I’m making this web site on a free website….uh….site. In setting up the pages, I found that it had some example blog posts. Once I publish this thing, I think they’ll still be on my site. I’ll leave them here for the moment, but one headline made me think of my own efforts to write a song.
I’m just a drummer. But I took guitar lessons years ago. My teacher was my old college roommate. He didn’t want to take my money and I refused to allow him to do his job for free, so we came to an arrangement – He’d teach me the basics in his last lesson scheduled on Fridays, and then we’d go out for beers together where I’d shout him beers until it was close to the price of a lesson.
Why is he telling me this?
The “basics” he taught me (and, bear in mind, I’m talking about pop/rock) were basic major and minor open chords and four barre chords: E shape, A shape, and the minor versions of those. The end of lessons (not the end of Friday beers though).
After that, my friend took me into the book section of the music store he taught in, and led me to The Ultimate Beatles Fake Book. It doesn’t have to be the Beatles book. Look at the photo – it should be a book that has the guitar chord graphs above the staff to make it easier to find the chords. His advice was to use this book to practice playing familiar songs and just get used to changing chords in rhythm.
Yeah yeah yeah…..I thought this was about writing songs.
Sure, of course. But we’re talking basics, and I’m letting. you in on my own path. If you have your own, then you don’t need to read this post. See, I wanted to be able to write songs so that I could be more autonomous, or contribute songs to a band. Bands are insanely hard to hold together, especially if you’re not the leader. But I didn’t know where to start and it occurred to me that I need to play an instrument that would make it easier to write songs than drums.
So now I could play guitar well enough to write songs. Great. That turned out not to be the hard part.
I still had some big questions. What should I write about? How do I start? How can I write music for a song without a topic, or lyrics for a song that doesn’t have music.
The first thing I did was try to write lyrics. I can’t even remember what I wrote about. You can probably already tell that I’m a bit long-winded. I tried writing lyrics and those turned into prose. Poetry at best. And if you don’t know the difference between poetry and lyrics, do a Google search. Good place to start is Richard Cory, both the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson and the song version recorded by Simon and Garfunkel. Compare those, to give you an idea.
Then I read an article by……I can’t remember. I’m really sorry. But the writer (Brian Eno, maybe? Frank Zappa?) had good advice, and it went something like this:
When you’re creating something (in this case, a song), you can, if you want, leave yourself open to the wide universe of possibilities. But for most people – probably almost all people – you actually need to start with a frame of some sort. One needs to give one’s self limitations first, and then create within that framework.
I took that to mean that I should start with a chord progression. From the chord progression, come up with a melody. How do you come up with a melody?
I have a few suggestions. The first, what I do, is scat sing over the progression. Or you can do a guitar or whatever solo over it. Whatever you come up with, when you have a sound you like, simplify it and BAM! There’s your melody.
Next, what’s on your mind? The first song I ever wrote, which is on the first record, was called Yaniré. I was waiting for my cousin-in-law and her partner to get to town (Puerto Vallarta, at the time). She was a day late, and I didn’t have much to do. I had come up with a pretty chord progression so I just thought of a story about Yani coming to visit me. That’s it. Look for rhymes while you’re at it, and pay attention to the meter and rhythm of the melody (of course, feel free to adjust it somewhat, but stay within the framework of the chord progression), but once you’ve said what you wanted to say, you’re done…..with your first draft.
Then go over the text and make improvements as you see fit. That method works very well for me, and in fact, I can now write a song on demand. As in, “Hey! You should write a song about blah-blah-blah!” I don’t mean that I can write a great song on demand. But I can write one.
That’s basically it. Sometimes I even just start with a title. I may not even know what it means. I might hear or think of a cool phrase. But that doesn’t really change the method. Guitar chords, melody, and then lyrics. Give that a go, if you are stuck with trying to write songs.
Now, does that mean you can’t just write songs on the drums? Not at all, and maybe I’ll make that a later post…..or maybe someone else can bring that up! Feel free if you have an idea; I’m hoping that this site/blog can be interactive.
Thanks for reading.
