We will be using musical terms in this article because it is difficult to explain these ideas without them. Some will be explained but others are too complex to cover in a simple sentence. If you do not understand things like beats, measures, and time, you might want to do some reading first.
We will be using musical terms in this article because it is difficult to explain these ideas without them. Some will be explained but others are too complex to cover in a simple sentence. If you do not understand things like beats, measures, and time, you might want to do some reading first.
The most common song form is called AABA. This means that there are two “verses”, a “chorus”, and then another “verse”. In other words, a section that sounds one way, then another that sounds the same, then something different, then a return to the theme of the first section. There are many different forms however, so do some research to find which one is best for you. You can consider AAAA, ABCD, AABACA, etc. Or you can break from this entirely, of course.
For example, the chord progression for blues and jazz follow particular forms. Jazz makes heavy use of particular chords, so you’ll want to look up jazz chords before writing songs like that.
Write down how the notes change. How do they build? How does the key make you feel? How does the melody work with the lyrics? What’s good about the melody? What doesn’t work or what could be better? You can transfer these lessons to your own melodies.
If you don’t have an instrument, you can sing or use an online instrument. You can find many free pianos on websites and on apps available for your mobile device.
People who are naturally musically-inclined will often just come up with little bits of music like this, like how an artist might get an idea for a painting. If this describes you, keep a digital voice recorder or a notebook (if you know any kind of music notation)
You can find websites that play chords for you if you don’t have an instrument to work with or you don’t know a lot of chords. Try humming along to the chords and mess around with ways to make it more complex. Since you can only make one sound at a time, you’ll find you have a melody before you know it. Don’t worry about lyrics right away: professional musicians almost always write a melody first and use nonsense sounds in place of words.
A good exercise is to borrow from a different genre of music. Say you want to write a folk song, for example. Try borrowing from rap. Want to write a country song? Borrow from classical.
One of the best examples of this is the allegro con brio from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. He took just a basic motif and repeated it over and over again and created one of the most iconic pieces of music ever.
A bassline can be simple or it can be complex, can be fast or it can be slow. In some genres of music, the bassline follows a particular pattern, as in jump blues where it is almost always a scale of quarter notes. The only important part is that it fits with and supports the melody you have written.
Start by establishing what key your melody was written in. Certain chords sound better with certain keys than others. For example, if your song starts with a C, then a C chord will be a natural place to start. When you switch between chords will really depend on your song, but try to time the changes to significant sounds or changes in the melody. Generally, chord changes will happen on the downbeat, at or towards the beginning of a measure. You can also use a chord change to lead into another chord. For example, in a 4/4 song, you might have one chord on the downbeat of one and then another on 4, before leading into the chord change at one in the next measure.
