|
Songwriting
Tips
Top Ten
Edited By
Robert
Curtis
Provided
by Roedy Black Publishing of CompleteChords.com
These songwriting
tips clearly point out what often muddies up the writing of a potentially great
song and show you what you need to do and what you need to avoid to optimize
your songwriting for ultimate emotional impact.
The following
songwriting tips cover both music and lyric writing.
The following
songwriting tips discussion is taken from the 10 TECHNICAL BLUNDERS SONGWRITERS
MAKE — AND HOW TO AVOID THEM (RESEARCH FINDINGS) from Roedy Black Publishing.
It is important
to bear in mind the following as you proceed through this songwriting tips article.
- To write great songs consistently,
you need
both creativity and certain technical skills
—which most songwriters lack.
We can’t help you with creativity. But we
can certainly help you greatly improve
your technical skills.
- And no, you do not need to
know how
to read or write musical notation to
write great songs.
The Top
10 Songwriting Tips For Avoiding
The Technical Blunders Songwriters Make
| 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
|
Using Musically
Unpalatable Chord Progressions
Incorporating Too Much "Unique"
Melody
Employing a Musically Unpalatable
Melodic Range
Failing to Firmly Establish Tonality
Not Building In Enough Sequence-type
Repetition
Paying Insufficient Attention to
Metrical Concordance
Writing in 4/4 Meter Exclusively
Failing to Edit Lyrics That Go On
and On and On
Not Utilizing Connotative Lyrical
Elements
Spending More Time and Energy on
Recording than Songwriting
|
1.
USING MUSICALLY UNPALATABLE CHORD PROGRESSIONS
- Songwriters
who have no knowledge of the Harmonic Scale
tend to write, clunky, musically unpalatable chord progressions. Such progressions
mitigate against the human brain’s natural tendency to want to process
intervals and harmonies that reflect simple frequency ratios. (For more information,
see How
Music REALLY Works! (ebook coming soon to this site in partnership
with Roedy Black Publishing).
- We found
that the chord progressions of "Great Songs" tend to follow the
natural clockwise flow of the Harmonic Scale to a much higher
degree than "Ordinary Songs:
- The easiest way to avoid writing
unpalatable chord progressions is to use the Harmonic Scale
as your basic framework for creating chord progressions. You can find out
how to do this by checking out How
Chord Progressions REALLY Work (tip
page coming soon on this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing).
2. INCORPORATING
TOO MUCH "UNIQUE" MELODY
- When you take the entire vocal
melody of a three or four minute song and subtract out all the repetitions
of the melodic parts, you have the core "unique" melody of the song.
In this study, Great Songs averaged only about 20 seconds of unique melody.
Ordinary Songs averaged 38 seconds—nearly twice as much unique melody:
- Human short term memory lasts
only a five to seven seconds. Your short term memory (and
the collective short-term memory of your audience) can only hold a few pieces
of information. (That’s why, for example, telephone numbers—exclusive
of area code—are only seven digits long.)
-
In preliterate times, songs served
the purpose of transmitting news. Any successful song really functions
as an elaborate mnemonic device. It employs as many memory-helping
elements as possible—rhyme, regularity of rhythm pattern, repetition
of catchy melodic phrases, etc.
- Songwriters who are not
aware of the importance of short term memory limitations overload
their tunes with too much unique melody. They do this to
try to prevent the song from becoming monotonously repetitive. Big mistake.
- You can avoid this by repeating
only a few unique melodic phrases many times throughout the song.
- You can use many other
ways to create variety. For example, you can modulate to other keys,
use variant chords, or introduce chromatic chords. These subjects are covered
in How Chord Progressions
REALLY Work (tip
page coming soon on this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing).
3.
EMPLOYING
A MUSICALLY UNPALATABLE MELODIC RANGE
- We found that most Great
Songs have a melodic vocal range of 12 to 17 semitones
(the pitch range of the lowest lead vocal note to the highest lead vocal
note, ignoring all vocal harmony).
- By contrast, Ordinary
Songs tend to have much greater variability of melodic range. Many have
a melodic range of fewer than 12 semitones or more than 17 semitones.
- Make sure your songs are
singable by just about anyone, without being too limited. Keep the melodic
range to a comfortable 12 to 17 semitones.
4.
FAILING
TO FIRMLY ESTABLISH TONALITY
- We found that Great Songs
establish tonality quickly and maintain it throughout
the song, even with modulating to other keys.
- Many Ordinary Songs often
lose their way and fail to firmly establish tonality
(40% of the time):
- You can avoid getting
lost like this by understanding the meaning of tonality and its importance,
and by using the tonic chord emphatically and "pointing"
to it via use of the V or V7 chord. These topics are covered in
How Music REALLY Works!
(ebook coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing).
5.
NOT
BUILDING IN ENOUGH SEQUENCE-TYPE REPETITION
- A
sequence is a melodic or harmonic phrase or configuration
that gets repeated at a different pitch.
- For
example, in the Lennon-McCartney tune, "Eleanor Rigby,"
think of the melody that goes with the words, "Picks up the rice
in the church where a wedding has been." The three notes corresponding
to the words "rice
in the" form a sequence that gets repeated on the words
"church
where a", then on the words "wedding
has."
- Using
sequences like this enables you to repeat melody, but not exactly
note for note. Sequence introduces variety while preserving
necessary repetition (unity). We found much more sequence-type repetition—about
three times more—in Great Songs than in Ordinary Songs:
- The subject of using sequences
is covered in detail in two books: How Music REALLY Works! and
How Songwriting REALLY Works!, Volume 1.
(ebooks
coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing)
6.
PAYING
INSUFFICIENT ATTENTION TO METRICAL CONCORDANCE
- We
found that in Great Songs, the melodic line and the lyrical pattern
adhere closely to the same metrical structure. We did not find
this to be the case with Ordinary Songs:
- Songwriters find it easier
to write lyrics that do not closely agree with the melody line. It’s
like writing prose. But in a musical context, it’s harder for a
listener to remember such lyrics because the irregular meter keeps forcing
revisions to the melody.
-
To avoid this problem, take
the time to sweat out lyrics that adhere closely to the same
metrical pattern as the melody line.
- The subject of metrical
structure is covered in detail in two books: How Music REALLY Works!
and How Songwriting REALLY Works!, Volume 1. (ebooks
coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing)
7.
WRITING
IN 4/4 METER EXCLUSIVELY
- All of the Ordinary Songs
in this study were found to be in 4/4 time. However, the Great Songs
showed metrical variety. While most were in 4/4 time, nearly
a quarter were in 3/4 or 6/8 time:
- If you usually write in
4/4, you might wish to try your hand at writing in 3/4
and 6/8 time.
- Metrical structure is
covered in detail in two books: How Music REALLY Works! and
How Songwriting REALLY Works!, Volume 1.
(ebooks
coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing)
8.
FAILING
TO EDIT LYRICS THAT GO ON AND ON AND ON
- We found that Ordinary
Songs have less lyrical repetition and are longer than Great
Songs. With Ordinary Songs, the overall effect is verbosity.
- The cure here is pretty
obvious: focus the subject matter more tightly, edit
out trivia, repeat emotionally powerful words,
phrases, and lines.
9.
NOT
UTILIZING CONNOTATIVE LYRICAL ELEMENTS
- We found that the lyrics
of Great Songs demonstrate more and better use of the
connotative elements of language. These include:
1.
Words with high emotional impact.
2.
"Personal" words—i.e., words that specifically
reference people, as opposed to ideas such as political messages, or
inanimate elements such as landscapes.
3.
"Personal" sentences—i.e., questions, commands,
interjections, fragments, dialogue, etc., as opposed to straightforward
declarative sentences.
4.
Concrete words—words that appeal to the senses (especially
the sense of sight), as opposed to abstract ideas and concepts.
- These topics are covered
in detail in the book How Songwriting REALLY Works!, Volume 2.
(ebook
coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing).
10.
SPENDING
MORE TIME AND ENERGY ON RECORDING THAN SONGWRITING
- The Ordinary Song demos
and independent releases we studied tended to be slickly produced. The
songwriters who made them were obviously spending way more time and
energy (and money) on getting perfect recordings of ordinary songs than
the other way around.
- T-Bone Burnett, ace
producer of dozens of great albums (including the movie soundtrack,
"O Brother, Where Art Thou"), put it this way: "These
days, instead of musicians playing instruments, instruments are playing
musicians."
-
Bob Dylan
once commented: "See, when I started to record, they just turned
the microphones on and you recorded . . . Whatever you got on one side
of the glass was what came in on the controls on the other side of the
glass."
- The truth is, anybody
can write a song in 10 or 15 minutes. Writing "a song"
takes no special talent whatsoever. The same goes for painting "a
picture" or writing "a poem." Anybody can create a mediocre
piece of "art" in a few minutes.
- The real question is the
question of quality, substance, emotional staying power. Most
songs written in 15 minutes, "in a burst of inspiration,"
actually sound mediocre to everyone except the songwriter and his or
her family members and acolytes.
- The way to overcome songwriting
mediocrity is to get educated about techniques you can use to compose
effective music. For example, check out
How Music REALLY Works!
(ebook coming soon to this site in partnership with Roedy Black Publishing).
When you understand pretty much everything you find there, you will
be ahead of 99% all songwriters, and well on your way to writing songs
with real "classic" potential.
- A truly great song will
sound brilliant with nothing more than a guitar-and-vocal or keyboard-and-vocal
presentation. Vocal skill matters little. Reverb matters less. Only
the tune, the chords and the words really matter. If the song does
not make it in a bare-bones rendition, it does not make it.
The
Above Songwriting Tips are Courtesy of Roedy
Black Publishing of CompleteChords.com
(Makers of handy chord chart systems for guitarists and keyboard players)
(Edited
by Robert Curtis)
|
