How to Write Songs on Guitar: A Guitar-Playing and Songwriting Course

I'm extremely pleased with the book. For me, it hit the spot in terms of expectations vs content. My primary expectation was that I was looking for a book that could give me some direction in terms of song writing. To clarify a bit more as to what I mean. If you have ever attempted to write a song or are (as I am) new to the process getting started can be overwhelming. The beauty (and curse) of song writing are the vast number of options. Even if you have a type of song in mind, sorting through which key, chord progressions, how the melody fits in etc can seem extremely challenging. While the book didn't eliminate or minimize the number of options, it did teach me how to organize them and to systematically sort through which ones directionally would be good additions to the song I wanted to write.Some things that helped me and may help you:- Read through the book completely the first time. My first time through I just wanted to absorb the information and understand how the information was presented.- Come up with an elementary song to use as a template as you go through the book the second time. Don't worry so much about writing the next greatest hit. Just have a simple idea for a song in mind - preferably in the key of C major.- Apply the concepts and information presented in the book to your new song to understand how the various points impact your emerging song.- The book does require, or at least it is helpful to have some understanding of basic music theory. Take the time to grab some additional resource books or go on-line and look up any points you may not understand. However the author does a good job of explaining most of the points.- Another valuable exercise for me was I took a couple of my favorite songs and tore them apart to see how the information in the book applies to them.For me this has been a great learning experience and, in a positive way, I'll never look at a song in the same way again - hope this review helps.

I've found myself profoundly disappointed with this book.I had high expectations based on how popular this book appears to be, but ultimately I have taken very little from it. Heck, I'd say I got more from the first chapter of Dominic Pedler's "Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles" than I did from this book. Obviously, however, since this book is very popular, I ought to address what I think the problems are.This book takes a very chord-progression approach to songwriting. But rather than help you understand how chords function and giving you a few practical examples, this book lists chords, and chord progressions, ad infinitum. You can play all the chord progressions in this book without actually learning anything about how chords or chord progressions work.Instead of teaching, this book lists. Do you really need a page full of different major sixth chord fingerings? No. You don't. What is half a page on min/maj7 chords doing in the section on basic harmony? One could teach a student how to figure out the advanced chords in half the space he uses to just list a bunch of them. The chapter on chord sequences consists of nothing but a list of chord progressions and songs that contain them - but would-be songwriters would almost certainly be better directed to some ear training resources and the tools to start to figure this out themselves. (Or you could just go online and find the chords to your favorite songs directly, if what you really want is a list of chord progressions).And the whole concept of how you harmonize a melody, which is basic songwriting 101 stuff, is almost completely absent from this book. This isn't that complicated, but from reading this book one might walk away thinking that you come up with a melody, pick a chord progression, and viola you're done - that there's no necessary connection between these two things. There's a tiny discussion of this topic in the chapter on melody, but it's backwards - it's written as if you're deriving the melody from the chords.Speaking of melody, if you're looking for practical tips of how to develop a melody from a simple idea, you won't find it here. Yet isn't this one of the areas where developing songwriters constantly get stuck? The melody chapter lists a few characteristics of different types of melodies, and ends abruptly.I could make similar criticisms of other chapters, as well.I really find myself wondering what the intended audience for this book is. Relative beginners don't need five or more voicings of every chord. More advanced students will be frustrated by the lack of depth and instruction. It's also rather bizarre that Rooksby seems to have decided to re-invent the roman numeral system - nearly every other book you read will use lower case roman numerals for minor chords, but Rooksby doesn't, which of course requires him to come up with other notation to indicate when the chord is something other than the expected quality. Why? There's a system that works, and that works better than sticking a carat (^) next to a chord to indicate that it's major instead of minor.The chart on p 42 is good and useful (probably the best thing in the book, quite frankly), although I could nitpick some of the explanations behind it. But the nature of the chart (listing the same thing in every key) is sort of perplexing. It's a "give a man a fish" rather than a "teach a man to fish" approach, which seems to ignore the fact that it's really useful to be able to figure out, on the fly, what (say) the sixth of a given scale is.I doubt this will be a popular review (since other people seem to really like this book) but if you want my advice you'd get Pedler's book instead. It's more work, but offers a much higher reward.

I bought this book because I wanted to write songs on guitar, and I liked the fact from the previews that the author labeled which songs had which chord progressions. The physical book is great - nice thick paper, high quality printing, despite being a paperback.I found the material on chords ok, but since I already know about the CAGED system, I'd rather he present the chords that way, which I think is a simpler way of understanding the fretboard. For the lyric writing content, I already have  Popular Lyric Writing: 10 Steps to Effective Storytelling  and  Writing Better Lyrics  which I think are better. For music theory as it applies to songwriting, I like:  Writing Music For Hit Songs (Omnibus Press) I think the problem is it reads like an encyclopedia. It's a great achievement by Rikky Rooksby to have done this analysis on chord progressions, themes, lyrics and melodies. But ultimately, any songwriter has to analyze their favorite songs to see how and why they work, and then figure out how to add it to their toolkit.This is a nice book to have to see all the ways a song could be broken down, but ultimately you have to do the work for yourself.Good luck!

A classicBought for young musician gift

Decent book on songwriting and direction. There is a lot of material and examples in here related to approaches and some theory. Over all good book for someone that is serious about spending some time studying ways to help them write some material on the guitar.

As a beginner songwriter and not-quite-beginner guitarist I've found this book extremely useful. Its key selling-points are its very practical focus and the level of detail the author goes into. His analyses of the mechanics of classic songs are fascinating - never seen it done with so much depth and insight. Other highlights include the chart on page 42 that sets out which chords belong to which keys (invaluable for a musical ignoramus like myself), the comprehensive chord charts and the discussion of different types of song structure.

Not just a book on song writing but a full course on guitar in the one book. Yes it is aimed at people who are probably more intermediate players but it is easy to pick many useful points out for the beginner as well. I think this book will help not only understand the song writing process but also make it easier to start out on the journey to composing many tracks. Thank you so much

This is a very comprehensive learning tool, and not as one would think, about writing music tons of examples of how chords are structured and related to one and other or not, fascinating, it's deep, but very well written, it's a big book.

One of the best beginners/intermediate book for chord theory etcBuy this one and not the latest edition which is physically smaller and without colour pics

Seems to be well set out. I'll be working through the book along with a songwriting course that I'm on so hopefully it will assist me in getting the artistic juices flowing!