My purple songbook

As a powerful young woman once said:

there's always a dirty secret. i'm embarassed what i'm showing you.
- a particular episode of small spaces, big style that i can't find anymore

As a creative, I think I'm comparatively chaotic. I have ADHD, I get inspiration at the most inconvenient times, and finding the drive to turn my one-off ideas into realized songs is its own battle.

For this article, I want to focus on how I keep track of my ideas, and what has worked the best for me in the past 10 years of making songs.

My earliest songs have been lost to time, between local phone notes on my dead blackberry, my local notes on my dead iPod Touch, and little scraps of paper that I'd use to write.

I think just having enough trips to the dollar store had me look at the pretty journals, and eventually I bought one on a whim because it looked nice. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized that I wanted a solution to my scattered and untraceable song ideas.

My purple songbook of 2019

This is my purple songbook. (Picture coming soon). It's lined, its got coils to lay flat (very important to play/write with only a chair and like a coffee table) and it's the perfect size to carry around without feeling like a burden.

I bought this in 2019. Or, maybe I bought it earlier and only started using it in 2019? Either way, I wanted to use something physical and centalized to capture all my song ideas that involved lyrics. I felt compelled to take this journey as my inspiration was drying up on the DAW side of things, just going into FL Studio with no plan and doing whatever I hadn't experimented with yet was starting to have diminishing returns.

Chords and Bars

I'd start firstly by write out chord progressions like so:

For my earliest example in this book, I still like this solution! I think this does an okay job at conveying these details to someone else, albeit with no melody or strumming patterns.

Just to fully explain what's going on here: One bar | marks the spot between measures of music. The amount of chords between bars indicates the division of the chords in the bar. For example: The first measure has the chord Am for a whole note, and the second bar uses Am for a half note, then G for a half note. More chords means the measure gets split up equally more often. This leads to nice groupings of 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8. (You can write the same chord name twice in a row to bridge the gap in these groupings. Also, I basically never write chord changes on each beat of 3/4 time.)

As for the lyrics: Each line of words correlates with the number of times the phrase is repeated, so the reader has to interpret the vocal rhythm and melody on the spot. Though on paper I can still adjust the spacing of words and syllables to land on certain chords, like if I wanted the word "nobody" to land on the 2nd Am by placing it after the first measure, with "I won't steal" to the left of it.

This lineup of chords lends itself well to having a strumming pattern added. For a long time I felt this was a satisfying way to leave my song ideas compact on the page.

I liked this for a lot of reasons! Primarily because it really was just the outline of the song, and finer details like melody and rhythm could be discovered on the spot, and captured in their most vulnerable form while recording.

Getting more specific details

But of course I didn't stop there. For some songs I really wanted to keep the rhythms in tact. Further iterations would have rhythm notes underneath the chords or lyrics:

I felt like having these extra symbols was nice, but ultimately felt distracting from the core flow, and took up a lot of page space for what was mostly amounting to "chords with lyrics". I just felt like I could make better use of the page's real estate than to have all the strumming and vocal rhythms appear on one page, and all the lyrics (with a lot of empty space) on another.

I think I'd kind of hoped for every song to live on one page, and felt frustrated by pages that were used for only the 2nd half of notes for a song. Eh, maybe the notebook just needed to be larger.

But what I didn't enjoy was just having too many notes for a song in general. It felt like I needed to put in more effort to correctly interpret what I meant, rather than letting the song feel free to express itself in the moment.

While trying to figure out what I wanted, I came across another way I could keep notes on the page without having them take up too much room for text.

The corner box

Instead of taking up an entire line to write chords (especially if those chords were going to be repetitive) I'd add a medium-size box to the corner of the page for anything that wasn't lyrics. This was a pretty big game changer for me, I ended up really loving the side-tab of info while letting almost the whole page be dedicated to just lyrics and little symbols.

I could put chord progressions in the corner box, then label them with symbols and shapes, like ▲ or ♦. Then I'd add ▲ or ♦ to the lyrics themselves, as an indicator of which chord progression to shift to. Now it was starting to look really condensed without having the lyrics feel burdened by rhythm or structure.

Sometimes additional chord diagrams made it into the corner box, like guitar tabs for alternate spellings of "E" or "F". I'd also sometimes put the name of the song that inspired the current one. Anything from my own songs: "HEY DUDE!!!" to something like Jeff Rosenstock's songs: "Savers" or "Hurricane Waves".

Although, the last time I saw the corner box in my notebook is when I tried putting rhythms in again, under the lyrics, as guitar slash-rhythm notation. I know that what I'm doing is 100% what guitar slash notation is for, but still, it felt weirdly inelegant to re-introduce those elements to what I wanted to be mostly lyrics. I was just afraid of losing the rhythmic ideas in the moment, but then I'd come back and feel burdened by them. I dunno. I think that was a sign to start pulling my overall songwriting goals into question. I'd kind of just "gone for it" at this point. Like, what aspects about my song ideas are worth remembering for later?

Re-evaluating my goals

In general I felt like the most important thing to write down were the lyrics. Be they fleeting phrases caught in my head while walking, or sometimes thought-out passages while sitting at the guitar and strumming away.

A chord progression on its own doesn't hold much value to me. A melody or rhythm is nice to remember, but so many of these ideas are essentially improvised (or stolen) that I feel like the most valuable melody or rhythm is the one you feel strongly about. You should work with those elements when you feel the most passionate about them, and usually that's right as you come up with the idea. If it has to wait, it either can't wait long, or it better find some form that gives it more context. A melody and a chord progression are valuable to me. A melody and lyrics are valuable but they feel more inservice to the lyrics, if that makes sense.

My personal pecking order of what's most important to keep:

Lyrics > Rhythm > Melody > Chords

Knowing this, I realize that maybe the most important thing was to write lyrics, and then take action on them as soon as possible.

Just lyrics

Looking back through this notebook, I found that as the pages got newer, I'd leave more lyrics on the page and fewer notes for anything else.

I would sometimes write entire songs just as a set of verses, with empty spaces to add more notes or a chord progression later. For a while, it became a fun ritual to head downstairs to my parents' basement, grab my guitar, open up the book, and just try a few of the lyrics and see what worked.

I think it was a really healthy process to try and tie my need to write things with actually getting stuff recorded out of those writings. It was almost hard not to release stuff as purely acoustic recordings of all these song ideas.

With fewer goals for myself, I found I'd open up my vocalizations and rhythms more to weirder stuff. I could capture the feeling of surprise or a realization of a good idea in the recording itself, rather than trying too hard to plan it out.

For chord progressions, I'd just try to match the vibe of what the lyrics were giving off. For example, I might do I vi V IV for the first half of a verse, but if the verse ends with some kind of sombre phrase, then maybe I switch that last major IV to a minor iv.

All of this made for really easy demo-making. I could just sit down and shoot out song ideas, and end up with recordings I could use in the DAW, or just to feel out what kind of emotional notes I wanted in an album.

What I do now (as of writing)

Truth be told, I seldom use a physical journal for song ideas now. I still do it when I want to just hash out some ideas, but if I'm in the mood to make music I usually have my laptop, and my laptop means I can bang out a demo as a multitrack recording. Arguably maybe less time is spent planning on paper, but I don't think I'd have my intuition for songwriting now were it not for the time I spent with my purple songbook.

For me now, it's mostly just about the lyrics and how I feel them in the moment. If I forget a phrase, it probably wasn't worth remembering. If I remember a phrase and I can't stop singing it, I know there's some potential for something really engaging.

I really just value capturing my ideas in the moment as soon as possible in an audible format, and as an adult (who cares less about what people think of me) I'm much more prone to just bust out my field recorder or even my phone, and then make sure those recordings get named and sent to my DAW so I can call on them later as needed.

I'll make a new article on my current process if it ever drastically changes, but this is how I think I sharpened a lot of my songwriting and structuring chops. Just trying to externalize the song into something interesting for voice and acoustic guitar.

Thank you

I don't think I would've grown my own understanding of not just what I write down, but also why. Knowing what's important to me as an artist to capture in the process is valuable, as I have a lot more trust in my own ability to work with what makes sense in the moment, and capture the ideas that are hard to come up with on the spot.

So thank you, little purple notebook.