5 Things To Do When a Chorus Falls Flat

Your chorus is arguably the most important part of your song. Here are some ideas to be sure it gets the job done.

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Ever get the feeling that your song chorus is just not popping? A chorus serves as a centrepiece for your song in practically every way:

1. It provides the listeners with the most memorable melodies and hooks.
2. It sums up the message of the story.
3. It displays the complete instrumentation that your song will offer.

Even people who have no musical training can tell when the song has reached the chorus. There’s just something about it that clicks with the audience and announces its arrival.

But when a chorus fails to get attention for itself, it can be hard to pinpoint the causes. Here are five causes of a chorus that falls flat, along with some solutions.

1. It doesn’t have a distinctive, attractive, memorable melodic bit (i.e., a hook). SOLUTION: Compose a short, 1- or 2-bar melodic/rhythmic idea that works well when repeated. Example: “Got My Mind Set On You” (Rudy Clark, recorded by George Harrison), “All About That Bass” (Meghan Trainor-Kevin Kadish).
2. The melody in general doesn’t jump out. Most of the time, a problem with an unremarkable melody can be traced to its basic range: it sits too low in pitch. Most song choruses, in order to differentiate from the verse, need to sit higher in pitch. In addition, chorus melodies will fall flat if they use the same verse pitches rearranged. SOLUTION: Choruses need to be distinctive from the verse in practically every way. Be sure at least some of your chorus is a 4th higher than the verse.
3. The chord progression wanders too much. A chord progression for a chorus shouldn’t use too many chords, and should target the tonic chord as being the most important one. SOLUTION: If your chorus progression contains more than 6 or 7 chords, you may need to start again, but focus on the tonic chord more, and limit your chorus to 4 or 5 chords.
4. There’s nothing about the chorus instrumentation that stands out. SOLUTION: Make sure your chorus is offering the fullest instrumentation that you’ll audience will hear. The only exception to this is the possibility of a bigger moment somewhere in your song bridge. Most of the time, however, you should create something full and engaging for the chorus, and then scale it back for the verse.
5. It doesn’t get an audience emotionally involved. A song’s lyric needs to pull the audience into the situation, with the most emotional part reserved for the chorus. If your song lyric tries too hard to emote in the verse, it leaves the chorus with nothing to do. To get an audience emotionally involved means that you should limit you verse lyric to describing people and situations, and then open up emotionally in the chorus.

That last point is, in particular, an important one. Properly structuring the emotional layers of your song will ensure that by the time the chorus happens, you’ve got the audience in the palm of your hand.

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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