When the tune won't come, and what to do
Okay. Last time we talked about recording yourself to catch the rushing. Tonight is the one I probably should've taught first, because it's the most common problem in the room every single week.
The tune won't come. You've got words. You've got chords. You sit there with the guitar on your knee and nothing happens. Or something happens and it's flat and wrong and you know it the second it leaves your mouth.
This happens to me constantly. I told you melody's my weak spot. Still is. So tonight isn't me handing you a trick that fixes it forever. It's what I actually do when I'm stuck, which is less exciting but it's true.
First, stop trying to write a good tune
That's the trap. You sit down wanting to land on something and every note you try, you're already judging it. Nothing survives that. You need bad tunes coming out of you before a decent one shows up, same as you needed a bad first draft of the words a few weeks back.
So give yourself permission to hum garbage for ten minutes. Actual garbage. Nobody's listening. If somebody in your house walks by and gives you a look, that's fine, let them.
Second, walk away from the guitar
This one surprises people. When the tune won't come, half the time it's because you're stuck to the instrument, trying to solve it with your hands instead of your ear. Put the guitar down. Do the dishes. Fold laundry. Drive somewhere.
I do my best unsticking in the truck. Not because there's anything magic about driving, but because my hands are busy and my brain's free to wander, and the tune sneaks up on me sideways instead of me chasing it head-on.
Third, steal from your own habits
If nothing's coming, go back to a song you already know and love — a hymn, something from the radio when you were a kid, whatever's stuck in your head anyway — and hum your words over top of its shape. Not to keep it. Just to see what your words want to do rhythmically. Where they want to breathe, where they want to land hard.
Half the time you'll find your actual tune isn't far from that borrowed shape. Then you drift off it, note by note, until it's yours and not theirs. That's not cheating. That's how most of us actually work, we just don't advertise it.
Fourth, record everything, even the bad tries
This is where I've got a story for you, actually.
A while back I recorded myself on my phone, just to hear the timing back, see if the pacing was doing what I thought it was doing. Played it back and about fell over. I'd been rushing every single chorus. Every one. For years. I never noticed doing it, because when you're inside the song, playing it, your ear lies to you a little. It wasn't even close — I was stepping on my own lines like I was late for something.
Fixed it that same afternoon. Took maybe twenty minutes once I actually heard it. And I remember feeling almost annoyed, like — nobody told me? All those years?
That's the thing about recording yourself while you're hunting for a melody, too, not just fixing timing. You hum ten bad tunes into your phone, you won't remember six of them by dinner. But there might be one in there, buried at minute four, that you'd never find again if you didn't have it saved. Your memory is not a reliable filing system for this. Mine sure isn't.
A caution, plain and simple
If you're humming in the car like I do, don't be messing with your phone to record while you're driving. Pull over, or wait till you're stopped, or just remember the line long enough to say it into the phone at a red light. I've lost good lines that way, sitting at the point of the mountain in traffic, trying to hold four words in my head until I could safely reach my phone. Lost two of them. Kept one. It happens. Better than an accident.
The opinion I'll drop in here
Cut it down. If you're wrestling six different tune ideas trying to find the right one, don't try to save pieces of all six and stitch them together. That's how you get something twice as long and twice as complicated as it needs to be. Pick the one that's closest to working, even if it's rough, and build from there. Say the thing, then stop.
Before next time
Get a bad tune down this week, even one you hate. Record it on your phone however you can. We'll listen to a few of them together next class, and I promise you nobody's going to laugh — I've hummed worse in front of harder crowds than this one. 🙏