Songwriting For Beginners Pdf

[Jacinto Dieujuste]

Audienceslove them because they relate to them. As a songwriter, your job is to make old themes new, to make them your own by bringing in your unique perspective and by adding your own surprising twists.

One of my good songwriting buddies, Rodney Clawson, says that he never prepares ideas before going into the room. He might have titles in mind but he never tries to develop them more before he meets with other writers.

Other songwriters I know are very diligent about having their ideas organized and ready to go before they go into a room. They might have lyrics fleshed out, or cool riffs or chord progressions already in mind.

Or are you writing songs for yourself, your friends, or for more of an indie crowd? Neither is better than the other. But having a clear goal will potentially radically change how the song is structured.

But the writers use it as a device to catch your attention in that song. And it works in that situation. Most of the time, though, you need to find ways to sing lyrics the way that you would say them.

After writing songs and continuing to learn for around 20 years, I'd certainly do things differently if I had the chance to do it all again. So, in this podcast I'm going to walk you through exactly what I would do in what order if I had to learn songwriting from scratch. What I'd do if I wanted to learn songwriting but had never written a single song before. The ultimate "songwriting for beginners" guide if you will.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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