7 Ways to Build Energy in a Song’s Chorus

The general direction of song energy between verse and chorus should be up. Here’s some ideas for making that happen.

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If you were to trace a line that represents the energy you perceive from a song as it progresses, you’d notice that the line would generally go in a mostly-upward direction. That’s a basic songwriting principle: the energy of the end of a song should equal or exceed that of the beginning. It’s that sense of intensifying energy and forward motion that keeps listeners listening. In particular, the chorus needs to take whatever the energy level is in the verse and pump it up a bit.

When you think about “energy”, you might tend to think about things getting faster, but that rarely happens in music. Especially in pop music genres, tempos are set at the beginning, and they stay pretty much constant.

So what are the things you can do in your song to ensure that the energy your listeners get from your chorus is more than what they get from the verse? Here are 7 ideas. You don’t have to use them all, but you need to be sure that you’ve done at least one of them:

1. Write a chorus melody that’s higher in pitch than the verse. This is the most common technique, and is probably true for 70%-90% of pop songs.
2. Allow the tonic note to occur more often in the chorus. In particular, melodic phrases near the end of the chorus should feature the tonic (key) note. That moving-to-the-tonic feel helps build musical energy.
3. Use more instruments in the chorus. Filling out the sound so that the instrumentation is fuller has been done for literally centuries of music composition.
4. Increase the upper and lower range of your instruments. For example, having a guitar start to play higher voicings in the chorus will build the excitement level of the music. Dropping the bass an octave, or doubling the bass with another instrument does the same thing.
5. Increase the rhythmic activity of the backing instruments. While chorus melodies tend to use longer (slower) note values, the backing instruments can generate more energy by playing quicker note values. For example, if your verse features guitars mainly strumming 8th-notes, switching to mainly 16ths along with using syncopations will raise the energy level.
6. Use backing vocals in the chorus. Backing vocals have a way of raising energy levels, and it works really well if your chorus melody is the same as, or very similar to, the verse melody.
7. Use “stronger” chord progression in the chorus. A strong progression is one that clearly points to one chord as being the tonic chord. So in a chorus your chord progression will generate more energy if it uses less chords and focuses more on the tonic chord. A verse progression can “ramble around” a bit, but a chorus progression should stay in the tonic chord neighbourhood.