Songwriting

What your cards do when you turn them into a track.

Guide 01 · 3 min read

A songwriter hunched over a desk under a bare bulb — Where every song starts Songwriting

You draw a hand, choose which cards go into the song, and name it. The game shows you what the song is worth before you commit, so you can always back out and try a different combination.

What each card brings

Talent is the raw material and most of what a song is made of.
A genre match adds a bonus, but only if you record the song in the genre the card names.
Uniqueness multiplies instead of adding. On a plain hand it is worth very little. On a hand you are already excited about it is worth more than anything else you could put in.

One of each, as they come out of the shop

Or do not write at all

A hand can be spent on training instead, which permanently raises one of your stats rather than producing a track.

The studio is the second half

Writing gives you a song. Recording decides how good it ends up: a better studio, a producer and the gear you own all push it further than you wrote it. The result is the song’s rating, from Demo up through Amateur, Professional, Commercial and Premium to Masterpiece.

Six rooms to record in, bedroom laptop to the shrine with the tube mic

A rating is not a badge, and nobody wins for collecting them. All it decides is how hard the song competes against everyone else’s, and how long it keeps earning.

The ones that did not work

Demos you do not want to release are not wasted. Several can be taken back into the studio and combined into a push for a song you do believe in, and a big enough pile becomes a permanent card.