In this continuing series on Capturing Song Ideas, we discuss various methods songwriters keep from losing their great fragments of inspiration.

Many budding songwriters work Dilbert-style day jobs and may have additional avenues to capture thoughts, ideas, melodies, and lyrics. One that has worked particularly well for me has been my laptop. Currently my Dell laptop has a copy of N-Track Studio that I constantly go to as my capturing tool of choice.

I work at home a lot so what I will often do if an idea strikes is this:


I’ll grab my guitar and play out the melody in my head - or chord progression and record it directly to N-Track and save it as a WAV file.

I don’t even use a mic. I just use the onboard mic built into my laptop. Sure it is a little noisy, and the frequency response is as flat as Kansas, but it does the job quite nicely where it needs to - CAPTURING the idea.

After I get a collection of WAV files on N-Track Studio, I will burn those clips to disc and save them, play them in the car when I am on the road (alone of course - I wouldn’t submit anyone else to the torture of my rough clips.)

Usually once a month I’ll clear out all my clips and burn them to CD so I don’t have clips scattered all over the place. I’ll take the clips from my iPod, Cel Phone Voicemail, Laptop, etc and burn them all to CD (if they are melodies or chord progressions). If they are just lyrics and phrases I’ll enter them into my master notebook.

Hopefully this series helped open your eyes to opportunities to collect ideas - even if you are a busy person. In upcoming articles, we will talk about how to turn those ideas into choruses, verses, and songs.

Capturing Song Ideas: The Complete Series

1. Capture song ideas: Capture at all costs
2. Capture song ideas: Notebook Style
3. Capture song ideas: Voicemail Style
4. Capture song ideas: iPod Style
5. Capture song ideas: Computer Style
6. BONUS: Capture song ideas: With washable Crayola Window Markers