– so you can catch those spur of the moment inspirations!

– this can be an ordinary cheap notebook that you can get on Amazon, top players from Taylor Swift to your everyday hobbyist musician have one and you should to! They’re not expensive. I put an Amazon link under this paragraph so you can get one now and get writing today!

– your experiences, your hurts etc. the human experience is totally relateable. More than likely, if you’ve been through it someone else has too and they will connect with whatever subject matter they can personally authenticate. On the other hand they will stiff out a phoney easily.

– Oh my goodness, I don’t know how much time here at Ride The Fader HQ I wasted writing a super complex song, only to revisit it, strip the whole thing back to something simple and share that with the world it that’s the thing people loved.

– like RhymeZone to help you with those times when you just cant find the right word. Don’t sit there and suffer scratching your head when there are these free tools to help you come up with words!

– super helfpful for finding just the right word, nowadays they are online. If you’re the blessed few to have a Mac or MacBook Pro etc Apple also has a built in Dictionary app which contains a Thesaurus check the Applications.

7. Collaborate

– two heads are better than one. so many times I thought something was good and then I shared it with other people and it turns out, it needed work… *ahem*. You can also make use of the different skills of other people. E.g. you do Hip-Hop, I can write orchestral music (I really can) – you give me your track, I add strings to it, KABOOM! Success.

– use free audio recording software like GarageBand or Audacity, that way you have something rough down which you can take to a professional.

– this may sound counter-intuitive but sometimes you really need to walk away from a track, sometimes for a considerable amount of time. When I was doing my BA(Hons) in Popular Music and Record Production at university my lecture told me the reason for this. It’s because the more and more you listen to it, the less you hear the mistakes and the more begin to justify, through sheer exhaustion, what you hear. When you walk away then come back with “fresh” ears you will hear things from a less biased perspective and mistakes will jump out at you.

– This was my biggest mistake, I was so shy initially that I wouldn’t share my music. Forget about it, there’s plenty of people who will love what you do – provided it’s good. Go out there. Do gigs, put your stuff on SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook just do, do, do!