Songwriter: Organizing Thoughts, Lyrics, Meta Information

[nashp 0]

Even though I don't post here much, I'm always keeping an eye on what everyone is posting. One thing I rarely see is artist and songwriters posting here. Even when searching Google, I rarely see artist who use Evernote. Seems odd to me.

I use Evernote daily to organize my songs, but would love input on different methods of doing this.

• Title Ideas (random title names that cross my mind)
  
• Mixdowns (an mp3 version of a completed song are verse)
  
• Lyrics (any words that come to mind throughout the day, that can potentially be lyrics)
  
• Completed Albums (the year it was released, all mp3s, artwork, etc)
  
• Production (mp3 or wavs of the production I get from a variety of producers)
  
• Studio Notes (meta notes for things that don't fit in any of the other categories, but relate to my music)
  

These are all of my use cases for my music. Of course I use it for every other aspect of my life too, but this is my main focus, and the topic to share at the moment.

I'm almost at 2,000 notes in Evernote, and would love to brainstorm with other pro users and maybe come up with better ways to manage my daily process. I'm always fighting with the Notebooks VS Tags method, but always lean towards and prefer the notebooks.

A few minutes ago I thought about using tags in a different way, compared to the way I use notebooks. I thought about beginning to organize the Lyrics folder with tags on exactly what kind of lyrics I'm writing. "lyrics: introspect", "lyrics: relationship", etc. Maybe this a good topic to discuss with everyone. I have over 400 notes in my Lyrics Notebook, and seem to struggle to find what I need.

I simply create a thought, throw it in the Lyrics Notebook, and MAYBE stumble upon it again one day.

I look forward to reading others thoughts on this.

[MC_Otter 13]

Hi nashp! Welcome to posting on the forum!

I've used Evernote for a lot of different writing (including music reviews) and could definitely discuss that if you'd like. More on point with writing songs though, I thought you might find some of the posts on the Evernote blog useful:

http://blog.evernote.com/2011/04/11/6-ways-musician-francis-macdonald-of-the-band-teenage-fanclub-uses-evernote-–-music-series/

http://blog.evernote.com/2012/04/25/evernote-for-songwriting-song-story/

http://blog.evernote.com/2009/05/08/user-profile-dave-levy/

Hope these help!