Borrowing Musical Ideas from Other Songs

Here’s a way to take pre-existing songs and borrow melodic ideas (without anyone knowing).

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Ever have one of those days when you really feel like writing a new song, but your creative mind is letting you down? When that happens, it’s frustrating.

Here’s an idea that can help. The following ideas come from Chapter 3 of my book, “Beating Songwriter’s Block: Jump-Start Your Words and Music.” It involves borrowing some melodic ideas from existing songs. Don’t worry, this is not a lesson in how to plagiarize. What it does is takes some melodic fragments from a song you know, and then reorganizing the notes to come up with something completely new.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure:

1. Choose a song chorus with a relatively small tone set (i.e., using few distinct pitches). Some examples: ‘Hound Dog’ (Leiber & Stoller), ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ (Bruce Springsteen), ‘One More Night’ (Maroon 5), or ‘Alejandro’ (Lady Gaga).
2. With your guitar or keyboard instrument, identify the individual pitches that comprise the main part of the melody. For example, ‘Hound Dog’ uses the notes G-A-C-D-D#-E, listed from low to high.
3. Play the list of notes in various ways, from low to high, high to low, and in random order.
4. Try to put the originating song out of your mind, and begin to construct a new song melody. It is best to choose a performing style and tempo as different as possible from the originating song. It is not necessary to use all the pitches.
5. As you work out fragments of melody, develop a chord progression to accompany it.

There are several ways to vary this exercise.

1. Try playing the original melody backwards.
2. See if you get good results by inverting the original melody (Start on the same note, but move in an opposite direction, keeping the same intervals: i.e., if the original melody moves up one tone from D to E, move down one tone from D to C.)

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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