How do you write songs?

Jan 21 '02 (Updated May 01 '02)

The Bottom Line Use a few handy and time-tested tricks to get past your initial mental blocks and start writing your tune!

There are 3 basic components to writing a song:

1. Lyrics
2. Melody
3. Chord Progression

Lyrics have always been a forte for me. Probably for you, too, since you're writers by avocation or vocation.

I have found that interesting lyrics come to me in spurts. I seldom can sit down and throw out 3 verses and a chorus in one sitting.

Instead, I'll hear a turn of phrase that sounds good to me.

Others have used bulletin boards where they write down interesting phrases on 3 x 5 cards.

I put mine on one document on the computer called "lyrics". These are sort of orphan lyrics looking for a home.

They serve as a jumping off point for starting, or maybe a place to look for a set of words for the hook, or as a sort of toolbox to find better ones than the scratch ones in a song.

What are scratch lyrics? Those are lyrics that you throw down hastily at the beginning of composition so that you can express the meter and melody that you want for the song. They can be horrible, nonsensical, whatever.

(The very beginning of composing is NOT the time to be a perfectionist. You want to try and get a good framework established. So, don't look for "that perfect phrase" until you've already got a melody.)

(Rumor has it that McCartney's "Yesterday" started out as "Scrambled Egg". He obviously wanted 3 syllables in there, and until he got further down the road, it wasn't important to figure out what those 3 syllables would be.)

Most musicians start with a melody that's kicking around in their head. I don't. My brain just isn't wired that way. I either start with lyrics I want to put to a melody, or I start with a chord progression that sounds interesting to me.

As you probably know, some common rock chord progressions are the I-IV-V (for instance, in the key of C, it's the C, F and G chord.)

Throw in a vi (that's a 6-minor) or in C an Am.

It's amazing when inspiration can pop up just from strumming the transition from a C to an F.

The FORMAT for writing a song, is generally:

INTRO
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Bridge
Chorus
Verse
OUTRO

The verse is the part that changes each time. ("Got a good reason... for takin' the easy way out.")

The Chorus is the part that is the same each time it is repeated ("She was a daaaaay Trippah!") It's also called the "hook". That's because you use this part of the song to "hook" the audience into listening. This is where you want your catchiest part of the song. Songs with "a good hook" are audience friendly and are more likely to get airplay than songs with a weak hook or no discernable hook.

The Bridge is thrown in to break up the monotony (in the case of Day Tripper, it's an instrumental bridge where they play the main riff in B, and go into a brief solo.)

(Funny story about a "bridge" in a song. There's an Eric Clapton song called "Badge", which, as many of us know, doesn't really say anything about no stinking badges. As he was showing it to some other musicians, one of them saw the handwriting where Clapton had written "bridge", and said, "Badge? What the hell is badge?" The name stuck.)

You could almost treat this like one of those "computer poetry generator" things, and compose the chord progressions by just deciding:

"Chorus is going to be I, IV, V"
"Verse is going to be I, vi, V, VI"
"Bridge is going to be iii, ii, I, IV"

Granted, this isn't going to work out the first time through, but it'd be the musical equivalent of brainstorming: just giving you something on which to start building.

If you're stuck, just chose some chords to work with. It'll give you something to start. You can always change them later.

Most songwriters have a hard time getting started. "I know I have a head full of songs, but I just don't know where to start!"

If you keep a bulletin board (real or electronic), throw out some hastily constructed chord progressions, you'll at least have a place to START.

The rest, well, that's where the actual creative process comes in.

Part two in this series:

http://www.epinions.com/content_2631311492

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