In this episode we are talking about what I would do if I had to start all the way at the beginning. If I was back to being 11, 12 year old me, and I knew that I had to relearn songwriting from scratch, knowing nothing at all, this is what I would tell myself to go learn in what order. Let's talk about it. [music]
Hello friend, welcome to another episode of the Songwriter Theory Podcast. I am your host as always Joseph Adala, honored that you would take some time out of your busy day to talk songwriting with me. If you haven't already, be sure to grab my free music theory guide. A few of the things we're going to talk about here are actually in that guide. That will be an easy way for you to learn what I'm talking about. Some of these steps, most of these steps are not music theory, but admittedly music theory is going to be a part of it because that was the most impactful thing that I learned in maybe my entire songwriting journey. The biggest A B switch of like, "Oh my goodness, I just opened a whole new world" was theory. Some of it is incredibly useful. That's the songwritertheory.com slash music theory guide.
So, the first step is really understanding at a high level three things, I think. One is keys, just at a high level, which we'll talk about in a second, phrases and song sections.
So, let's talk about keys first. When I say understand keys at a high level, I don't mean what notes are in keys.
I don't even necessarily mean some version of what keys are and why they work that way. I'm just talking about understanding that generally an entire song is written in A key.
So, you understand that a song might be in A major or it might be in B minor and that is a key.
And then understanding that that means that probably the song 99, maybe 100% of the time is utilizing notes that are in that key. Every chord is a chord from the key and every chord is a chord that is made up of notes in the key and every note of your melody is probably going to be in the key. Are there exceptions to this? Yes, of course.
There are many songs that are perfectly diatonic, which means literally every note that everything ever does in the song is a note from the key. Tons of songs like that, maybe even most.
But there are also a lot of songs that will have borrowed chords and a bunch of other things. There's way more you can do than just have every single thing in key. But when we're starting with songwriting, you don't want to worry about any of that because when you're a beginner, you have to do beginner things. And part of doing beginner things is just understanding that at first you're best served by just understanding, okay, if I write a song in the key of C major, what that means is that my melody, what I sing is going to be notes from C major. Again, you don't need to know what those notes are.
And also the chords are going to be chords from C major. We're seeing another way. The chords are going to be chords that are made up of notes that are the notes of C major.
You're not worried about memorizing what C major is and exactly the notes versus G major versus A major. Not worried about any of that. Is that useful down the road? Yes, for sure. Is it necessary now? Absolutely not. But at least if you understand what a key is and how it relates to a song that a song is usually in a singular key and the ramifications of that, that's the first step.
And maybe you take that for granted, but a lot of people don't start with that. And that's going to make music writing very difficult.
And it's going to make writing a melody, especially if they're not writing it with their voice, very difficult.
I know for me, I had a bunch of songs that I wrote that I just felt disjointed and I didn't know why. And then I learned about keys. And then all of a sudden, I never had that problem again, which is why this is the first thing I would have myself learn.
Number two is phrases. This I see come up a lot where people get really overwhelmed with phrases in a melody or specifically just with melody writing in general. And I think a lot of the times that comes from making melody more complicated in our heads than it really is.
And for sure, melody, I think is undoubtedly the most important part of a song. So I understand this sort of pressure that I think we all have on the melody because the song is going to live or die by the melody. Some people like myself, if the lyrics aren't good, I'm probably not interested. Ninety nine percent of the time I care deeply about lyrics. A lot of people also care deeply about lyrics. There are also a lot of people who don't. That's true.
And chord progressions, you know, there are some people that are extra obsessed with music theory and, you know, they're like, oh, they did this amazing thing with a chord progression. And they had this borrowed chord that they borrowed from the mixolydian mode. And then they borrowed it from the next chord is actually borrowed from the Dorian mode. Right. And you might not know any of the words I just said. That's totally OK. The point is that there are people that are really obsessed with like, oh, the brilliance of the musical composition of the chord progression.
And for every one of those, there's like a hundred people who wouldn't know that if they hit them in the face. Right. And literally every single one of us that does appreciate that is subscribe to Rick the Isle because he does a great job. He does a great job breaking that stuff down.
So. I think a part of the overwhelm with melodies is we sort of think of it just like my song has a melody and that's true.
But it also has song sections that each have their own melody. And that's less overwhelming. Right. It's pretty overwhelming to be like, I need to write a melody for my song. What do I even start? It's such a big thing. There's so much variety. There's so many different parts.
It's a little easier and we can sink our teeth into it a little bit more when we say, OK, well, really, I'm writing a verse melody for my verses and I'm writing a chorus melody for my choruses.
And you know, bridge melody for my bridge. If I have a pre-chorus melody for that, that's a little easier. But still a verse might be, you know, 30 seconds, 50 seconds, a whole minute.
That's a long time for melody. And that still can seem overwhelming. That's a lot of notes. Is it just random sequence of notes that just happen to be in key notes from the key that the song is in?
And if we just understand phrases at a high level, that sort of mysticalness goes away. So a phrase is essentially a musical sentence. It could be a way that you could see it. In fact, a phrase in a melody almost always correlates with a line. So if you think of how you would write lyrics out where it's, you know, one line and then the next line and then the next line, each one of those usually is the melodic equivalent is a phrase.
So you might have a really simple phrase.
Right? And that could be a phrase that happens maybe once or very often you would have a phrase pattern. Let's say your verses are in groups of four lines, then you would probably have four phrases.
Very often you will have a scheme like A, B, A, B or A, B, A, C.
And there are many others, right? You can have A, A, A, A or A, A, A, B. There's many different combinations to have, but very often a melody, like say your verse melody, let's say it's A, B, A, B. So maybe the A is...
Okay? And then the B is...
So then the verse melody, if you put it all together, if it's an A, B, A, B, would be... Right? A, B, A, B. Very often, that's all the melody is. It's phrases and then phrases in a pattern.
So we also could have A, B, A, C. That could be A. And then B, B. Back to A. And then now a C.
Now that was terrible because we're just making up on the spot. But you get the point, hopefully.
We just wrote a whole verse melody, or improvised, that one's I wrote, because again, terrible. But it's just thinking in terms of phrases, right? Musical sentence number one.
And then we could say, "Alright, let's have a B now."
That one, just one note different, right?
Down.
Or...
Alright, so...
A...
B...
A... Let's do B again.
Right? Or we could be like, "I don't really want A, B, A, B. I want A, B, B, B." Okay? Okay.
Now, with those specific phrases, I don't think A, B, B, B works. But it's going to depend, right? But it's as simple as thinking, "Okay, do I want groups of four or groups of three?" Those are the two most common, and then how to break them down into phrases. So just getting a rudimentary understanding of phrases, which by the way, I think what I just explained is good enough for now. If you understand the like, "Oh, yeah, okay." Basically, phrase musical sentence, more or less you could see it as if a singer is singing at the end of a phrase is when they would take a breath.
Breath.
Breath. You could think of it like that, or as the equivalent for lyrics, a line is a phrase and a melody. If you understand that, and you understand just the basic idea of it probably is some form of pattern, whether the pattern is just A, A, A, A, A for a group of four, or A, A, A, B, or A, A, B, B, or more commonly, A, B, A, B, or A, B, A, C, or A, B, C, D, you can have that as well.
So many different patterns to have, but you don't need to worry about that part. So much as just thinking of melodies at that atomic level, where you're thinking in terms of phrases in patterns. And once you have phrases and then phrases in patterns, now you have like a verse melody. And then you can have phrases in a different pattern, and there's your chorus melody. So just understanding melody at that sort of atomic level where we're thinking in terms of phrases, I think removes 90% of the overwhelm of melody. It doesn't relieve the pressure necessarily, because yes, melody is very important, but at least makes it simpler.
And then we have song sections.
Just a basic understanding of song sections, because I think again, we're in trouble if we kind of think of a song just as one unit, and we can't think of a song as a bunch of different parts. Imagine you're building a house, and you don't understand something like foundation versus framing versus I'm already the master of my construction knowledge, I might have even gotten something wrong.
I shouldn't have picked that analogy. But basically, somebody who builds a house can't just think in terms of house, right? They have to think in terms of the pieces that make up the house. It would be overwhelming to just constantly be thinking of the big picture of building the house, you have to be able to break it down into more manageable parts. Something that maybe you can do in a day is starts to pour the foundation. Right? You can't build a whole house in a day. We can't even really wrap our mind around that. You can sort of think of how none of us can really wrap our mind around infinity. Surprisingly, I had an argument about this with a friend. I'm like, no, like humanly, it's not possible to truly grasp infinity. Yes, we understand that it means go that way, and it never ends. But to truly be able to process that in our minds that we're not capable of that. Now, this is not that extreme. Right? But we want to put ourselves in a position where we are getting small enough chunks that are understandable.
And if we just think of something as a song, then it can be a mess. In the same way that if we think of a melody, that can be a mess.
So just understanding the basics of song sections. What is a verse versus a chorus versus a bridge? I would say that's like a bare minimum that we want to understand. And I'm not saying don't write a song until you understand. I'm not saying that. If you are listening to this podcast saying, I just want to write my first song, I want to get that first win. I don't know these things. I don't want to take the, I don't know, couple hours maybe to learn what I'm talking about. Maybe honestly, probably not even that long. I think most people already kind of know what verses and choruses are in bridges. Maybe not.
But I do think it's worth the time to dive into that just a little bit before you start writing. But if you want to write a song first and then dive into this before your second song, that could be a great way to go as well.
So at a super high level, a chorus is usually a song section that is the highlight of the song musically. It often is more thematic than it is story driven, but not always.
But if there's one part of the song that's not story driven, it's more just about a theme or an idea. It usually is the chorus because of course usually contains the main theme. The main theme is very often indicated by the song title and the song title very often is taken directly from the chorus. It's like the first line of the chorus, the last line of the chorus, probably the two most common. Sometimes it's like the second to last line of the chorus.
And I think I said this already, but usually the highlight of the song or the climax of the song musically.
And also usually the lyrics are the same every time. So a chorus is a song section that repeats both musically and lyrically. Once you write the chorus, it's sort of like copy paste across. Not always. Some choruses change lyrics.
I personally kind of like that sometimes. I think it could be a great way to go. But this early on, we're just treating a chorus in its most basic state, which is the lyrics and the music repeated.
A verse is a song section that every time it comes back, which will come back almost always at least a second time, sometimes a third time, once in a while, fourth or fifth time.
The music is going to be the same every time. So the chord progression and the melody. But the lyrics will change.
So verse one starts with the story. Then you have the chorus very often. And then you have verse two, which has the same melody and the same chord progression as verse one. But this time it has different lyrics.
Then you have the chorus again, which usually is the exact same lyrics, the same chord progression, the same melody.
And then if you have an alternate section that is not the same musically as a verse or the chorus, maybe it has the same chord progression as one of those, but the melody is different and the lyrics are different, that would be a bridge.
And again, this is a reductionist definition, right? You can have multiple bridges in a song, technically. There's many things we could get into. I've done whole podcasts just dedicated to a bridge. But at a high level, a bridge is sort of like an alternate section. It's a C section, if you will. It's like you have A, B, A, B, C, B, right? It's the one that is the change up.
If you just understand that, I think you're good to go. You're good to go. You don't even have to research any further. You should at some point, probably early on, get a little deeper than that. But the next thing to look into is pre-choruses and post-choruses. But if you understand pretty well what a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus, and bridge is, you're golden for a while.
And that brings us to step two.
Step two is a stock chord progression and probably four-chord song. So this is the point at which I feel like, okay, I at least understand when I say I want to write a song, I know what that means. The song is going to be in a singular key.
My melody is something that is made up of phrases, so that's how I would write my melody. And I understand song sections at least to a degree that I could write a song and know like, okay, I'm going to have verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. So I'm going to have verse, chorus, verse, chorus, end of song. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus. At least that understanding. Now it's time to write our first song.
Or write our next song. And for this, we're going to go on easy mode because we want to get a win. It's better to get a win early than not.
Because getting a win keeps you motivated. And a great way to get a win is to keep it simple. Your first song should almost definitely be a simple song.
This is how anything works, right? Whenever we learn anything, your first picture that you drew, the first painting you did, the first sculpture you did, you don't start with the statue of David, right? You don't open with that.
Or my wife got into crocheting in the last six months, I think it was maybe seven months last year, right? The first thing she did was a blanket.
You want to know why? Because everywhere said a great thing to start with is a scarf or a blanket. Why? Because they're very easy compared to a hat or right. My wife is working on a, well, it's going to be a gift.
I don't know if I should say it. This person doesn't listen, but just in case, she's working on like an animal, we'll say. It's a type of animal which involves curves and has to be shaped right and it has to be stuffed with stuff in it. You know, it has to look like the animal way harder than a blanket, which is a square that's flat. But the first thing you do is the square flat blanket or a not square, but rectangular smaller flat scarf. That's what you start with. We should do the same thing for songwriting. This is not the time to be thinking about all borrowed chords and I want to do fancy stuff with my music. Okay, now let's keep it simple this time. So pick a stock chord progression for your song and maybe consider doing what's often called a four chord song, which is one chord progression for the whole song. You can have your verse, your chorus and your bridge all built off of the same chord progression. Many songs do this sort of unfortunately. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with this for the record. Great. Some great songs are this. But we probably shouldn't default to that long term. But for your first song, to do something where, you know, you basically use one chord progression that's trying to ensure you're not writing a chord progression, you're just picking one that you know is well used. A 1564, right?
Which would be C major, G major, A minor, F major in the context of C major.
Picking a chord progression like that and saying I'm going to write a whole song off of that. So now I know I have my chord progression for my whole song. Now I know I need to write a verse melody and a chorus melody. Let's say I don't even have a bridge in my first song because keep it simple.
And now all I really need to do is write a verse melody and write the chorus melody both on top of the same chord progression because I'm doing the same chord progression throughout the whole song.
And then write the lyrics, which is not trivial and we're going to touch on that in a second.
It's a great way to set ourselves up for success. This is what I would have myself do. Early on I thought I tried to do way too much and I didn't have the knowledge to support it.
It's just going to be difficult to write a complex song early because we don't have the knowledge to do the complex thing. And I think we'd be better off doing a simple song because simple songs can be great as well. There's many songs out there that are great and simple, just like there are many songs that are complex and simple. So right from where we're at, embrace where we are.
So that brings us to step three, which is to start diving deeper into lyrics because maybe at this point we've written a song or two, but the lyrics probably are some form of mess. Maybe not. Maybe your first lyrics are great. Maybe you have a poetry background and therefore it came more naturally to you.
But for most people, especially because most songwriters are musicians that are like, I kind of want to write my own stuff. So music tends to come more naturally to your average songwriter than lyrics do because they're musicians at heart, not writers of words at heart.
So it's time to start diving a little deeper into lyrics.
And when I say diving deeper, I would say three basic things. One, meter, which is something that comes from poetry or just lyrics in general.
And then also storytelling, just a basic idea of storytelling, whether that be storytelling specifically in songs in the form of song outlines or song maps.
Or whether that be storytelling in general. I read a book about like the hero with a thousand faces, which talks about the hero's journey.
Or learning about who is it that has the story, I think story circle, the nine step story circle, Dan Harmon, I think it is. Stuff like that. Just looking into how do people construct stories? Because very often our songs will be stories and we can take and borrow those elements or even a three act structure.
Very often I'll talk about songs in terms of three act structure because sometimes I see a song as the chorus is the theme and then the first verse is the first incident or whatever that first act is called. I'm currently forgetting what it's called. The inciting incident. I'm losing the term.
And then the second act is called rising action. And then the third act is usually the climax and the conclusion.
That song where you have three verses in a bridge, let's say it's verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, that aligns perfectly to have your first verse be that that first inciting incident or whatever. The second verse is going to be the rising action. The bridge is usually goes bridge, third verse, chorus, usually in that sort of song structure. The bridge would be the climax of the song because it makes sense. It's a departure musically. So it's a climax of the story of the song, the musical climax, so probably in the chorus. And then the third verse is a great conclusion or a great epilogue, if you will. If the end of the conflict of the song is in the bridge, then you can give that. And here's what happened after in the third verse. It just lines up really well. Right? So understanding story structure can go a long way. But let's dive into each just very slightly.
First meter. I mentioned meter. Meter is basically just syllables and their emphases. That's all it is.
So understanding that there is a natural meter to every sentence. So let's just take the end of what I just said to every sentence. What are the emphases naturally occurring in that? In every sentence. Now I overdid it there, right? But try even saying those words with the opposite emphases. The... I just forgot. I just forgot what the sentence was.
Let's say it's for every sentence. I don't remember if that's what it was. I want to say something like that. For every sentence. That sounds weird. Right? Like that's not how humans speak.
It's for every sentence. For every sentence. For every sentence. Right? It sounds like I'm trying to do some horrible accent. Or I'm trying to do an accent horribly. Because that's not how we speak. That's not how the words work. Right? And all I did was change the meter, the emphases, within the words. The natural emphases of empty is M emphasized T not emphasized. Sentence. It's sentence. Right? It's not sentence. It's sentence. Or forever is for ever. The middle syllable is naturally emphasized. So understanding meter is just understanding that. And it's understanding that this usually is again going to be in patterns. You can see it the same way we just talked about melodic phrases. Right? That you might have a pattern like A B A C or A B A B. Very often your meter is going to be in patterns.
Or your pattern of emphases and syllable count. That is very often going to follow a similar pattern. A B A B. Right? You might have 8 syllables with 4 being emphasized. And then 6 with 3 being emphasized. And then 4 and then 3 again. That'll be A B A B.
So very often meter will follow a very similar pattern as our phrases will. And also just understanding that usually we want to match the natural emphases of the words with the emphases in the melody. So for instance if we did... That would work well with the 3 syllable word forever. Why? Because the emphasized parts of that 3 note phrase is definitely not this. This is emphasized. And then that is not as emphasized. So that goes well with forever. Right? But if we tried to match another 3 syllable word where the first syllable was emphasized with the last one it might not work. Or it just might not work as well. So usually we want to match the natural emphases of the word, the words with the natural emphases of the music. Because then they're working together rather than working against each other. So that's meter at a high level. And then storytelling we sort of already dove into but stories in general at least we dove into. The other one is song maps. A great place to start is just looking at some of the song maps or song outlines that are commonly used. For instance it is fairly common to have a song map where the past tense you tell the past in the first verse and then you talk about the present tense in the chorus. And then your second verse talks about the future that you hope for, the future that you dread, or the future that you think your current circumstances are going to inevitably lead to. And then other songs will instead do future in the first verse and then in the chorus present very often if the chorus is not just theme driven very often it will be present. And then in the second verse you actually go back to the past and say how did we get here? So you're talking about the hope you have maybe in the first verse and the second verse and then the chorus illuminated where we actually are. And then the second verse was like how did we get here? Like doing prequels if you will.
And then rhyming. And this is a maybe for me because I think rhyming is probably the single most overrated thing in all of songwriting because you can have songs that just completely abandon any form of rhyme and it's totally fine. Tons of songs do.
And if anything a lot of times rhyme usually ends up being cringy because people over rhyme. They just obsess too much with the rhyme and then they change their words just to fit some arbitrary rhyme scheme and then people can usually tell because it's usually a cringy rhyme that's like that's not really what you meant to say though. And just a friendly reminder your rhyme scheme should serve your song. Your song does not serve some arbitrary rhyme scheme. So never ever ever always throw out the rhyme scheme if it doesn't work for your song. Right? Just abandon it. It's fine. It doesn't. It's like the least important thing. Way more important to get meter right to say the words you need to say that the words match well with the melody. All of that is way more important than like oh I set up an ABAB rhyme scheme and this one time I did ABAX meaning like the last line just didn't rhyme with anything. Oh no, like no, who cares? Nobody cares. Nobody cares. That's way better than ruining your song by having some cringy rhyme that just didn't really work but you just tried to force the rhyme scheme. That being said is still worth learning a little bit about rhyming. Just understanding that not all rhymes are perfect rhymes. A perfect rhyme would be like night in light. Both the consonants and the vowel sounds at the end match. But there are other types of rhymes like family rhymes, consonants, assonants, and that's maybe worth just I wouldn't even say diving into. Just looking into for like 15 minutes. Just understanding that there are types of rhymes that can sort of give that feeling of rhyme without actually being a perfect rhyme which often can end up being cringy anyway especially if it's over used.
So basic understanding of rhyming could help too. Step four, upgrade your chords and theory understanding to write chord progressions rather than use stock ones. So at this point we have basically just been using stock chord progressions, right? Because step two was stock chord progression, probably a four chord song. If not, maybe something really simple. You pick one stock chord progression for your verse, another stock chord progression for your chorus.
But that's going to get boring. And it should get boring. If it doesn't get boring then I don't even know what we're doing. Because at some point, like, I don't think my wife has stopped making blankets yet with crocheting.
But at some point she's probably going to see that as like, I mean, you know, I knew it once in a while. It's a nice change up. But my wife, just like three weeks into picking up crocheting was already done with just doing blankets over and over and over again.
So we should probably feel the same way about chord progressions. Like, we use the same five stock chord progressions over and over for every single song. It just gets boring. We want to do something interesting with our music, hopefully.
So this is where it's time to evolve past that a little bit. And some basic music theory is going to help here. One thing we want to learn is inversions. Inversions make a huge difference in the sound. It's as simple as this is a C major chord.
This is a C major chord as well. But it's in first inversion instead of the normal root position with C major chord, C in the bass. Instead we have C major chord, E in the bass. Sounds maybe totally different as overstating it, but it certainly sounds different. In the context of a song that does not sound the same.
But it is the same chord. All of those were the same. This last one is just second inversion. But those sort of subtle changes in chords, just changing the inversion, makes a big difference, especially in the context of a song where the chord is going to be used over and over again. Or just in general, I think songwriting is a masterclass in understanding that details matter. And seemingly small changes very quickly add up to big changes. If you took your favorite song and just changed the inversion of every chord and changed nothing else, you would be shocked how different the song sounds just by changing the inversion.
There's a reason why people don't just do that. They play the song with the same inversion every time for a reason.
So inversions is the cheapest or, see another way, easiest way to get more bang for your buck with chords because you don't actually have to learn any new chords. You just have to know, okay, have the note in the bass, whether that's what the bass guitar is playing, or if you're a pianist, what your left hand is playing.
Just change that to another note from the chord other than the root of the chord. That's it. Simple. Then learning different chord types, right? Just slowly over time. And this is a key that we're going to dive into with step five, which is going to be the final step, which is really not a step so much as a what to do from here. But you want to grow as you go.
I think a mistake people, there's two mistakes people make. One is they get into songwriting and then they just stop learning. Any knowledge that they don't learn just from doing songwriting,
they're not interested in actually learning any music theory or learning anything about meter or storytelling. They just want to write songs. I think that's a mistake because there are some things that you're just not going to naturally learn just by doing. There are some things that you kind of need is maybe a strong word, but it certainly would be helpful to go get knowledge from someone who's already been through it.
Learn from somebody who's more of a music composer than you are that understands music at a deeper level. Learn from your poet friend or your friend who's writing a novel. They're going to have some knowledge for you that you're probably just not going to naturally get just by writing songs over and over again. There's many things you might not even know exist or possibilities out there until you go out and seek knowledge. But another problem and probably more common is people who are paralyzed by, "I don't know all the things so I can't write any song." I did an episode about this, or maybe it was a video, I don't remember, but fairly recently about no matter who you are watching this right now or watching that video then, you know enough to write your first song. Go do it. And I stand by that. You absolutely do know enough. I didn't say it would be a great song. It's probably not going to be your best song. Almost never is somebody's first song their best song unless they only write one. Heck, if you write five songs, I can almost guarantee you your first one's not the best one. Much less if you go on to write songs for years and years and years.
But a key is to get wins by actually writing songs. Learn by doing. That's the most important way to learn, but also to supplement that with learning.
And one of those learnings to do is adding chords to your chord toolbox as I have to refer to it. It could be something as simple as, "Hey, I just realized I only use major chords."
Let me just add a minor chord to my toolbox. Or maybe you already used major or minor chords, but you've never used a sus chord before.
This would be a sus two, or this would be a sus four. You can even separate those, right? First you're like, "Alright, let's add a sus four."
Which often is just called a sus chord. And then, oh, let's try a sus two. That's the other type of sus chord. Or about seventh chords.
Alright? Give that little jazzy sound. But don't add too many at a time. You can write ten songs with one new chord that you've learned.
Okay? I'm going to add a sus four chord to my toolbox. Write ten songs. Then I'm going to add a seventh chord to my toolbox. Write another five songs.
Then I'm going to be like, "Huh, I've never really used add chords." This would be an add two, which usually would be denoted as an add nine. Again, C major, add nine.
But just add chords to your toolbox slowly over time.
And then also learn how chords work in context of keys. This is the most important way to understand chords as a music composer, as somebody who's writing songs, who wants to write their own chord progressions.
I cannot recommend this enough. It makes songwriting more fun. It puts you in way more control over what you're doing with your songs.
This is where music theory is going to come in, though. And this is where the guy that I mentioned before is going to come in. It's just really important to get past, like, "Oh, C major is happy, and G major and C major work well together." That knowledge you can write songs with. For sure. And you should write songs with. But at some point it's going to be limiting, because that G major and C major work well together is a half-truth. It's like, well, it kind of depends on the context, and they can always be made to work well together. But if you're an E major, and then you just randomly do that, it's probably going to sound disjointed, because you just randomly change keys to an implied key of C major or G major when you were an E major.
You can do that randomly, and you can do that intentionally and make it work, or you can do it unintentionally and somehow make it work. But most of the time it's probably going to feel disjointed, and you're not going to know why, and you're like, "But E major chords sound good, and G major sounds good." But this is where a deep understanding of keys comes in, and where it can be helpful to understand things like, you know, in the context of C major, G major is a V chord. In the context of D major, A major is a V chord. And therefore an A major chord in the context of D major is going to sound the exact same as a G major chord in the context of C major, which is why you can transpose a song. If you have a woman singer, and she needs the song higher to perform it, you might transpose a song from, let's say, B major, which is where the guys sang it, to D major.
But the song doesn't really sound different. It's higher, but it doesn't sound different. Why is that? Because you transposed it.
So now every B major chord is going to be a D major chord. So in context of this new key that a song is in, the D major sounds the same as what the B major sounded like in the previous version, the male singer version.
This is why you can transpose songs, and it doesn't fundamentally change how it sounds. We could dive deeper into this, but we've talked about this at length, so I won't. But this is where diving deeper into understanding keys and chords in context of keys is so important. So important. It's going to take your songwriting to the next level. It's going to just be that mind-opening moment where you're like, "Oh, everything in music makes so much more sense now."
People don't understand it. So that's the last part of step four, step five, which I already alluded to and actually straight-up said. Grow as you go.
And there's many ways to approach this, but we could make it really simple. One way to approach it is, you know, once in a while asking, "What is the area of songwriting that I'm weakest at?"
If you're like, "Man, I feel like my melodies are weakest." Address that specifically. Learn more about that.
If lyrics are your weakness, learn more about that. Learn more about storytelling or meter or whatever part of your lyrics that you just feel aren't working. Or maybe even work on your vocabulary because you feel like you keep using very, just too basic of words and you feel like you need some words that have a little bit more gravitas and flair. Or maybe the opposite. You feel like you just have your dictionary is such that you feel like you can never think of another word you could use to mean the same thing. And sometimes you pick an overly complex word and sometimes it's overly simple, but you just don't have control because you just don't have enough words at your disposal, which you can also use thesaurus.com, which is a great tool for songwriting for this very specific problem.
But something else you can do is just ask, "What is something cool I've seen done in other songs that I haven't done before or that I don't understand?" Like, "Ooh, that sounded really cool in that song. Let me figure out the music theory of how they did that. What was that chord progression that I thought was really dope? What was it?" That way I can apply it to my own songs.
And the key here is what I was talking about before. You gotta learn primarily by doing, but you're also missing out if you don't supplement it by learning, by just learning.
You want to write more interesting chords in harmony? Dive more into music theory. People don't like hearing that, but that's the truth. That's the best, borderline-only way to get better at that. I mean, you could just practice more and more, but at some point the theory is just gonna make it way easier. You're gonna understand it way better if you understand the music theory. You don't have to ever take that step. You could write four chord songs forever, you could write songs off of stock chord progressions forever, but I don't know about you, but I don't want to write the most basic stuff over and over and over again.
I want to be able to have control over do I want this song to be basic or this song section to be basic in its chord progression, but then in the bridge I totally change it up.
If all you can do is the simple thing, then that's all you can do. That's just limiting. And less fun. And, I don't know. I feel like if I have to sell you on "someday don't you want to write more interesting chord progressions or have more control over the harmony of your music and be able to do whatever the heck you want musically?"
I feel like I shouldn't have to sell that. So I guess I'll just... There we go! Music theory is the answer. Or, a part of the answer.
Really, music composition is the answer and music composition, like a prerequisite to it, is understanding theory to a certain degree. And yes, of course, there's worthless music theory as well.
Want to write more engaging lyrics? Dive more into writing and poetry. Maybe vocabulary, as I mentioned previously. Want to write something more than just a chord progression? Maybe you want to write piano riffs that are interesting that aren't just a chord progression? Because, yeah, we can have a piano part that's just...
And we can jazz that up as much as we'd like, right?
Like, "Oh, I broke the chords up!" So it's a little more interesting, maybe? But I don't know, is that ever going to be as interesting as something like...
That has an underlying chord progression, but it's not just a chord progression. And that, to my ears, at least, is way more interesting than...
There's nothing wrong with that basic chord progression. For some songs, it fits perfectly. But sometimes you want something a little more interesting, a little more different.
And that might be in the form of a guitar hook, a bass line, a piano riff. Many different forms that can take.
Practicing, improvising on your instruments more is going to go a long way. Not to mention, another beauty of songwriting. I think I've done a whole episode on this, but I feel like I want to revisit it, because...
It could be overwhelming if you dive too deep too fast. But man, as you grow in songwriting, there are so many different depths that you can reach with different parts. Just in chord progressions, you can literally just use a machine and be like, "Give me a stock chord progression," and write your whole song off of that, where you didn't even write the chord progression. You didn't even choose the chord progression.
And you can write a song. Great. You also can go super deep and control literally every note or voice within your chord, where you're paying attention to exactly all of the different moving notes. Which is usually how a music composer would think of a song. Hans Zimmer isn't just thinking like melody over chord. No, no, no. He's thinking about exactly what instrument is doing what, why they're voiced that way. Right? Why is it that the top note of the chord is an E rather than a C, even though they're both notes in the chord? Things like that. And you don't have to ever reach that level. But man, is it fun. It's sort of like arranging. Essentially, if you're arranging and producing your own song, it involves more sort of musical composition skills, which you never have to do, but you get to do.
As you learn and as you grow. And it's so much fun. It makes it even more fun.
Writing a song should be fun at every level, but it's most fun when you can do the simple version or the complex version for everything. You can do simple lyrics. You can do complex lyrics. You can do simple music. You can do complex music. You can write it and record a song such that it's just you and an acoustic guitar, strumming chords and release it and be like, "Yep, awesome." But you also can do a whole fancy arrangement for your song with strings and maybe do a whole orchestra that you arrange for your song. And you can do that too. That's where you have the most fun, right? Because you are no longer bound by your limited skill or knowledge. And I know that may even sound design, right? You can literally make your own instrument. I've recommended this before, but I'll recommend it again. There's this great Hans Zimmer video breaking down how he made fake instruments basically. Like made up instruments for the soundtrack of Doom. It's awesome. I think it's a Vogue. I want to say it's a Vogue. Things like 10 minutes. Check it out on YouTube. Totally worth your time. Fantastic.
Even things like sound design from things like Star Wars or whatever, how they designed the sound of the TIE Fighter. Sci-fi is a great place to look for like, "Here's how they designed sounds." And we can do the same thing for music or look into EDM because a lot of EDM producers sort of, that's a part of their skill set that they almost have to have. For us as songwriters, it's kind of a luxury, but it can be so much fun.
So we can go on forever about all the depths you can get to. But these are the sort of things that you get to do over time as you grow as you go. You don't ever have to do this. You don't have to be overwhelmed by this, but it's so much fun to keep adding things to your toolbox that you're capable of doing that are a blast or can be a blast when you choose to do them.
Anyway, hopefully this was helpful to you. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to grab that Music Theory Guide that will help you with understanding chords in context of keys, which is non-trivial. It's not hard, but it's non-trivial. So be sure to check that out. SamuraiTheory.com slash MusicTheoryGuide. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for watching if you are on YouTube. If you enjoy these podcasts, be sure to drop a kind review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen. Helps me out a lot. I appreciate when you do that. Thank you to all of you also who leave kind comments and some of you have really nice emails. Somebody recently I mentioned that I was having an ear problem and PJ, his name is, who emails me with encouraging things all the time. So thank you, PJ. I appreciate that. But also, also just took the time to be like, hey, here's how I fix my ear. My ears are clogged. That's awesome. That's the sort of thing that legitimately brightens my day. I hope you know that that's the case. And many others of you do that as well. But to all of you, I probably don't say it enough. But thank you. I say it via email, but I'm saying it publicly now. Anyway, thanks so much for listening. Hopefully it was helpful. And I'll talk to you in the next one.
