Cardell started a forum topic earlier this week, posting some great songwriting tips. It started me thinking about collecting and categorizing such gems, and led me on a search for ideas. I quickly came across the "Songwriting Tips Project" hosted by our friends at BloggingMuses.com.

Anyone can contibute a tip. All tips are categorized into one of 8 general topics, such as melody, lyrics, song structure, and song titles (to name a few). Tips are immediately posted and available in the search feature. Here's one of my favorites from the database...

The best tip I ever got was from an incredibly clever lecturer from my university. He advised me that the most 'successful' music tends to be 90% familiarity, 10% originality.

This helped me to stop worrying about trying to be revolutionary with every rhyme, rhythm and chord change (which, by all accounts, seems to be impossible these days in the wake of so much progress).