How Do You Get Past The First Section Of A Song?

[RTLDan]

Hello Comrade's!

This is my first post on this forum. I'm hoping to learn a lot from everyone here. I realize this question

has probably been asked before in one form or another, but I'm going to go ahead and ask it anyway...here we go!

In my songwriting life I often come up with some great parts...maybe I've got a whole musical verse figured out, or maybe it's a chorus.

In any case, what's happened is I've realized I have a huge library of song "starts" and very few finished products. This is with

the music by the way, not so much the lyrics. You could call it writers block and we could talk about techniques for getting over that... but what I am really interested to know is how do you personally move from a single idea (for example, a completed verse section)

to a finished product? What techniques do you use to keep moving from verse, to chorus, to bridge, etc... to get the structure down?

I find that after I've got a part figured out, I end up just playing it over and over again looking for a way to move into the next section

and somehow I never seem to move out of what I've already written...

Alright ladies and gentlemen...fire away, or else maybe link me to another post?

Thanks in advance!!

-Daniel

Edited October 7, 2010 by RTLDan

[Coises]

In my songwriting life I often come up with some great parts...maybe I've got a whole musical verse figured out, or maybe it's a chorus.

In any case, what's happened is I've realized I have a huge library of song "starts" and very few finished products. This is with

the music by the way, not so much the lyrics. You could call it writers block and we could talk about techniques for getting over that... but what I am really interested to know is how do you personally move from a single idea (for example, a completed verse section)

to a finished product? What techniques do you use to keep moving from verse, to chorus, to bridge, etc... to get the structure down?

I find that after I've got a part figured out, I end up just playing it over and over again looking for a way to move into the next section

and somehow I never seem to move out of what I've already written...

What I do:

1. Let it be. Just let the verse and refrain really be one long verse (whether you call it a verse or a verse+refrain) in which the last few lines are the same, or nearly the same, in each verse; or break with traditional structure and don’t have a refrain at all.

2. Change the timing or chord structure of one part and see where it leads to develop another — for example, if the refrain moves fairly quickly, try doubling the length of all the notes and see if working with that leads you to a verse. Substitute minor chords for majors and see what happens. Switch around figures like ascending scales, descending scales and jumps.

3. Combine two different tunes that share the same rhythm and general feel.

Some examples in my songs:

Thru Those Eyes: 1 (last 3 lines of each verse serve as refrain), 3 (instrumental bridge)

Heartbeat: 3 (intro, instrumental bridges and the end section are one tune, refrain is another), 2 (verse was derived from refrain)

Don’t Get Your Hopes Up: 1 (last 2 lines of verse serve as refrain), 3 (vocal bridge), 2 (instrumental bridge)

Meet Me in the Sunset: 1 (no refrain, though the repetition of “Meet me in the sunset” at the beginning of each verse gives continuity), 3 (instrumental bridge)

Cinema: 2 (the refrain came first, then I forced myself to play it without the distinctive “out-of-key” chords, which quickly led to the verse)

Miss Me for a While: 2 (the refrain came first, then I slowed it down to get the verse started)

[RTLDan]

Coises,

Thanks for your reply!

I really appreciate your advice...and I really liked your work! Especially 'Don't Get Your Hopes Up'.

I'm going to try some of the things you suggested next time I get stuck.

Anybody else have a specific way they like to work a fragment into a whole song?

Thanks!!

-Daniel

[Steve]

Have you tried using some of your other fragments? Try changing the key you're working in to get different phrasing of chords.

[MikeRobinson]

One strategy that seems to work well is called, "theme and variation." Now, at the risk of having the music-professors among us throw rotten apples at me, I'd say that you can think of this as: "First, do something. Then, do the same thing again, only different."

Now, having fiddled around with that notion for a little while, try something else. Take another one of your existing set of ideas and ... drop it in. Maybe you've never associated the two before, but if they're in the same key (or a nearby key) and similar in rhythm and so on (or... can be made to be), well, "What the heck? Let's try it." (After all, the worst thing that could happen would be that you decide that it's a "clam" and so . . . you just pick another one of your existing brainstorms and experimentally drop it in.)

Now, try a little variation on something, and drop that in.

"Something smells funny?" Well, (after making sure that you didn't leave something on the stove...) switch a few of the sections around. Or something.

"And so it goes."

You might think that you're "just (!)ing around," but you're really not. As they say, "for quite some time before 'the lightning strikes,' you were probably playing around with sparks."

Honestly... that is how the creative process works, whether you are writing music or something else. There are a lot of "rough drafts," and a fair amount of experimentation in which you have no idea what's going to work. (You literally might not know until you actually hear it ... and when you do, you just might be mightily surprised, yourself.) You might go through several revisions. The peculiar thing about "all that work" is that, when you're finally satisfied with your new baby ... the "labor pains" that produced it are totally invisible. As though they didn't happen, and/or were completely unnecessary. You just can't explain the necessity of it (or the difficulty of it) to your spouse, your family, or (you hope) your crowds of adoring fans.

Uh... scratch that last bit... stars may have to deal with the "crowds of adoring fans," but the songwriters (who wrote their stuff!) never do.

Now, P.S.: As you are working through this stuff, don't actually throw anything away. Disk space is cheap; pencils are even cheaper; notebooks are small and bookshelves are big. If you don't like something, neatly cross it out and, instead of crumpling it up and throwing it into your (real or virtual) trash-bin ... put today's date on it, and file it. You just might get your best sources of future inspiration from that "trash notebook." (In any case: "you created it, therefore, it's worth keeping. If it was worth your time then, it still is.") When the ideas absolutely aren't coming, spend half an hour or so poring through the stuff you threw away. As you work through a piece, trying different things, keep a notebook handy, and keep a tape-recorder (or iPhone "voice memo" or something) running all the time.

Edited October 10, 2010 by MikeRobinson

[RTLDan]

One strategy that seems to work well is called, "theme and variation." Now, at the risk of having the music-professors among us throw rotten apples at me, I'd say that you can think of this as: "First, do something. Then, do the same thing again, only different."

Now, having fiddled around with that notion for a little while, try something else. Take another one of your existing set of ideas and ... drop it in. Maybe you've never associated the two before, but if they're in the same key (or a nearby key) and similar in rhythm and so on (or... can be made to be), well, "What the heck? Let's try it." (After all, the worst thing that could happen would be that you decide that it's a "clam" and so . . . you just pick another one of your existing brainstorms and experimentally drop it in.)

Now, try a little variation on something, and drop that in.

"Something smells funny?" Well, (after making sure that you didn't leave something on the stove...) switch a few of the sections around. Or something.

"And so it goes."

You might think that you're "just (!)ing around," but you're really not. As they say, "for quite some time before 'the lightning strikes,' you were probably playing around with sparks."

Honestly... that is how the creative process works, whether you are writing music or something else. There are a lot of "rough drafts," and a fair amount of experimentation in which you have no idea what's going to work. (You literally might not know until you actually hear it ... and when you do, you just might be mightily surprised, yourself.) You might go through several revisions. The peculiar thing about "all that work" is that, when you're finally satisfied with your new baby ... the "labor pains" that produced it are totally invisible. As though they didn't happen, and/or were completely unnecessary. You just can't explain the necessity of it (or the difficulty of it) to your spouse, your family, or (you hope) your crowds of adoring fans.

Uh... scratch that last bit... stars may have to deal with the "crowds of adoring fans," but the songwriters (who wrote their stuff!) never do.

Now, P.S.: As you are working through this stuff, don't actually throw anything away. Disk space is cheap; pencils are even cheaper; notebooks are small and bookshelves are big. If you don't like something, neatly cross it out and, instead of crumpling it up and throwing it into your (real or virtual) trash-bin ... put today's date on it, and file it. You just might get your best sources of future inspiration from that "trash notebook." (In any case: "you created it, therefore, it's worth keeping. If it was worth your time then, it still is.") When the ideas absolutely aren't coming, spend half an hour or so poring through the stuff you threw away. As you work through a piece, trying different things, keep a notebook handy, and keep a tape-recorder (or iPhone "voice memo" or something) running all the time.

Well said Mike!

Especially the labor pains! I know that to be true with some of the projects I have finished. I can't remember the pain of working on them, only

revel in the satisfaction of having completed it.

I have an extremely hard time settling on any one idea...I'm afraid of commitment!! Which I'm sure plays no small part in my endless starts and rare finishes.

Anybody have a mental trick they use to help make a final decision about a lyric or a chord or arrangement, or a whatever it might be?

The possibilities of the creative process are...unlimited. That's the hard part!

I know questions like these have probably been asked to death, but thank you again for all your helpful suggestions!

-Daniel

[MikeRobinson]

Y'know, Dan, the beauty (and, the curse) of "this creativity thing" is that it is a choice, and one that is completely up to you, the composer. There are no hard-and-fast rules, although we do have the comments and suggestions made by the many other people who have followed this same pathway over the course of thousands of years.

First, you come up with ideas ... no one really knows quite where they come from ... and you write them down or record them (or else they slip away). In time, you accumulate "a whole bunch of random snippets," and you just sit down and try to craft them into something bigger. That is where the choosing begins. And, that is where a whole lot of pure experimentation begins. You really don't know where you will wind up -- you will be genuinely surprised, much more often than not.

I seriously think that there is a whole lot to be said for ... "write each one of the phrases out," using a music-composing program like MuseScore (http://www.musescore.org ... most-excellent, and free!), or some other music-word-processing software ... and then, "copy and paste." Shuffle them around, swap them into various combinations, save copies of whatever seems to have some promise, and then just keep at it. (It is, as we geeks would say, a "breadth-first" approach, a "voyage of discovery," not a "depth-first" pursuit of an intended goal.)

There are "things that you can try." We know that the ear likes "repetition, but not too much, and variation, but not too much." The ear is very sensitive to hearing again what it remembers hearing shortly before, and usually finds the experience pleasing. Most of all, there is what you find to be "pleasing."

Gradually, you start zeroing-in on something that you think really sounds good, and that's when you try to apply more craft to it. It's the point where your "composing" starts to drift toward "arranging," and that is a form of creativity also, but "of a different sort." (I am, even as we speak, re-reading John Mark Piper's article, Adding Color and Richness to Common Chords, on this very web-site, and cursing that I did not pay more attention in music-theory class.)

Eventually, you "finish it," which is to say, you decide to stop working on it (for a while, at least). What's left is the product of the myriad decisions that you accepted.

If you took my advice, though, and "kept all of you lab-notebooks," then every one of the decisions you didn't accept [this time...] are still around, too. When you change things, and replace them, don't actually destroy them. I even do that line-by-line or phrase-by-phrase in the music software, keeping many different versions of the same idea in the same [scratch...] file from which I'm copying. ("It's only ones and zeroes, and we have room for hundreds of billions of 'em...")

Any song can be re-worked, at any level, at any time. You can "improv" against a line in a fake-book. You can re-arrange or re-orchestrate an existing melody. You can add to it (e.g. Paul Simon's additions to Scarborough Fair.) You can come back to your own work, on a different day in a different light, and say, "hmm... let's try this instead..." It's never truly finished.

Edited October 10, 2010 by MikeRobinson

[RTLDan]

Mike,

Thanks for taking the time to respond! A lot of forums would be much harder on someone asking

the type of question I asked! Your response was very enjoyable and educational!

I've already begun downloading MuseScore and I'm going to try what you suggested! Sounds like

a really cool way to get the brain permeating on some music ideas.

Thanks again!

-Daniel

[MikeRobinson]

Mike,

Thanks for taking the time to respond! A lot of forums would be much harder on someone asking

the type of question I asked! Your response was very enjoyable and educational!

I've already begun downloading MuseScore and I'm going to try what you suggested! Sounds like

a really cool way to get the brain permeating on some music ideas.

("A lot of forums" are managed by clods.)

The thing I like about it (full disclosure: I am a computer geek who writes software for a living ... I actually enjoy it ... run for the hills as fast as you can ...) is that it moves you above and beyond "your music lessons." Although I am an earnest player, I am not a particularly outstanding one. When I try to make my fingers do what my mind imagines, well-l-l-l, let's just say that my third finger sometimes seems to have something (very unmentionable) to say to me.

But, since I am more-or-less in the business of making computers do what people by themselves cannot, I somehow manage to write music that I cannot perform... but that a digital computer can perform in my stead. I have at my disposal a "music word-processor," an unlimited supply of paper, and an unlimited storage place in which to "throw away" (and yet, never actually lose) a mountain of discards. And if I want to put together a score for an orchestra and hear more-or-less what it might sound like when played, I can. (P.S. It sounds terrible. I have no idea ...yet... how to write for an orchestra! But I've got one, nonetheless.)

Even though I do not (appear to) possess the mechanical aptitude to go straight from "an idea in my head" to "a sound in my ear" by means of an instrument in my hands, I have found a way to approximate it. I can "write it down" (a visual act...), press the 'Play' button, and hear what I have just written be "perfectly" performed by the computer. (P.S. It sounds terrible. I don't know ...yet... what to tell my players to do. But, I don't have to pay 'em union scale, either!)

I know that a computer "performance" in this case is only a stand-in, but I also know that I am still just a hobbyist (albeit a very serious one). I live very close to Nashville and I have witnessed what these music professionals are capable of doing with a musical score. I am hopeful ... not for fame, but merely to interest them and to be ready with work that is competent. (And, y'know, even if that day never comes, I genuinely enjoy listening to my own work, and maybe that says a whole lot of good things right there. It's extremely cool to be able to do that. "We live in interesting times.")

Am I having a helluva lot of fun with this, "regardless?"

Edited October 19, 2010 by MikeRobinson