Fleshing out a song - help needed

  • Thread starter Thread starter fritsthegirl
  • Start date Start date
Hmmm, I'm gonna start listening to my scrambled eggs instead of eating them.

Hey thanks for all the replies guys. I really appreciate it. I don't really have much experience playing or being taught music. A lot (most all of it) I've just made up as I've wanted to learn it. Right now, I think I need to be more applied and methodical with stuff that I find challenging musically. That will entail doing pretty much all of the things you have suggested.

It's cool, you all have a lot more experience with this, and it's excellent that you share this stuff with me so I can learn how to go about my own development a bit better.

:thumbs up:
 
Harking back to what Miro said earlier, I have on my computer a folder of around 20-30 crappy half bits of song written in Notepad. Only a few of them made it into full songs, but the process of writing down the bits of ideas (some of which I can't remember well enough to reproduce now, despite transcribing words and chords) I got and trying to develop them and learning when to give up on them was a valuable learning experience.

And as discussed in another thread, I (and others) find that when the good stuff (relatively speaking!) comes to me, it simply flows out. If you're struggling with it, chances are it's no good. The stuff that I like seems to almost write itself.
 
What Jonny said, keep everything, every idea. You never know when you are working on something and need a little snippet of something to make it all fit together, and you may already have something tyhat will fit perfectly that you never used. Or you could be listening through rough recordings and find a gem you totally forgot about.
From a technical point of view, when creating bridges and changes etc. it's good to have a basic understanding of the structure of your key and scales. There are rules to music structure which can help you jump to different chord structures, keys, tempos etc. all within one song. I say rules, but music is art and there are no "rules" in art, so they are guidelines, not rules and can and should be broken at will, but it's good to understand those guidelines and why they are there.
 
c7sus said:
"Yesterday" started out as "scrambled eggs".
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RAMI said:
True story.
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"Scrambled eggs.....oh my baby, how I love your legs..."
'Eleanor Rigby' started off as "Ola Na Tungee".
Alot of lyricists start off with that kind of thing. Apparently, it's called "blocking". One thing I've tried a few times recently is using the blocking as the actual lyric and writing around that. Because sometimes, even though the block is highly embarrassing or total rubbish, I find that I can't get it out of my head and even if I came up with different lines, in my head I'd still think~sing the block ! They can be like computer viruses, they just won't go away.
 
It seems the conversation turned to lyrics somewhere, and I do instrumental composition. But I'd like to chime in, too.

My favorite arrangements start small, build slowly, take deep breaths, and crescendo to a defined statement at the end. U2 is awesome at this. John Williams is another good one, although many of his most famous pieces begin with an in-your-face bang.

I try to find a basic element to use as the theme throughout a piece, then I diverge from it wildly in the middle of the song and bring all the elements together at the end. Often the song evolves into something completely different by the end.

I've often found that a piece seems thin and unfinished, yet I've put all the elements where I want them and there doesn't seem to be anything to add without it getting too busy...Then I add a seemingly insignificant underlying sound that warms the whole thing and fills it out nicely.

Try to avoid over-repetition. Some of my least favorite music stays on the same note throughout with little deviation. The chorus of Whitney Houston's I will always love you is like that. I was forced to listen to it twice an hour over a PA system in a loud warehouse for what seemed years, and all I could hear was that one shrill note! AUGH!! Hootie and the Blowfish is another example, as every song seems to be in the same key and the lead singer has a comfort note that he returns to every couple seconds.

In instrumental works, repetition can be masked by adding new elements every couple of bars, or changing up the order. I never (say never ;) let a set of tracks go unmodified for more than, say, 4-6 counts... no matter how kewl sounding the vibe is, it gets awfully monotonous awfully quickly. This is my biggest gripe with most electronica/trance. The trance isn't supposed to be literal!

Anyway, what I do is mostly instinctual. It's hard to explain/teach. But I hope I helped a little.
 
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fritsthegirl said:
I was just thinking about how I'd like to make my songs a bit longer and more interesting musically.
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Mine was the opposite problem ~ for me a short song was 6 minutes. Many of my intros were longer than a couple of songs !
Alot of this stemmed from the fact that from the age of 16 I got into bands that played long tracks and often they were multi~part. So something like Pink Floyd's "Echoes" or Genesis' "Supper's ready" or Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Dreams" or Black Sabbath's "Megalomania" or Led Zeppelin's "In my time of dying" set something of a template, or at least got me comfortable with long songs, not to mention those avant garde jazz pieces that went on forever. I went to many a concert where it was simply impossible to tell where one piece ended and another began. And I'd been listening to classical music from before I was born......
But after nearly 30 years of writing and recording mainly long pieces, I felt that shorter pieces were something I'd like to try, just to see if, on a consistent basis, I could. It was hard to leave a verse after a few lines. I had to struggle endlessly with something feeling rather incomplete or short. But over the last 2 years, I've managed tons of 1, 2 and 3 minute songs. They won't all necessarilly have bridges or "middle 8s" {I call any deviation in the middle a "middle 8", whether there's 4 bars, 8 bars or 37 bars} but they all make sense musically. Kind of.
You don't have to write any song other than the one you feel to write, but for me, simply listening to music over the years is how I got the idea. There are so many different kinds of songs across different genres. I honestly couldn't tell you how songs work or what makes them tick. Especially listening to/reading what the artists say about their music. Sometimes, what you might think is the main bit of a song as you hear it is nowhere close to how the writer or artist conceived it. The arrangement of a song often takes the song to another place altogether.
 
Jammeez said:
Anyway, what I do is mostly instinctual. It's hard to explain/teach. But I hope I helped a little.
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Hey I appreciate it. We all learn and work in different ways but I always get something out of reading all these different perspectives & methods.
 
grimtraveller said:
You don't have to write any song other than the one you feel to write, but for me, simply listening to music over the years is how I got the idea. There are so many different kinds of songs across different genres. I honestly couldn't tell you how songs work or what makes them tick. Especially listening to/reading what the artists say about their music. Sometimes, what you might think is the main bit of a song as you hear it is nowhere close to how the writer or artist conceived it. The arrangement of a song often takes the song to another place altogether.
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That was good reading Grim, thanks a lot. On the song length thing, I reckon I need to give it a lot more time before thinking of it as finished. Maybe try to enjoy the sound of my own voice and playing a bit more too. I quite quickly think people will get sick of listening to me it if it's longer than 4 verses and a couple of choruses. I'm pretty sure I feel like this because there is a lack of diversity in the stages of the song, intro, bridge, outro...und so weiter.
 
ConorC said:
What Jonny said, keep everything, every idea. You never know when you are working on something and need a little snippet of something to make it all fit together, and you may already have something tyhat will fit perfectly that you never used. Or you could be listening through rough recordings and find a gem you totally forgot about.
From a technical point of view, when creating bridges and changes etc. it's good to have a basic understanding of the structure of your key and scales. There are rules to music structure which can help you jump to different chord structures, keys, tempos etc. all within one song. I say rules, but music is art and there are no "rules" in art, so they are guidelines, not rules and can and should be broken at will, but it's good to understand those guidelines and why they are there.
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I need to work on music theory, without a doubt. I can figure out most notes on my guitar, but only if you give me an hour. I know a tiny little bit about majors and minors and scales and all that, but again, not enough to use it effectively. There's definitely a chunk of learning for me to do here. It's impossible for me to manipulate or play around with music in the way I want to be able to, when I don't even understand the rudiments.
 
miroslav said:
I'm sure there are a lot of folks here who can write songs easily and regularly....and it's not some real special talent IMO, it just takes practice. I've been writing songs for a long time, and I can now get a song going with just a few guitar strums, and already I'm thinking structure and arrangment.....but, you have to write a lot of shit songs to get maybe 2-3 that are really decent...but that too, is a matter of practice.

For me, it's usually a couple of chords and maybe one or two lines of lyrics that pop into my head almost simultaneously...and after that it's mostly about sitting down and *deciding* what I want to do with them.
I work out the structure and get the arrangement going....then I sit down and finish the lyrics around that arrangement. Lyrics take the most time for me, the other stuff flows pretty fast.

So....the point is to write...write....write.....and be prepared to shelve a lot of them, but with each new song, you get better at it. Don't throw any away...sometimes you find that the better sections of two mediocre songs can be combined to make one pretty good song. Also, try to consciously change things up, so you are not writing the same song over and over....which is a trap one can fall into without realizing. Don't start everything with the same key, same chords, same rhythm and tempo...etc.
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I read somewhere, to your point, write a CD a month. Don't worry if they are good, make sense, just write the songs, finish them and move on. I remember reading about how when the Beatles before they went to Hamburg were not very good, they played for almost a year there (not sure of the duration) and came back a different band. Point is, write your **s off and complete them. Sometimes you might find two or three bad songs that make a great song when put together.

I think this has suggestion has a lot of merit, the more you do it, the better you will be at it.
 
fritsthegirl said:
I need to work on music theory, without a doubt. I can figure out most notes on my guitar, but only if you give me an hour. I know a tiny little bit about majors and minors and scales and all that, but again, not enough to use it effectively. There's definitely a chunk of learning for me to do here. It's impossible for me to manipulate or play around with music in the way I want to be able to, when I don't even understand the rudiments.
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Something that will really help is getting a circle of 5ths and understanding how keys relate to each other and how to get from one to another. This site here: Guitar Chords - Diagrams | Scales | Keys | Lookup Charts helps to know what chords go in what key, then take the circle of 5ths, look at it neighbor and determine how you want to get there to change key. Just an idea and another tool to help.
 
Get down to your local library and get the songwriter's bible - Carole King Deluxe. She's written everything from rock to soul to love songs - look at the chords she used in any given key. I was falling into the same pit but you can add more interest to your songs by using derivatives of chords and alternative fingerings. I'm not that nimble with my fingers for picking, but things like 7ths, sus4, sus 2 can add a lot of colour to your songs with very little effort.
 
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