Nice to meet y’all! I’m Maddie. I’m located in Utah currently and maybe forever because of my deep abiding love for the desert and rock climbing.
I’ve been playing piano since I was 12, and recently picked up guitar because I worked a wilderness job for a long time and missed music in the field. I grew up playing music in church but never considered myself an artist/musician and have never taken it seriously. I have no formal training. I love to sing as well but was always really shy and scared to play for others until I learned the guitar so I could play music at work. Since then, I do a lot of campfire guitar and entertaining friends 
I wrote a ton when I was young, but also didn’t take that part of myself seriously. I stopped doing music and writing for years and have picked them back up slowly over the past couple years.
I am really grateful to have a group to be apart of as I have always been shy and private with my creative life. I appreciate y’alls support so much!
Great idea Hugh, and I have been meaning to do a thread like this for people to introduce themselves to the community as well as get to know the stories, backgrounds, goals and aspirations of fellow members.
So I’m Jamie, I’m from England, I am primarily a pianist and piano teacher, but over the last few years I have been trying to write lyrics which has been a real uphill battle! My education was more on the left-brained mathsy side of things so words have taken a bit of getting used to. I am driven by the understanding that whatever you practice, if practiced in the right way, you get better at, and so ‘Songwriting Steps’ was born out of this idea to take it one step at a time toward the dream of being able to craft songs I am proud of.
You can find what I hope to be a growing portfolio on YouTube and SoundCloud.
I am so pleased to have found friendly people on the same path, and look forward to building a really exciting songwriting space with you all!
Here is a link tree that points you to my newest album, but you can find the discography in most services (for some reason, YouTube does not have all of them) by looking for 4 Star View.
Also, some services have all my lyrics, some do not. All of them are available on bandcamp and https://genius.com/artists/4-star-view.
Hi everyone. 
My name is Crysty, but I go by WLDFLOW3R. I’ve played music for over 20 years, mostly in church settings. I am currently doing online music production school, which is an 18 month program. I am a stay at home mom, so I spend most of my free time learning right now… Ableton, sound design, synthesis, guitar, songwriting, etc. I also (as a side note) do photography.
I am wanting to get better at songwriting, as well as poetry, and think the two go hand in hand.
I play keyboard, guitar and I sing. I think my style is in the Indie Pop lane.
Anyway, nice to meet you all. Here are my socials
A big welcome to community Crysty!
And oh my goodness a new bar has been set production-wise. Your track has a really professional sound to it. I just went to listen to it again on my studio monitors to hear the detail, and it all sits together so cohesively!
Hopefully you can use this community to develop the lyrical aspect of your music, which as you say has a lot of cross-over with writing poetry. In fact, the book we are currently working from is for all descriptive writers from songwriters to poets to novelists. They all share the same skill of painting pictures with words that engage our senses.
We also have exercises in the pipeline that focus on titles, structure, melodic construction etc. We are growing this community one step at a time to gradually master this beautiful craft!
Delighted to have you onboard
Hey crysty,
That songs sounds awesome!
Enjoy the journey of the songwriting steps, its been tremendously helpful for me personally so far!
Beautiful song! Welcome to the community, and seriously your music is awesome and so well put together, you have a new fan!
Thank you! I’m so happy to be here!
My name is Edu Monteiro. I am an artist and a music producer based in Lisbon, Portugal
I’ve been making music for a few years now and manage to make a living from it. My focus was always on the production part of the music. But I feel like I am shifting now towards a more “songwriter mindset”.
I started to study more about it and I want to improve my craft
This community is a really incredible initiative and opportunity to do it! Really happy to be here!
Welcome to the community Edu, I’m fairly confident (like 98%) that if you stick to doing this excersises your lyrical abilities will drastically increase. Also! Sometimes it takes awhile to really get things warmed up so dont be disheartened by the feedback given! We are all here just trying to make each other stronger songwriters. Look forward to reading what you write! Its good to see the community growing
Welcome Edu! That’s awesome you are already in the music industry, and I hope we can help you to sharpen the songwriting side of things. There’s a great bunch on here and we have just been pouring words down every day without fear of judgement. To my delight, the experiment seems to be working and everyone is getting gradually stronger without question. Great to welcome you to the party, I recommend starting at the beginning with writing about the sky as there is a logical progression to the exercises, but that’s not a hard-fast rule if you prefer to dive in elsewhere. Looking forward to reading your words!
Hi folks,
My name is David and in the music world I go by David Kelly. I’ve been playing music for almost 25 years now - my mom was a music teacher growing up and although I hated practicing piano, I learned to love it as I got older. In high school I found a spark for singing (acapella, musical theater), and eventually studied voice in college.
After leaving college, I became disenchanted with performing classically and got more involved with the jazz scene in Seattle. I ended up being a part of a jazz/soul/pop band and eventually transitioned into my solo project, David Kelly. Before the pandemic, I was more active in playing shows around town and was dipping my toes into recording music. When the pandemic hit, I was also shifting careers and have put music on pause for a time being.
Over the past year, I’ve realized how important music is to me and how I want to continue writing and creating, no matter what it looks like. This is my step in that direction.
Here is a link to my soundcloud (with the one song I’ve recorded): David Kelly SoundCloud. If you’ve got any feedback, let me know! I have a couple of other songs I was trying to finish producing and launching, but it has fallen through the cracks.
I’m not usually as available during the week given my work, but I am trying to embed time for it when I can. I have been a middle school teacher the past few years and recently transitioned to be an Assistant Principal at an elementary school. I look forward to writing and creating with y’all!
Best,
David
Welcome! Prepare to nurture those songwriting skills here, I think it is important to carve out just 10 minutes each morning to do this, I have been struggling to get it done some mornings and feel like if I don’t activate the creative brain In the a.m i am either to tired or less inspired when it comes to doing the exercise in the afternoon.
Had a listen to “Sunlight” and that is a quality mix man! The bass was shaking the walls! And the vocal layers are great!
Hi David!
Great to hear about your background, and it is funny I similarly used to hate piano lessons and practice - my former self would be in confused disbelief to be told I would one day be pursuing it as a career!
I think we all go through phases where the things that are important to us fall through the cracks, and I hope this community can help to encourage you to re-engage with your creative outlets, for which there is obviously already a great deal of talent! There really is nothing that compares to a like-minded community in helping to achieve your ambitions, and the aim of this website is to create a space to propel everyone forward in this craft. I hope you enjoy the ride!
Hello all,
Great to meet everyone here. I am Homesh Rawat from India. I’ve been working in the IT industry for the past 5 years as a Machine Learning Engineer.
I’ve always been interested in music and would sing sometime in my school days. I’ve craved to learn an instrument, so 3 years back I bought a guitar and since then I am learning songs through Youtube. Recently I’ve decided to learn this trick and figure them out on my own.
Picking up a guitar created this spark in me to know more about other aspects of music from harmony, music production, lyric writing. So I bought Pat Pattison’s book - Writing better lyrics and in it’s first chapter it talked about object writing and how being part of an enthusiastic community can be so helpful. After some digging on the internet, I found this amazing community.
Whatever time I get after my work, I try to devote it into music. I have this desire to create my own music, to be part of it from start to the end and I am sure this community would be very helpful and I would learn a lot here. Looking forward to writing and learning with you all.
Lovely to meet you Homesh! Really cool to hear you are a machine learning engineer - I have often wondered if machine learning could ever help us with lyric writing, and generally trying to learn the patterns of how songs are constructed. Fantastic to hear you’ve picked up a guitar, and of course that you want to develop the skill of writing lyrics. I hope we can help you achieve this ambition here, a wholly supportive community helping each other grow with constructive criticism but not an ounce of judgement Really looking forward to reading more of your words!
@jamie definitely AI has now become extremely advance. Here is an article, it tries to learn on Shakespeare’s work and then try to create dialogues based on his style. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
Hey, all!
My name is Cosmo. I work with wild-land fire support for an air tanker base. Until a year ago, I worked in the translation industry and was in grad school for literature. One day, I was reading a book and thought to myself Why do these NPCs not practice magic in this book?! if magic existed, I would practice it everyday and become amazing. A few weeks later, another line in a book hit me pretty hard, “this is magic. Sure-but not necessarily fantasy.” (Gravity’s Rainbow) When I watched people busking and singing along together, I realized that art is the closest thing we have to magic. It was literally stopping people in their tracks to listen. It can move people to tears, communicate the ineffable, and make people experience something new without leaving their chair.
I quit my job and found a job where I have a significant amount of free time so I can focus on learning my magic–writing books and music. It can be quite difficult meeting people who share ambitions similar to mine given I spend most of the year stationed or one spot or another. I’m glad to find an online spot where people are motivated to improve their crafts.
Thanks in advance for all the help and I look forward to assisting as able as well!
Regards,
Cosmo
Hey Cosmo!
What a wonderful introduction! Sounds similar to me in that once I realised the magic of music and songwriting I realised I was going to have to give everything to it. The aim of this community is to try and pave an efficient path toward developing the core songwriting skills so that we can make best use of all the time that we devote to it. It’s still very much a work in progress but having a like minded community with members from all over the globe is proving to be one of the coolest things I’ve been a part of - so glad to have you along for the ride!