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Boring songs are hard to fix. That’s because when listeners are bored, they often can’t put their finger on why. There may be nothing obviously wrong, and yet the song is committing the worst sin in music composition: it’s just sitting there, enticing no one, and making no one care about it. A boring song means no one is humming it afterward, and no one is caring if they ever hear it again. It takes good analytical skills to find the reason why a song is boring. In general, you’ll find that there are 7 categories of boredom that songwriters can commit. Are you committing one of them?
The following list doesn’t include issues that don’t apply directly to the writing of a song. For example, a bad performance can kill a song, no matter how good it is. But when it comes to the actual writing of the song, keep reading and see if you’re committing one of these basic songwriting errors:
- There’s nothing “hooky”. No rhythms or melodic shapes that jump out and grab the listeners attention.
- Chord Progression Have Too Many Chords. Since chords are part of what makes music sound like a journey, you can tighten up that journey by making progressions succinct and to the point.
- Chord Progressions that Don’t Resolve Properly. Certain chords feel like they naturally want to move to specific resolution points. For example, you know that dominant chords (V-chords) will often want to move to tonic chords (I-chords). Normal resolutions should be happening most of the time. If it sounds like your chords are meandering around without any sense of direction, your listeners will get lost and feel bored.
- Instrumentations That are Unimaginative. A simple guitar strumming the entire way through a song, with no attempt to spice it up with some technique, or no attempt to add something interesting, can make songs sound boring. Look for ways to add other instruments that will raise the interest level: fiddle, French horn, string quartet… all these ideas can help give your song better “curb appeal.”
- Melodies That Have No Shape. Melodies don’t need to move up and down constantly, but a melody that has no distinctive shape is difficult for a listener to remember afterward.
- The Tempo isn’t Right. You’d be surprised what nudging the tempo of a song a bit faster, or a bit slower, can do to the overall impression of a song by an audience. Tempo is strongly linked to energy. So consider tempo to be a crucial part of the songwriting process, and experiment.
- The Song is in the Wrong Key. This probably comes in under the “performance” category rather than the “songwriting” category, but it’s so important that I have to mention it here. We know that it’s normal to consider placing the key of a song basically in the middle of the singer’s range. That way, you can reach all the notes with ease. However, songs with powerful lyrics may need to be placed higher to get the emotional impact across. Without that impact, songs can fall flat. As with tempo, experiment!
Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website
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Definitely agree with #1. it’s like going fishing without a hook! Doesn’t matter how good a bait you have, you can’t hook your fish and bring them home!
I think 6 and 7 are part of performance and production of a song, and possibly number 4 as well, which falls under ‘arrangement’ I would say, rather than the writing of a song itself. (Although I write with arrangement in mind a lot of the time).
You’ve also left out a crucial and obvious point.
One of the main reasons a song is boring is to do with the idea of the actual song itself; the story, the images, the emotions. A lot of thought and effort goes into things like chords and melody (and rightly so), but that’s almost a total waste of time I reckon if you’re just going to use it to write yet another song about your ex-girlfriend, or how much you hate your job….
Hi Gideon:
Thanks very much for your comments. The final two reasons in the list are indeed, as you point out, very much performance-related. But I include them only because of my experience listening to songs that are sent to me for analysis. Wrong key and wrong tempo top the list as to why a song isn’t working so often that it surprises me that songwriters don’t think of them more often. And I always wonder if other aspects of composition might have differed if those two elements had been experimented with along the way.
As to your final point, I can’t say I agree. The topic of love is always a popular one, and people never tire of hearing another song about it.
Thanks again, Gideon. I really appreciate the comments.
Gary
Yeah, I was only being nit-picky. It’s a good point you make and besides, I tend to write songs with an eye on arrangements and production most of the time myself.
Regarding the last point, perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in what I meant. I go for love songs as much as anyone else, and write my share of them too.
The problem I was talking about was to do with not just stock and obvious lyrics, but not even having an interesting angle to look at your subject matter from.
My examples are common song topics, but there is a huge difference between one done well and interestingly, and one done badly.
No one tires of hearing great songs, no matter what they are about, but you dig your own grave if you deal with obvious topics without having looked for a unique way of dealing with them.
ie Take any teen love song by someone like Avril Lavigne and compare that lyrically to something like ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’
Same ball park, totally different scores.
My point is that EVERYTHING matters in a song. Every aspect and angle, and also how they interact with each other (ie happy melodies with sad lyrics and other juxtapositions).
People could stand to spend a little more time on lyrics as much as anything else.
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Very helpful. One add I might suggest, though, is that chords resolving all the time to the expected tonic can kill any tension. Sometimes, no resolution is cool (Rhiannon) or holding off until the end (don’t have an immediate example for this, although I tried it on one a song I wrote with a friend, which you can check out here: http://deepsalvage.bandcamp.com/track/borderline-love