"After a Lifetime of Searching, I Created This $149 Deck of Cards for Songwriting: Can It Improve Your Music?"] - Guitar | Technique

Whether you’re a bedroom beatmaker or a top-tier songwriter, you’ve probably experienced writer’s block at some point. Inspiration is a finite resource, and it’s not always there when you need it most, so it helps to have a few time-tested techniques in your back pocket to get things moving when you’re stuck in a creative rut.

That’s the idea behind Session Cards, a new venture from Tommy Rush, a songwriter and producer with credits on music from The Weeknd, Madonna and Travis Scott.

Pitched as a “hit-making system” that promises to “change how you write records”, Session Cards are a deck of 144 cards that each features a “session move”, a strategy that’s intended to help you move through a creative impasse and send you on your way towards finishing a track. “I spent my entire career searching for this, and it didn’t exist, so I built it for myself,” Rush says.

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Organized into 11 categories, the cards feature advice tailored to a variety of creative contexts, intended to solve common problems that arise during a studio session. Categories like Chorus, Melody and Lyrics are targeted at specific stages of the songwriting process, while the Rescue cards offer an “emergency kit” for when “the session is dying”.

The Lyrics card previewed on Session Cards’ website, for example, offers up a suggestion for when “the song has too many ideas”. “Finish: This song is about ____,” the card reads. “Every line must support that sentence. If a line doesn’t support it, cut it.”

Another card titled Motif Recycle provides a solution for when “the song feels like separate parts”: “Steal a tiny melody fragment from the chorus. Hide it earlier (intro, verse, background). Bring it back louder later. The listener won’t know why the song feels like ‘one piece’ – but they’ll feel it.”

If this all sounds rather familiar, then that’s because Brian Eno had a similar idea all the way back in 1975. Eno’s Oblique Strategies are a pack of creative suggestions designed to help artists break through mental roadblocks and approach their work from a new angle. (They’re also a third of the price.)

How are Session Cards any different, you ask? “Where Oblique Strategies offer a philosophy, Session Cards give you the exact move a platinum producer would make right now,” the website reads. “Oblique Strategies are abstract suggestions for any creative field. Session Cards are specific, executable moves built for music production and songwriting on professional records.”

While Session Cards may well have some reasonable advice to offer songwriters and producers, we can’t help but feel a twinge of skepticism when judging their usefulness against their optimistic price point: a pack of Session Cards will set you back $149, and that’s a 25% discount on the price they’ll go up to after “Edition 001” sells out.

The Session Cards website justifies their exorbitant price by pointing to the fact that studio time can cost anywhere from $50 to $500 an hour, reminding us that “one dead session” could waste more than the price of a pack: “Pull a card, the whole room pivots, and the deck pays for itself in minutes,” it says, reassuring us that the cards come in a “premium rigid display box” and have a “studio-grade finish” that “holds up in actual sessions”.

“This is information I would have given anything to have when I was starting out,” Rush says. “I was going to keep it private forever. The producers and writers I work with saw me use it and wouldn’t let it go. Eventually enough of them convinced me it should be in every room. It’s the cheat code.”

While we’re inclined to take anything that promises to offer the “cheat code” to writing hit songs with a substantial pinch of salt, Session Cards is an intriguing concept, and much like Eno’s Oblique Strategies, they could provide a helpful nudge in the right direction when you’re feeling creatively stalled. Whether that nudge is worth $149 is up to you.