You can also go the route of dispensing with phones and learn to transcribe solfege into a notebook. This is something I just started exploring and while it does take practice to gain the ear to transcribe things, you can start by learning to write down children's songs like Baby Shark(do re fa fa fa fa-fa fa-fa)and gradually work up to pop melodies - and once you do that, songwriting becomes a very natural process. All the precision stuff, you can work out in the DAW once you have a general indication of melody and rhythm.
I think the solfege for Baby Shark would actually start with sol la do, or in the key of C, G A C. Because the phrase eventually ends by dropping down one semitone on the final "shark", which would end up being F# (Fi!) if you started at the root of the scale. The initial movement from G to C, or sol to do in solfege, is very common and something you spot everywhere once you're aware of it.
