If you’re a songwriting jack-of-all-trades like myself, you may not even think about it anymore—when it’s time to write, you set up your instrument. You warm up your voice. You take it all on at once.
The pitfall is that playing and singing simultaneously is an entirely different skill. Subconsciously, to make this easier, we fall into certain habits and patterns. For example: when the chord changes, your sung note is more likely to change. Your vocals may tend to emphasize the same beats that your hands do. And so on.
Experiment with doing just one thing at a time. You can do this by recording yourself on a multitrack recorder, but I think the even better way is to put yourself in a novel situation: just focus on playing the best piano or guitar that you can while somebody else takes care of the singing. Or put down your instruments and let somebody else accompany your voice. You can even be quiet entirely and just write lyrics for somebody else to set to music!
Write a new song in a new musical environment, and you may surprise yourself—we’re often able to stretch further in one direction when we’re not worrying about one or two other directions simultaneously. And trying out a different angle of connection to the writing process is likely to infect your solo writing with some new ideas and energy!
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