>
Absolutely, JWM. Anything I do with RTM has lyrics that mean something. They tell a story, make a point, express an experience. It is our antidote to the shovel full of banal crap pumping out of Radio Gormless.
There is, of course, also room for works that have simple - but not simplistic - words, ‘cause sometimes less is more, and the song works best on a feeling, whereby the music takes centre stage.
Sometimes it’s both! On the next album, we have a song inspired by a character in a novel. There are two versions, which please us equally. One is, for want of a better expression, a dance mix, using just three words spoken by the character. The other, uses a full lyric to tell the a potted version of the character’s story. Each version appeals to a different part of the brain, which is no bad thing.
I do the words.
I don't say lyrics because they are just words.
The words convey thoughts or emotions.
At the time in which I create music that I feel corresponds to the particular mood or influence zone, I apply the lyrics from my catalog of word piles in notebooks.
I often record live into phone if things hit me.
My mind state and existence often determine the content.
The issue is realizing that the words still came from me. But, often times an interesting attempt to recreate those same circumstances yields entirely new results based on the evolved emotions in the modern context.
I signed up this morning...opted out of the assesments so as to get the course free.
Same here. It’s more about the experience and learning than a grade.
@Zen210507
That’s totally awesome! Where can I find your previous albums? I see Ziggy (and Bowie in general) has possibly influenced you too.
When I woke up this morning, I heard a song in my head - “Barbie Girl”.
It’s a guilty pleasure song of mine, but I haven’t listened to it since about October. I realised that while the lyrics are a bit shallow and dirty, they also make use of imagery rather than saying things outright. I pulled out Spotify and gave the rest of the Aquarium album a listen (haven’t listened to it fully since I was about 15) and was shocked to learn that if you analyse their lyrics, most of them really make great use of imagery to pull off explicit ideas barely hidden behind metaphor/simile. You ever hear of “Candy Man”? Holy shit! 
All this to say - “dumb fun” pop music can be crafted well rather than manufactured toss. It actually takes a clever (and dirty) mind to pull off a song about 69 and not get slapped with a parental advisory sticker.
So do you think the words have to make sense, or are you good with the more abstract style of wordsmithing? I used to really like punk song words that were direct and to the point, often in a blunt manner. But now I think I prefer the more abstract stuff that conjures images, feelings , memories, etc. without being too literal. The meaning becomes personal to the listener through their own interpretation.
Started messing around with this app last night and had a blast. It reminds me of the texting game I play with my youngest. We string together the word suggestions and make absurd gibberish sentences and send them to each other. It can be pretty hilarious sometimes.
Anyway, thanks for the tip on this app. It was previously unknown to me.
Same here, I’m in too. I’ve done Coursera courses before, some fairly naff and one was very good (the gamification one I did a few years ago). The problem with a lot of them is that they’re peer marked and there’s a bit of a tendency on some of the courses I did to review and mark everything else you see highly positively, as you know everyone else will be doing the same to you. You had to mark at least five others each time, for your mark to be counted and to progress.