In this post, I'm giving you a step by step walkthrough of my songwriting process without any instruments or vocals. At this point, I’ve made a couple of videos about how to write songs without playing an instrument, but what if you don’t sing either? WELP, this time, we’re going to explore some fun ways to get started with songwriting without any musical background or “talent” whatsoever.

I recommend watching the linked video to get a visual of everything I talk about in this post.

Writing a 4-Bar Loop

For this process, we’ll be using Chrome Music Lab’s Song Maker. This program is super fun because you don’t actually have to know anything about music to get started. It’s all just fun, colorful blocks that you can click on. For context, though, each of the vertical blocks represents a white key on the piano, starting at C. So, red is C, orange is D, then E F G A B and back to C and then they repeat.

The horizontal axis represents time. So, if you want your notes to happen quickly, put them closer together. If you want them to be slower, put them further apart.

Okay, now that you know the basics, we’re going to start by creating chords. All you have to do here to make a really nice chord progression is stack three colors on top of each other, skipping one box every time. I like to choose one chord per bar, or in other words, choose a different bottom color for each of these shaded or unshaded sections.

If the stacks are really far away from each other and you want them to sound a little closer together, you can take any high note and replace it with the lower version of that color. Now we’ve got a really nice chord progression that we can play around with.

If you want, you can also add drums with the little dots and triangles at the bottom. You can have a lot of fun experimenting with different drum grooves, but here’s a really common rock beat that you can use - it pretty much always sounds good, so have at it.

If it still doesn’t sound like music, try changing the instrument or the tempo.

Now you can start playing around with the melody (aka the tune) of your song. I like to start by choosing one or two notes using the same colors in each chord. For instance, in the chord above, I used Red, Yellow, and Dark Green. So, when I create my melody, I’m going to start with those colors.

If you like what you’ve got, go ahead and leave it as it is. If you want to add more, go ahead and fill in some spaces with other colors. There are no wrong answers in any of this, so feel free to do whatever sounds good to you.

Getting Started With a DAW

Now that we have a pretty cool sounding loop, we’re going to add it to a DAW. I’ve chosen to use Soundtrap because it’s free, there are no downloads, and it's easy to use. This post isn’t sponsored or anything - I just really like it. Start by opening up a new music track.


All that I have to do to put my song into Soundtrap is to click save on the Song Maker and then hit the “Download Midi” button. Then you can just click and drag the track it into your song.

I have no idea why it does this, but sometimes a couple of notes get clipped. If you know why this happens or how to prevent it, please let me know in the comments because I’m super curious (and also infuriated). To fix this just drag any clipped notes out.

Now you can mess around with different sounds and add any instruments or parts that you want. I like to add bass lines by going back into Chrome Lab and creating a simple melody using the notes from my chords. This can be as simple as the bottom note repeated in every box or it can be a little more complicated.

Do the same process to put it into Soundtrap and then, to make it sound extra bass-y and cool, right click, go to the “change key” button, and hit -12. Boom! Bass.

I am a big fan of adding string sections during intense parts. I also like staggering when the instruments come in.

Once you have all of your instruments set and you generally like what you’ve got, go ahead and repeat that process for any new sections that you want to add. If you want to repeat a section later in the song, just copy and paste.

Adding Words

If you don’t want your song to have any vocals, you’re done! You can download this as an MP3 and move right along to your next project! If you do want to add vocals, you now have an awesome track to start collaborating with a vocalist or lyric writing friend. The nice thing about this program is that collaborating is really easy.

I’m not going to go too deep into lyric writing since I have a ton of posts and videos on this topic, but if you want to write your own lyrics or if you do feel brave enough to sing, go for it! Here’s a post about Top Lining, which is all about writing lyrics and melodies over an already finished musical track.

♫ Time Stamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:17 - Creating 4 Bar Loops

02:28 - Chords

04:20 - Super Simple Drums

05:00 - Melody

07:32 - Using a DAW

09:15 - Bass & Guitar

14:06 - Final Song & Stuff

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