9 Ways to Speed Up Your Metal Songwriting

If you’re like most of us, you have tons of unfinished riffs, half-written songs, and folders full of unused ideas. Finishing a song can feel like a huge task – but it doesn’t have to be.

Today I’ll give you 9 techniques that I personally use to write faster, generate better ideas, and ultimately finish songs (without so much stress)!

[you can download the PDF of this guide here]

1)   Mangle the riff

You’ve written a riff recently, but you’re not quite happy with it. It’s nearly there, but not quite. Let’s try to improve it!

Take this riff and record it into your DAW as it is. Then you’ll split it up into individual sections or even individual notes. Now you can move these sections around and mess with the riff to come up with a better idea. Here’s some ways you might do this:

• Reverse the riff
• Change the rhythm
• Swap the notes around
• Simplify the riff
• Stretch or shrink sections

This method can often help you come up with ideas you may not have come up with if you were just sitting with your guitar!

2)  Idea dump

This tip is very simple but it can be extremely effective at getting you out of a rut, but only if you’re able to detach yourself from the output.

Set up a click track in your DAW and pick a tempo. Then you’ll set a timer on your phone for 10 minutes and from the moment you press go until it ends you’ll come up with as many riffs as you can and record each one into your DAW.

The key to this is that you aren’t focused on the quality of the riffs but simply how many different ideas you can get down – but even if you come up with similar ideas, that’s ok too.

Once the timer is done and you’re left with maybe 10 to 20 ideas, here comes the fun part. Similar to the first tip, you’re going to go through these ideas and just chop out the best parts and that might leave you with only a few ideas but that’s ok! Now you can split these up and combine them together to create fresh ideas.

3)  3-minute burst

For this next tip, similarly to the last approach, we’re focused on speed and not on quality (yet). The difference here is that we’re going to use this method to construct an entire track! Here’s how it’s done:

• In your DAW, map out your future song into sections. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t written it yet, these don’t need to be final.
• Set a timer on your phone for 3 minutes. Once you press start, you’re going to come up with as much of the first section as you can. Again – don’t worry about the quality of the ideas in this stage. Don’t even worry about finishing the section!
• Repeat this process for each section of your track until you’ve given the whole track a pass.
• Now you’re going to repeat this whole process again! Maybe you want to work on refining some of the riffs, or maybe you didn’t get to finishing the drums in the chorus. Again spend 3 minutes per section then move on.

You can repeat this process as many times as you like or you can use it once just to come up with ideas, refining them later; up to you!

4) Build from the rhythm

This can be a great way to break the paralysis you face when looking at the empty DAW! You’ll map out your song (or parts of your song if you’d like) but only putting in the drums, focusing on creating cool rhythms which fit the energy of each part.

It’s important you don’t have your guitar on your lap while you build the drums!

Ideas will start to come to you as you listen to the rhythms and the way they transition between sections. Then once you’ve created a basic map of the song using drums, you can pick up your guitar and play along.

Having the drums there to play against gives you a much better sense of context for when you’re writing which can help you come up with new ideas or write parts which better fit the end vision!

5)  Start with the climax

If you’re able to come up with cool parts on their own but you’re not sure where to go next with them (“what now?”), then this tip will help you to avoid that!

This one is very simple: we’re going to write the most exciting part of the song first and then work backwards to build our structure and come up with the rest of the song.

So what part should this be? Usually this will be the bridge of the song or perhaps the second or final chorus. Pick this part carefully because the rest of the song will point towards it!

You then need to think backwards about how to structure the song in a way that builds into this section. It can help if you already have in intro or verse idea as well because now you have the start point and the end point, and that can give you a clear path to follow.

6)  Patchwork songwriting

Originally when I was writing this, I was going to make this tip about putting two ideas together and building something from that – which is still a valid tip – but I realised that there was something else that I do much more often which I’ve found incredibly helpful.

This tip involves repurposing ideas which you already have in order to create something far removed from where it started! The key to this is to keep track of your best ideas (I put a lot of my ideas on YouTube so I can refer back to them)!

I’ve had parts which I wrote years ago which started out in one of those riff graveyard projects (I’m sure you know the kind) and ended up on a song.

If you’ve been doing this recording thing for a year or more, then by now I’m sure you have hundreds of ideas already which you could put together and create a song from.

A lot of these ideas may feel like they shouldn’t work together, but it’s often these that create the most unique combinations!

7)  Genre swap

When I first started producing music on my laptop (10 years ago now!), I was making electronic music. I didn’t even know what metalcore was! Fast forward to when I first started recording electric guitar, I originally just made dance tracks and then put some guitar leads over the top and called it a day! 

Obviously the results were subpar but there was something cool and unique there.

For this tip, try to write outside of the genre you usually write in, and come up with ideas for the song which fit in that genre.

Once you’ve come up with some ideas, perhaps you’ve written a section, you can turn the ideas back into metal and chances are you’ll have created something really unique which can then inspire you to write the song around that section!

8)  Unplug

It’s so easy to get distracted by guitar tones and effects when what you’re really trying to do is to be creative and build awesome songs! A great way to do that is to stop writing at your computer.

Take an acoustic guitar or unplug your electric guitar, and try to write riffs, melodies and lyrics without touching your computer (It’s hard, I know)! Writing unplugged can help you really focus on the writing process and not worrying about all the production and arrangement. You can use your phone as a recorder if you need to get ideas down!

Chances are, if your song sounds great with just you and the guitar, then it will sound amazing once you’ve produced it!

Clearly this method doesn’t work as well for super heavy music, but if you’re trying to write a song or a part which relies on strong melodies, this is a great way to really dial them in, rather than settling and focusing on stuff which doesn’t really matter during the writing process.

9)  Structure thief

Many of the songs I’ve written have been because I was inspired by the way another song developed. You shouldn’t be afraid to steal the structure or framework of an existing song, but there’s a right way to do it!

If you’re just going to copy the structure in a very basic sense (e.g.  verse, chorus, bridge) then you’re not taking advantage of this as much as you could be. You need to be more specific.

Think about the energy of each section and how that relates to the kind of part that it is; for example you might have a really heavy first verse, a big emotional chorus and then a fast, thrashy second verse. You can see how that’s added a lot of context to the structure.

This kind of depth will help you to really get a clear picture of the song you’re trying to write and ultimately will make the process much faster, as you’re eliminating a lot of the guesswork.

And you don’t need to worry about sounding too similar, a structure is just a structure. Your own writing style will shine through.

Now that you’ve got a strong set of tools, but the real key is applying them!

If you use just one or two of these techniques in your next songwriting session, you’ll see results right away; ideas should begin to click together, you’ll second-guess yourself less, and you’ll finally start finishing more tracks!

If you end up finishing something using these tips, feel free to send it to me! I’d love to hear what you come up with.

Good luck!