Singing a melody without the accompaniment allows you to hear things a lot more clearly.
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As you know, good songs are a partnership of many different elements all working together. Melody, lyrics, chords, instrumentation, musical arrangement… these are all the components of songs that need to partner well together in order for the song to be successful.
Even songs that are mainly about an excellent lyric also need a good melody with solid chords. But once in a while, as you’re writing, it’s a good idea to try to isolate those various components so that you can hear each one a bit more clearly. Isolating the vocals (i.e., the melody line) gives you a great opportunity to really focus in on the structure of your song melody.
Mind you, some songs don’t really need a stunning melody in order to work. Even in those kinds of songs, it can be very revealing to sing it on its own, with no instruments. So singing Otis Redding’s “Respect” without the band may seem lacking, but it tells you something right away: it works.
For a short list of song tunes that would still sound fantastic sung as an a cappella tune, just think of:
- “In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney)
- “Love of My Life” (Freddie Mercury)
- “Royals” (Lorde)
- “Someone Like You” (Adele)
As a student of songwriting, the task here is not to ask yourself if you still “like the song” when it’s sung this way. It’s more a question of asking yourself if you like the contour — the basic melodic shape. And when you remove the instruments, you can hear those important melodic shapes much more clearly.
As you work on writing your next song, try this exercise as you get close to finishing it: put your guitar down, step away from your keyboard, and just sing the melody and lyrics, as if it’s just you on a stage. Do you like what you hear?
The basic rule of thumb is this: if you’ve written a song for which you consider the melody to be an important element, that melody should be able to stand on its own.
Any melody that sounds boring to you sung this way needs to be fixed before you add the instruments back in. Most of the time, a melody is boring if it lacks shape and a climactic moment. Those flaws will be much more obvious to you when you sing it on its own.
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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.
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I noticed this when I recently remixed Phoenix and tegan and sara songs on soundcloud.com/maxtonx the acapellas allowed me to take the vocal line melodies and arrange them an entirely different way and make very nostalgic 80’s sounding tracks out of both artists songs. It was fun and refreshing to start from a vocal melody and playing in the key and scale versus doing melody last. I think it lends better results personally but isn’t the way most people start off writing. Id say for better results, record little melody ideas and build tracks around thoses since the vocal is generally the focal point of pop songwriting
Reblogged this on I Write The Music.