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Whether it’s your first song, or your hundredth, one thing remains true: you can write it. In fact, anyone can write a song! The process required to craft a song can be absorbed, developed, and perfected by any person with a passion to do so. But where does one begin when trying to write a song?

In his course, Song Factory: Birth of A Song, Ellis Paul shows you how to create your own process of coming up with great song ideas, craft parts of the song, and then put them all together.

Here are five songwriting guitar lessons from the course. For the full course, check out Ellis Paul’s Song Factory: Birth of A Song on TrueFire!

Songwriting Lesson – Powder Kegs and Whispers


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Songs can be life changing experiences for those who hear them. Songs have stopped wars, started wars, moved cultural mountains, helped to make life, they’ve started marriages, ended marriages! They are incredible movers of earth and sky. But songwriting is NOT rocket science. It starts with honesty. Three chords and the truth. That’s all Bob Dylan needed for “Blowing in the Wind”.

Songwriting Lesson – Write What You Know


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You should focus your subject and ideas on things that are personal to you, emotionally and intellectually. Choose a day of your life and free write on that day for ten minutes. Don’t edit yourself! Don’t think, just let the story of that day unfold in a flow. Just tap in!

Songwriting Lesson – The Guitar Wrote The Song


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Often times a guitar or piano piece can be a springboard to a song. It sets the mood and tone and evokes a person or an event or a time in your life. Suddenly the guitar is telling to you to write about your girlfriend in your twenties and the night you walked to Times Square. Losing yourself in your instrument is a great way to start a song.

Songwriting Lesson – Innocence & The Afterlife – Concept & Creation


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This was another song born out of a guitar part. There was a somber beauty to the piece that led me to think it felt like a funeral, like an Irish funeral where the music has both joy and sadness in it. I connected it to my father’s passing and to my explanation of the afterlife to my daughter.

Songwriting Lesson – Innocence & The Afterlife – Full Performance


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This is a full performance of “The Innocence and the Afterlife”. I love the guitar part to this as well. Played with the fingers rather a pick as a tonal choice. I like how it’s somewhat muted because of this.

Digging these songwriting guitar lessons? Check out Ellis Paul’s Song Factory: Birth of A Song.