Every musician needs to know something important - song writing is the key to making a career out of being a musician. Let's say you are in a band that plays original material. Your band gains local interest and gets signed to a record label. If you wrote songs that the band plays and records, then you are entitled to royalties. If you are just a drummer or guitarist or something and haven't written or co-written any material, then you will never see any royalties down the road. Royalties can continue almost indefinitely. So, I hope you can see how important this is. Sure, you can get paid by playing or singing for a touring band or artist. The only way to get paid after you've stopped playing is by writing songs and getting those royalties pouring in.

Remember the last time you had a great idea for a song? You probably scribbled down some lyrics and put together a basic chord progression and a melody. You put the song away and wake up the next morning and - "OH NO!" - you can't remember how the melody goes, or worse, you can't remember the chords either. I can't tell you how many songs will never be completed because of this problem. Your mind simply can't retain everything perfectly.

Here's the solution: you should have recorded that song idea! It only takes a few minutes if you have a microphone hooked up to a recording interface. You only need ONE microphone. After hitting record, you might say something about the song title or idea and play through what you have so far. That's it. You've just recorded your first idea. Easy right?

Here are a few things that hold up most people:

• your idea is just that - an idea
• the melody doesn't have to be perfectly on pitch
• the chords don't have to be right chords
• the lyrics don't have to be finished - you may only have a melody
• everything you do can sound horrible - that is OK
• don't worry about a flawed performance

>Now that you've recorded your song idea, what do you do now? Well, you should probably let it sit overnight and come back to it with fresh ears. Only then can you truly judge whether it's something that you can use. Perhaps it needs better chord structure or a new melody. Maybe you need to speed it up or slow it down. When you get stuck on any song idea, move on to something new! There are always exceptions to this rule, but you will probably craft the best material when you are in a groove and the creative forces are flowing freely.

Once you have been recording songs ideas for a decent amount of time, you may want to go back to old unfinished songs and play with them to see if you can craft a finished song. Here's another idea: try to combine song ideas to create a song. A short phrase might be the perfect bridge to another nearly complete song. Change the key or melody or anything else to make it fit in the nearly complete song. It could be that bit of magic to turn a boring song into a radio hit.

I once listened at a seminar as Chris Tomlin explained how he keeps track of his song ideas just like this. He said that he has hundreds of song ideas on his laptop - hundreds! Every time he has an idea, he immediately heads to the laptop to record a snippet. These snippets have helped him create some of the most popular Christian songs of all time.

Bottom Line: Songwriting is key to any musician's career - professional or otherwise. Keep track of ALL your song ideas by recording them one by one. Then you can use this library of knowledge to help you create songs that can be radio hits.