Song writing is what happens when the voice you sing with wins over the voices you think with.
In songwriting, the first steps to take are purely practical and they work more like guidelines than rules.
You need music and you need to put a melody over that music, whether it’s the rhythmic melody of Hip Hop, the more traditionally lyrical melody of Rock or the throat-shuddering guttural of Death Metal, whatever it is, it will have melody.
There are songs that are composed entirely of vocal melody, of course, but, if you want to include music and all the emphasis it provides to a song, you should write the music on guitar or piano first by picking a key and a group of chords or notes and run them in a sequence.
Historically, we have developed names for the parts that form a sequence in songs, including chorus, pre-chorus, verse, middle eight (bridge), refrain, coda and outro just to name a few. But it might be a good idea to leave those names out of the process early on.
In the interests of finding out what a song is going to be (rather than imagining you know everything about it before you begin) its probably a good idea to name each of the parts in your sequence of chords or music as A, B and C, or 1, 2 and 3 and so on.
If you frame them early on as a chorus or verse, you might tend to write and arrange your song based on those frameworks and labels and you might miss something interesting or new if you work to create early on without labels.
When you have a couple of chord sequences that are mostly in the same key signature (and, if they aren’t, if it’s a change in key that you enjoy the sound of) sit down and listen carefully to the music and find within yourself a vocal melody that the music inspires. A kind of emotional reaction in sound that you feel and want to sing.
Also, if you want to at least be a little bit original, to try and avoid the first, fourth, fifth and relative minor configuration of chords that have been overused in music over the past forty years. Those chords are a great place to start and you will sound okay, but, if you want to create something that is your own, it’s probably better to grab hold of some information about music theory and other chords and see how wonderfully complex and beautiful music is beyond that arrangement.
When it comes to creating a vocal melody that encapsulates the emotional reaction the music engenders in you, a good way of starting this is simply by singing the root note of the key signature. You can easily just hum this note, and, in a way, right there and then, you have already written a song. It might be a one-word song with a simple melody of one note, but it’s still technically a song. And it’s a great way to start.
From here the possibilities are endless. You can vary the notes in the melody by moving along the diatonic scale in that key. Melodies everywhere have come from movements in notes throughout that and other octaves. If you’re feeling very adventurous, you might want to try flattening the seventh note of the scale to move it into the mxylidian mode. Or sharpening and flattening other notes as they occur in other modes.
Modes might seem daunting but they are very useful in melody making and they change the nature of a key signature to make the music more engaging. You can watch a helpful Youtube video here, explaining how the Beatles did this with a lot of their songs.
Even though it might seem exciting to have finally made a melody appear over some music, it’s important to keep pushing yourself into the further trials of song writing, which involve arranging the musical parts of the song into sections that you might want now to call chorus and verse and so on. Or you can simply arrange it as parts and stamp those with your own labels.
Arrangements are killer moves to making a song work. And it’s a good idea to remember that thinking carefully about the impact your voice and choice of lyrics has on your listener at every point during the song is an intuitive exercise that plays out inside your own head and has a lot to do with your own internal thought processes.
Way back around the start of the last century, Sigmund Freud wrote ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ about human internal thought processes, as part of his career at attempting to explain aspects of human consciousness.
It’s a long book about the battle individuals have with the normative forces in their society and it includes the notion that parts of a person’s mental life includes ‘perceptions, thoughts, feelings’ which seem alien and divorced from their own sense of self.
It’s an idea that has a great impact on artistic creation. When you are creating a vocal melody or a line of poetry or an installation representing some immense idea, all you are doing is creating something from ideas of your own. Ideas that come from within you and have all the validity your subjective self-worth commands.
It’s true that art can be evaluated by a consensus of subjective opinions, which, generally, divide into popular and critical appraisals and it’s true that some of those evaluations have some merit.
But, if you are going to create, you need to ignore the evaluations that might arise in your own mind and suggest to you that its not worth bothering because you have no talent, or it’s not worth bothering because you have immense talent and no one needs to know about it but you. If you really want to create, it’s important that you bother.
In the end, as guitarist Robert Fripp says, you have to ‘learn to trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.’ And create.
By James Gallaway