How to build an Idea Bank?
The Idea Bank has been an essential tool for me over the years. It has allowed me to access all of my ideas wherever I am. It has also helped me turn up ready to serve my co-writers as best I can.
What is an Idea Bank?
You can include many things in your Idea Bank — everything from lyrically or musical notes to your co-writer's publishing details. Or even the name of their dog! But having used this tool, using different versions and iterations over time, there are now five processes that each goes through.
The five processes are:
Captured — fresh ideas that I'm thinking could be turned into a song at some stage.
Writable — ideas mapped, using a Song Map or otherwise, giving some structure on how the fresh idea could be used when being written.
Organized — what, when, why, and who this writable idea could be used for writing.
Written — yes, actually creating a final draft song - this is when the music and the lyrics all come together, either written by myself or within a co-write.
Delivered — having signed off the final version that is recorded (even as a rough work tape on my iPhone to finished in a studio) and then sent to the publisher and included in the catalog.
As an idea is developed or written, they are updated from fresh ideas to completion (or delivered). This is captured in the 'status' column of my own Idea Bank.
Steps of building an Idea Bank
In both of my Workbooks, I've set out more details on how to build an Idea Bank. But, if you've not seen this before, here's how to set up an Idea Bank just simply using a couple of spreadsheets. There are two main elements of this:
Details about new fresh ideas, and
Details about your co-writers.
There are four steps involved in building an Idea Bank.
Step 1. Prepare the idea spreadsheet
In Row 1, Column 1, enter the title “Idea Bank” in bold
In Row 3, enter the titles across the sheet as follows:
Reference number
Date
Title
Link to Lyrics
Link to Music
Song Map
Status
Cool Score
Genre
Structure
Tempo
Co-writers
Final shares
Notes
Step 2. Prepare the co-writers spreadsheet
In Row 1, Column 1, enter the title “Co-writers” in bold
In Row 3, enter the titles across the sheet as follows:
Name
Publisher details
PRO
Notes
Step 3. Enter your idea details
This is all about capturing all of the ideas, wherever they are lurking, whether lyrical or musical ideas – from half-written ideas on an old pad of paper to voicemails of music you've sent back to yourself. The trick is to capture all of your ideas because if it's not captured, it can't be there when you need them.
Step 4. Categorize your ideas
Once all of these ideas are captured, it's time to review these ideas and categorize them to give you a feel for how your very best ideas could be used. I used the Cool Score (OK, Cool, Very Cool, Brilliant) column as a way of highlighting the best ideas to the top of the list when looking for which should be written in a coming up co-write.
The (Possible) Co-writer column is also something I'd use, especially when I'm planning a trip to Nashville, so that I've at least a few ideas that are likely to work for each co-writer, even if we end up writing something else.
To set this up, here is a Google Sheets template https://tinyurl.com/Idea-Bank that you can copy/paste and use on your drive.
This is the simplest way of setting up your Idea Bank. There are alternative ways to do this – from simply having a long list of all of this on paper to using a database like FileMaker Pro or using something between these like Notion.
Questions
Here are a few questions:
The key thing about an Idea Bank is that it keeps everything, everywhere with you. The brilliant thing about computers is their ability to search very quickly. That's why I love databases like FileMaker. If you haven't yet set up your own Idea Bank, what method would you prefer most - paper, spreadsheets, database, or other?
If this approach is too left-brained, how would you rather keep these ideas around when you need them most?
Hope this helps with your songwriting!
– Simon.
