How to Write a Song on a Guitar

If you want to know how to write a song on a guitar, here are 5 steps. If you already know how to play the guitar, meaning you are able to strum chords, you can skip to step 1.

1) Learn how to play the guitar

I’m going to tell you the brutal truth. Learning to play the guitar does not happen overnight! So many people quit learning a musical instrument because they “dabbled” with it for a week or two and found it too difficult.

Let me tell you, that when you get through that hump, it’s totally worth it.

In order to write a song on a guitar, all you need to learn are a few chords and a few strumming patterns. If you don’t know how to play the guitar yet, I would start off with learning the following chords: G, D, Em, and C.

2) Pick a song structure

The song you write needs a structure. You can write a song with the structure of intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus which is the structure many pop songs fall into.

If you’re bored with this overused structure, you can switch it up by starting with the chorus, or even starting with a section that doesn’t repeat itself in the song.

3) Pick a chord progression

If you are still a beginner in playing the guitar, you want to pick a key that is easy to play. Some easy keys to play on the guitar are G major, D major, and A major.

Choose a chord pattern for your song that fits with a specific key.

I suggest that you have different chord progressions for your verse and chorus to avoid the two from sounding too similar.

4) Write a melody to your chords.

There are so many ways of doing this. One way to come up with the melody is to strum the chord patterns and sing random melodies until you find something you like.

Another way of writing a melody is playing around with the notes that make up the chords at a specific point in the song. This requires a little bit more knowledge than knowing the fingerings for each chord. You need to know what notes make up each chord.

For example, let’s say that your verse is using the chord progression G-D-Em-C, a very common chord progression. You would record yourself strumming those chords on the guitar for a few measures. Play what you recorded and fiddle with the notes in each note. So when the G chord is being played, fiddle with the notes G, B, and D which make up the G chord. When playing the D chord, the notes involved would be D, F#, and A. For the D chord, you can try different combinations like F#-D-A, D-A-F#, and etc. I’m pretty sure you can’t run out of these combinations. You can even incorporate notes outside of the notes of the chord like the ‘E’ note to connect the notes ‘D’ and ‘F#’. So that would look like D – E – F#.

Another aspect of writing a melody that I can’t get into in too much detail is rhythm. if you want to know more about using rhythm in your melody, study rap. Rappers are masters of rhythm.

5) Write your lyrics

This is another section of songwriting that can be done in many ways. One way to do it is to come up with lyrics as they come up in your head which may take forever. One technique I use is to pick a few words that rhyme or share in a vowel sound and put them at the end of the lines and come up with lyrics that will fit the words I chose. For example, if I chose the words ‘bend’ and ‘head’, I would put those words at the end of each line and come up with lyrics around that.

I heard the metal frame bend

Across where the baby laid his head

When writing a song on a guitar, you can write a set of lyrics first before writing a melody or write a melody first and write lyrics to fit the melody. You can try both to see what works better for you. You might even find yourself writing both the lyrics and melody at the same time which is common. Sometimes, when I’m tinkering on the guitar, I sing a random melody with a random set of lyrics that came out in the moment and it ends up turning into a whole song.