I’ve always considered myself a songwriter. It’s what excites me most about music! I love being creative and writing songs, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I started taking my craft seriously. I went from averaging one song a month to two a week. As I started writing more and more, I wanted to make a comprehensive list of my songs: a document listing the names and dates I wrote them.
What I did is simple, but effective. I used Google Sheets (which is free) and entered the names and dates of my recent songs. There were several open cells begging to be filled, so I included BPM, key, and genre.
Charting a song’s data was a great reward for finishing, and I never wanted to break my streak. Also, I noticed trends at a glance, like how much I loved writing in the key of C, that I wrote a ton of hip hop, and that I frequently used Bedroom Beats 2. These aren’t bad things, but if I felt like my sound wasn’t evolving or I wanted to do something new, I knew what changes to try.
Later on I started tracking what I offloaded, including where it was offloaded from, and the name of the sound if it came from a sample pack. You can go crazy with a list like this, adding chord progressions, modes, the alignment of the stars, and anything else you want to track.
If for no other benefit, I recommend keeping a list to hold yourself accountable. “Write more songs” is a hard goal to follow. “Write a song a month” is much better. You don’t have to quadruple your output, but you should challenge yourself and do more than you did yesterday. Going from a song a month to two songs a month is good progress. Don’t measure your progress against others, but only against yourself. Now working from a new list in 2021, I have a clear goal: write more songs than 2020.
Pre-save Summertime! Coming out September 10th:
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/latenightluke/summertime
Alternative Student 
From one song a month to two a week is incredible.
What type of music do you write?
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Thank you! I write mostly hip hop right now, but I’m trying to get into EDM. I think it helps that my songs usually don’t have lyrics. For me it was getting over the mental block of thinking a song needs to take a long time to be good. I just forced myself to make decisions faster, even if the song was “bad,” but a lot of times I still liked the results!
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More often than not, we’re our hardest critics.
I’m glad you were finally able to get over that mental block.
Here to your success 🥂
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Thank you! I appreciate that 🙂
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