If there was one thing I always wished I knew how to do, but could never quite master, it was writing songs and lyrics.  It is a strange mental block for me.  I can write some fine prose and poetry, but set the whole thing to music and I start shooting blanks.  What I need is something that takes the stressful part out and just leaves me with the words themselves.  That part I can handle.  Which was what drew me to Songwriter’s Pad in the first place.

The beauty of this app is that it does not require you to write a song.  The problem with most writing is that once you sit down, you start thinking about the finished product and staring at the blank screen.  Novel, blank screen.  Book of poetry, blank screen.  Oh sure, maybe you write a title and byline, and then imagine how the whole thing will look in the store window, but in the end, the task of that finished product ultimately becomes too daunting to overcome the blank screen.

One of the best tools for overcoming this immediate hurdle is breaking the finished product into its constituent parts.  It is not a novel, it is a chapter.  It is not a book of poetry, it is a single rhymed couplet.  It is not a song, but a verse, an intro, a chorus, or a bridge.  That is exactly what Songwriter’s Pad offers. 

Of course, just breaking the task into its constituent parts is not always going to be enough to overcome any of the writing problems you might have along the way.  Sometimes, when you are writing a song, you know exactly the emotion you are trying to convey, but you just can’t wrap your tongue around the right words.  For this, the app offers the word and phrase finders.  Just find the emotion you wish to convey, and a list of lyrical options will appear.  Scroll through the list until you find the one that fits your song, and hit the plus button.  This will add the word (or phrase) to the appropriate sidebar list for your immediate or future use.  The only problem I had with this was that the list of emotions was pretty limited.  It would have been nice if a full Thesaurus had been included here, just as a complete dictionary was included as a tool.

The final component of the app is the recorder.  You can see the controls running along the bottom of the screen.  Let’s face it, songs are designed to be heard, not seen (or something like that).  So, if you want to know whether your song is really Top 40 material, reading and writing just will not be enough.  The record feature allows you to sing your song out loud and then play it back to your heart’s content.  This is really the only way to refine and edit your latest hit before selling it to American Idol…or something like that.

The only problem I had with the whole app was that there is no option to record music along with your lyrics.  Song lyrics are rarely written without musical accompaniment.   By only offering the tools to write the words, the app really seemed like it missed a large portion of the song writing process. 

Notwithstanding the lack of music to assist with the writing, I thought this was a fantastic app for what it offered.  The two pronged approach to writer’s block (breaking the process into bite sized segments and offering writing prompts when needed) should offer even the most seasoned writer the push they need to finish their next project. 

Songwriter’s Pad is available from the iTunes App Store for $9.99 from Dante Varnado Moore.

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