If your Sim is a shower singer, occasional guitar busker, or secret piano virtuoso, writing a song in The Sims 4 is a fantastic way to turn their talent into your family’s main source of cash. Paired with the ability to license music, you can rake in hundreds of Simoleons in royalties per song daily. Or, if you’re just doing it for the love of music, you can also just keep tracks under your belt for future performances.

Writing a song can be confusing because it’s locked until later skill levels, presumably to protect the general public from the awkward musical attempts your Sim makes at level 1. To make things worse, writing and licensing songs are both required steps of the Musical Genius aspiration with little explanation—trying to figure out how to meet this requirement in my early Simming years made me lose my mind.

Luckily, if you’ve already thought about becoming a Sim songwriter, it’s likely that the option to write songs and lyrics is just a few levels away. Here’s everything you’ll need to know about writing songs and lyrics in The Sims 4, including how to unlock both and how to let your new songs shine through licensing and performances.

How to write songs in The Sims 4

To unlock the ability to write songs in The Sims 4, you’ll need to make sure your Sim has reached level 8 in their instrument of choice: Guitar, Piano, Violin, Pipe Organ (if you have the Vampires pack), or Singing in the City Living pack. Once you’ve hit level 8—whether through practice or cheats—click your instrument and find the “Write Song” option. From here, you’ll have a few genre options to pick from.

Before starting a songwriting session, it’s worth checking on your Sim and making sure their needs are at least close to full—songwriting is a long process. Forcing my Sims to power through songwriting has more than once resulted in me finding them slumped over on the floor next to their instruments. If your Sim needs to stop writing a song in the middle of the process, you can resume that song instead of starting over by finding it in your inventory (it’ll be a black “digital music file” if you use a digital instrument like a keyboard and a blue piece of “sheet music” if you use an acoustic instrument like a piano) and clicking “Resume [Genre].”

Once you’ve finished writing a song, you’ll be prompted to give it a name. Then, you can send your new song baby off into the world, although you’ll need an extra level to do this. To license a song or lyrics once you’ve hit level 9 in the appropriate skill, head to your Sim’s mailbox, click “License Song/Lyrics” and select your instrument and song (and then wait for the royalties to roll in).

Singing works a bit differently—you’ll find a “Write Lyrics” option when interacting with a microphone at level 8. However, if you want to write lyrics to accompany the piano or guitar, you’ll need to hit level 3 in that instrument’s skill as well. Once you’ve hit both milestones, then you can interact with your instrument and hit “Write Lyrics.”

If you want to perform a song after you’ve written it, you can do so through the usual method of interacting with an instrument and clicking “Sing Song,” although your new song will appear under its own fancy little “written” category. Or you can just let your Sim rest—they’ve earned it.

How to cheat your Sim’s music skills

If you’re eager to write songs and would rather skip the time (and bothering your neighbors if you’re in an apartment) that practicing an instrument requires, you can get there with The Sims 4 cheats. Just open the cheats console, enter the code “testingcheats true” and then “stats.set_skill_level [skill code] 8”. The skill codes for each instrument are:

• Guitar: Major_Guitar
• Piano: Major_Piano
• Violin: Major_Violin
• Pipe Organ (Vampires pack): Major_PipeOrgan
• Singing (City Living pack): major_singing

For example, if you want to rapidly get your Piano skill to the required level 8, you’d type “stats.set_skill_level Major_Piano 8” into the console.