john

There are a few, though several are genre specific. The closest in terms of being a broad selection of genres, albeit their forums are of a different emphasis, would be musesmuse.com. It is a good site but I don't think their crit boards were as busy as ours when last I looked. It is a good site and Jodi the musesmuse founder is really nice but I don't know how active she is now. We have several regular members here who are members there, though I don't know how active they are there... I am always too busy here! Obviously I'd prefer you to stay here as an active part of our community, but I understand you seek further opinions. What I would point out is that provided you approach critique as an interactive discussion you don't need that many different opinions... Ie it is the depth of that discussion and exploration that is the most important factor. Whether you seek that here or elsewhere I would definitely recommend that you approach critique in that way. Quality is better than volume. While I completely appreciate Tom's point above, I am confident that our community measures up and compares very very favourably with any other community out there.

Writing music is writing. It is no less and no more than lyrics writing. In fact if you only produce music it is an instrumental, if you only produce lyrics it is lyrics writing. To qualify as songwriting it has to include both processes. If you are a lyricist with no music skills then you need to collaborate with a music writer to produce the finished work: a song. The reason is that a song is more than adding lyrics to music or vice versa. When you add the two together the two parts work together to become something much, much stronger. Sure in some genres music is less important, or in others the lyrics are less important, but in both cases the combination is still vital for the overall effect, the overall connection between writer, artist and listener. So in my opinion working on the music and working to combine words and music into a song, on your own or with a collaboration partner, is absolutely vital.

You can add or manage your blog here: http://forums.songstuff.com/blog/manage/

Hey, it is a great idea, but why not create a Blog on Songstuff? It's an ideal way to manage a journals plus the blogs get quite a lot of readers. Just a thought. Of course you can still promote your posts on the forums.