All songs are a mixture of things that we find familiar and predictable, with a touch of innovation and newness tossed in. The familiar things, as far as a listener is concerned, start with the very sound of the music: the sound is often what gives the genre away. “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting […]
You can spend a lot of time worrying about how to get a verse and a chorus to work well together, but don’t forget the other option: consider writing a song that doesn’t use a chorus at all. Sometimes the melody for that kind of song will end with a kind of repeating refrain, like […]
I don’t at all want to give the impression that the chorus hook is so important that it makes whatever you do in a verse unimportant. It most certainly is important that everything you write is something people want to listen to. But when it comes to standard pop song formats that use a series of […]
A pre-chorus is an optional section that sits between the verse and chorus. There are several reasons why you might choose to use a pre-chorus in a song, the most common reasons being any combination of the following: The verse is quite short. The verse melody is very repetitive. The beginning of the chorus is […]
Form is one of those words that can cause songwriters’ eyes to glaze over. It sounds like a term that’s only going to help other people understand what you’ve written, but not help the songwriter so much. Got a melody but don’t know how to add chords to make it come alive? “How to Harmonize a […]
At first glance you might think of a song’s refrain as simply being a shorter version of a chorus. But they’re actually quite different. Choruses are usually complete structures that can be repeated over and over easily, as we notice with final chorus repeats of most pop songs. But a refrain isn’t a complete structure; […]
