Musicianship and Performance: The Lurking Variables of Songwriting

We here at You Can Write Songs have spent most of our lives thinking about songwriting and all of it's many facets. There are two primary variables that lurk under the songwriting umbrella: musicianship and performance. As I always say, if you can play other people's songs then you have all the tools that you need to write your own. I stand by this, but it never hurts to see what's under the hood.

Musicianship is your overall musical skill. It increases every time you learn a new chord and it skyrockets when you learn what these chords are capable of. At the very least, I encourage you to study chord progressions. The best way to do this is to learn the songs that you like. You'll quickly begin to see how things can fit together. After this, the rest is up to you. The musical rabbit hole will go as deep as you want it to and even deeper than that. 

Being the greatest musician in the world will not necessarily make you the greatest songwriter, though. Most of the songs that you love probably weren't written by master instrumentalists. Some people skew more to the creative side of things and become songwriters while other are drawn to the technicalities of music and become virtuosos. Most of us sit somewhere in the middle. The creativity of songwriting propelled me to tolerate the technicalities of musicianship. I am always trying to fit more tools into my toolbox these days, but that wasn't the case during my first ten years of writing. Sometimes three chords and the truth is all you need.

Even if you don't plan on ever performing for people, performance is a necessary part of the equation. Every time we play a song we are performing it. You may argue, but I'll stand my ground. Performance is the expression of music. So if you're trying to make the music sound good then you are, in effect, a performer. Without musicianship we can't play the damn thing and without performance we can't bring it alive.

These are independent variables which means that you improve them separately. When effectively combined they create a synergy.  You'll struggle to identify where one ends and the other begins. If you're like me, a songwriter first and a musician/performer second,  I encourage you to apply each new skill to the writing process. If you learn a cool new chord then put it in a song. Same goes for a neat guitar lick. Once it's finished, play it and mean it. Put some style behind it and add some oomph to it. We may not be rock stars, but we're close enough in my book.

Take these factors into consideration as you revise your 30 minute song.