Humming it before you write it down
Okay. Last time we let the chords suggest the tune — you play the progression, you hum over the top of it, you see what your voice wants to do. Tonight I want to back up one more step, because I think a lot of people skip it and it costs them.
Before you touch the guitar at all. Before you write a single word down. Hum.
I mean it plainly like that. No instrument in your hands. No pen. Just you, walking around, or driving, or standing at the sink, humming something with no words attached to it yet.
Here's why. The guitar has opinions. The minute your fingers land on a chord shape, your melody starts following the chord instead of the other way around. Which isn't wrong, we talked about that last week, letting the chords suggest the tune. But if that's the only way you ever find a melody, everything you write starts to sound like it came out of the same three shapes. I've heard my own stuff do that. It's a real trap.
Humming first gets you a tune that's actually yours before the instrument gets a vote.
How to actually do this at home
Nothing fancy here. This is a plain-words lesson to match a plain-tunes teacher.
- Pick a feeling or a line you already have. Maybe it's that one line we found a few weeks back, the one your song is really about. Don't worry about the rest of the words yet.
- Hum it, no words, just the shape of it. La la la, whatever. You're not performing. Nobody's listening. If somebody IS listening, that's fine too, my wife's heard me hum some genuinely bad nonsense over the years and she's still here.
- Do this in a place where your brain is half-occupied. Driving. Dishes. Weeding. I get more tunes at the sink than I ever get sitting at a table trying to write one on purpose. Something about the hands being busy lets the other part of your head loose.
- When something sticks, catch it fast. This is the part people skip and then lose the tune forever. You think you'll remember it. You won't. I don't care how good it felt in the moment, by tomorrow it's gone.
- Catch it with your phone, not your memory. Record ten seconds of yourself humming it, badly, right there in the car or at the sink. Don't clean it up. Don't wait till you're somewhere better. The version you catch messy is the only version that exists.
I keep a notebook in my truck for exactly this reason — not for tunes so much as lines, things that show up at a stoplight and then evaporate. One time I was sitting at the point of the mountain in traffic, that valley just sitting there under fog the way it does most winter mornings, and a line came to me that actually held up later when I looked at it again. Most of what's in that notebook doesn't. Half of it makes no sense when I read it back — words that felt like something in the moment and turn out to be nothing. But you don't know which is which until you've caught it and can look at it later. So catch everything. Sort it after.
Same goes for a hummed tune. Catch it messy, sort it later.
The opinion part
I'll say the thing I believe about this straight out: save your scraps. I hate waste, and a half-tune you hum in the car and never use isn't waste if you write it down or record it. It's a scrap sitting in a drawer waiting for the right song to need it. I've pulled lines out of an old notebook two years later and had them be exactly the missing piece for something I was stuck on. You don't get that if you didn't save the scrap in the first place.
A caution, small one
If you're recording yourself while driving, pull over first or use a hands-free setup and hit record before you go, not while you're fiddling with the phone at speed. I say this because I've caught myself reaching for the phone at a green light more than once and it's a dumb way to get in a wreck over a tune that wasn't even that good.
Tonight, in class
We're going to sit quiet for a few minutes — no guitars out — and just hum. I know that feels strange in a room full of people. Do it anyway. Then we'll each say a line we already have, hum it three different ways, and see which way wants to be the real one. You'll be surprised how often the first hum you land on beats whatever you'd have built on the guitar first.
Before next time: Catch two hummed scraps this week, even bad ones, and bring them in whatever rough shape you got them. We're not judging the tune yet. We're just seeing what you've got. 🙏