A Guide to writing your first song

Shoutout to Ryan McGuire and Pixabay.com

Everyone loves good music, especially those compositions that not only have beautiful and lush orchestral passages, hard hitting beats or complex rhythms, but also those who have an intricate story and rhyme pattern behind, reminding us that being a good composer and being a good writer go hand in hand.

However, coming up with the next Hey Jude, NY state of mind or Purple Rain will not be a task that you can accomplish in just a day of looking at songwriting blogs, as there are near endless pieces of information and examples you can find about popular songs and how they were made.

But this doesn’t mean that you should study for months and years before you make your first songs, as the best way to learn has always been direct exposure. That’s why in this post I present you a comprehensive, simple guide to help you write songs in a matter of minutes. Let’s begin:

In this post you will learn about:

• Coming up with a song idea
• Structuring your song
• Different patterns and rhymes in songs.
• The use of literary devices.
• How to translate what you write into music.

Coming up with a song idea

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Every great Idea started in someone’s head, whether It was blue jeans, the Mona Lisa or Bohemian Rhapsody.

The problem with most writers and creative minds is that they think that everything has been done and that they have to reinvent the wheel to stand out from the crowd. However, this is far from the truth.

Almost every song that has been done reimagines old concepts that have always been present in life. If suddenly everyone became bored of cheesy love songs, 75% of the music industry would disappear.

Because of this, the greatest songs of all time don’t tend to change that much with regard to the topic they talk about, but they only look at it from different perspectives, adding the personality of the artist and the zeitgeist of the era to the mix.

So, If you want to be the 1.000.000.000 artist that comes up with a song about a breakup, go ahead and put your feelings on the paper/phone.

However, there might be times where you find yourself with a complete writer’s block, and this is normal. That’s why the first thing you should do is drop the expectations and second, to take a look for inspiration in other forms of media.

Look at other media

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Sometimes taking a breath of fresh air and walking while you take a look at nature’s beauty can bring the muse to your side and help you come up with a good topic.

See, when our brain is not focused intentionally on a task, It doesn’t mean that It stops thinking about It completely. When we are wandering around doing something that doesn’t require processing information, our mind begins to make connections between the data that has been consumed and It comes up with optimal solutions.

That’s why sometimes when you’re solving a complicated puzzle and you stop for a couple hours, some minutes after continuing you end up solving It, as your unconscious mind is providing you with the tools to do so.

Aside from this, listening to other sources of entertainment might bring you new Ideas and ways of looking at things that you might never have imagined before, igniting your creative spark. Things such as books, songs from another genres and movies can come handy.

Structuring your Song

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When coming up with a captivating song that can get listeners hooked from start to finish, Structuring is one of your greatest allies, as it ensures that you don’t waste a verse or make the track too thin or thick.

Structures can be vastly different between genres, ranging from common verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus in conventional pop songs to ones that don’t even have a chorus.

This is why you should take a look at how the greatest exponents organize their songs to make them so catchy, as It gives you a blueprint to follow when writing.

Here are some examples of the most common song structures and how/when to use them:

VERSE|CHORUS|VERSE|CHORUS|BRIDGE|CHORUS

Probably the most used out of all the writing formats, having a conventional start with the first two verses and then adding a bridge to the mix to push the surprise factor, leaving the listener craving for a resolution with a last chorus.

However, you can also use simpler variations like the Verse|Chorus|Verse|Chorus|Verse|Chorus where the edge will rely on the quality of the verses, hence why It’s so used in Hip Hop.

Songs that use this:
• Pharrel Williams – Happy

VERSE|PRE-CHORUS|CHORUS|VERSE|PRE-CHORUS|CHORUS

You can consider the Pre-Chorus as the lyrical equivalent of that section you hear before the beat drop in EDM, adding as much tension as It can to the track, making the release much more pleasing to the ear when the hook comes.

Some use them to add epicness to the song, some to make It sadder. However, the overarching concept you should know is that this can work as an “emotion amplifier”.

Songs that use this:
• Adele – Someone like You

VERSE|VERSE|BRIDGE|VERSE

Even if this structure is not used as frequently as the previous two, that doesn’t take away from how effective It is.

Not having a hook doesn’t mean that the songs that use this structure don’t have a recurrent element in them, opting for shorter recourses like refrains that repeat the title of the song.

This type of form shines the most in songs where the heavy duty is carried by the melody and instrumentation.

Songs that use this:
Billy Joel – It’s Still Rock and Roll to me
Pusha T – The Games We Play (Variation without the bridge)

Different Patterns and Rhymes in songs

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Once you have the soul and the skeleton of the beat, you need to fill the remaining parts.

In this equation you will find that not all rhymes are equal, as depending to the sound they make they will be categorized differently. However, that’s a topic we’ll explore in another post.

To convey your message you will have to use words in clever ways If you want to capture the audience’s attention. However, using the old boring patterns where you only rhyme the last word of every line might not cut It.

That’s why I present you with a series of rhyme schemes you can implement, not only to add variation to your pen game but also to have expectations in the palm of your hand while controlling your listeners’ emotions.

ABAB Scheme:

Here you take a quatrain (a set of 4 lines) rhyming the 1st and 3rd line at the end, while also rhyming the 2nd and the 4th.

You use this scheme to bring a sense of stability to the song, as It makes the 4 lines feel like a whole unit, not a set of two couplets that complete themselves.

ABBA Scheme:

Also known as an enclosed rhyme or Petrarchan Sonnet, here you rhyme the 1st and 4th lines of your quatrain while internally combining the 2nd and the 3rd.

This is another way of establishing originality in your lyrics as It is not so commonly used as the AABB or AAAA patterns.

XAXA Scheme:

Maybe a rhyme scheme that is not used as frequently. However, this can bring a lot of authenticity and surprise to your writing.

In this form you only rhyme the 2nd and 4th lines, while leaving the 1st and the 3rd without rhyming (Hence the X).

You can also invert the sequence and make an AXAX scheme, rhyming only the 1st and the 3rd line.

Now that you know how to come up with the idea for your song, how to structure It and some rhyme schemes you can use, here It comes the content of your verses, where I’ll explain you how you can add the poetry to your wordsmith arsenal:

Literary Devices:

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The reason for why I’ve been promoting the use of literary devices since the previous article is because of the potential they can have to make your language richer.

From saying that the teeth of your s/o are a set of shiny pearls to comparing marriage to skinning yourself alive with a nailclipper, the use of a good resource to make the listener empathize and visualize the scene come handy in every situation.

Here are three of the most used literary devices in literature/songwriting:

SIMILE

One, If not the most popular literary resource, used in your day to day whenever your prison cellmate says you look “Thicc like a bowl of oatmeal” or whenever you hear “Hot as Hell”.

In essence, a simile is just a comparison of two elements, whether they are people, objects or situations, comparison that is introduced using the words “like” or “as”.

Examples:
America is like a matchbox at the side of a gunpowder keg

METAPHOR

Like the SIMILE, this rhetorical figure is used to convey a relationship between two terms that are not related. However, the difference with regard to the simile is stated by the fact that the metaphor doesn’t use auxiliary words (Like or As).

The main use of the metaphor is for aesthetical or enhancement purposes, as It depicts that two things not literally similar are “equal”.

Examples:
Love is a battlefield – Love is not literally a battlefield but It can be seen as one.
The world is an apple.

HYPERBOLE

This figure of speech can be depicted as the extreme exaggeration of a particular situation or action.

Examples:
So hungry I could eat a horse.
It’s raining cats and dogs.

How to translate what you write into music

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Depending on the artists, you might find different methods on how to approach songwriting and recording, where some of them write while the beat is playing, others begin to freestyle/scat over It and even some compose the instrumental from the lyrics.

However, the most common out of these three is the old writing with the beat method, where we grab a pen and a pad or our phones and we begin to write, first creating a rough draft and then editing until we’re satisfied with It.

As easy as this might sound, one of the main difficulties you’ll find when songwriting will be translating your words into music, where you’ll struggle finding the pockets to create verses that are both melodic and rhythmic.

That’s why one of the techniques I recommend you to use is to first figure out the beats and bars in the song. For this, you just have to pay attention to the part where the kick/toms and the snare/clap hit or just at the general groove of the song (The rhythm that you create when bopping your head).

Since the concepts of time measuring and following the rhythm are hard to explain in a written article with no sound, here I leave you with two videos you can use to get accustomed quickly:

As you might see, writing a song doesn’t have to be a hard task, as you just need to have basic knowledge of writing and literature coupled with a defined idea to come up with a captivating work of art.

That being said, the only thing that will turn you into a master songwriter will be constant repetition and feedback, which, when combined with the right attitude, will make you enjoy both the process and the outcome.

I hope that this article could have been of help to you, bringing you a comprehensive guide on how to write your first song and put It into music so you can make a career out of your art. Thank you for your support and good luck!

Pages used for research:
https://www.careersinmusic.com/song-ideas/
https://www.careersinmusic.com/song-structure/#:~:text=Never%20stop.-,Verse%20%E2%80%93%20Chorus%20%E2%80%93%20Verse%20%E2%80%93%20Chorus,%2DChorus%2DBridge%2DChorus