Songwriting tutorial 1: creating chords and melody

If you want to learn how to write a song, it’s not easy to know where to start. There’s plenty of songwriting information on the web, but a lot of it tends to be a big vague, dealing with overall structure and the process of getting ideas for music and lyrics rather than the actual process of writing a song.

That’s no surprise - explaining how composition works is pretty hard! This is the first post of four or five on how to write a song. It includes two screencast videos along with a text transcript of all the major points I cover. The videos in this post cover the basics of writing a chord structure for a song. Subsequent tutorials will cover topics like adding lyrics and putting together and arrangement.

Videos and tutorial transcript

There are lots of different ways to write a song. Sometimes a melody occurs to you when you’re in the shower or out shopping, sometimes you get an idea for a few bits of words attached to a melody.

With the song I’m looking at in these video tutorials it was more of a case of it emerging as I sat and played around on the piano. I put some chords together, developed a hook, added some more chords, and before long I had a good provisional structure for my song.

So here’s my first key point: if you want to write good songs, having a decent level of confidence with your instrument is a big help. If you can sit down and mess about on your keyboard or guitar without having to stop to figure out where different notes and chords are, you can work up ideas easily and get stuff down before your inspiration disappears.

In this tutorial and the ones that follow it I’m going to assume you have a basic knowledge of chords and music theory. If not, now is the time to explore Jamcast! and other sites like it to improve your understanding of the basics. You might write some decent songs if you only know a few chords, but knowing just a bit of music theory will take you a long, long way to a professional songwriting level.

OK, so like I said, what happened with this particular song was that I was sat down at the piano, playing around. Specifically, I was experimenting with ninth chords – a particular harmony we’ve dealt with before on Jamcast. I started off playing an E9, and began alternating it with an A9 that had an added 6th.

By the way, don’t worry if some of these weird and wonderful chord names are a bit new to you – the important thing is to create your chords on the piano and guitar. If you don’t know their names you can use all-guitar-chords.com or the Piano World chord tool to work out what they are.

So, having played around with my two chords I wind up with a hook. Here’s the chord sequence, set in 2/2 time because this is turning out to be a moderately-paced ballad kind of song:

E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |

Again, the rhythm I’ve got there is just the result of noodling around, having a little confidence on my instrument that’s born of some experimentation and practice.

Where do I go from there? Well, the song needs to move away from the initial hook and into a development phase, moving towards a chord like B major or B major seventh that’ll give us the feeling that we’ve reached the end of a phrase or section before resolving back on to the tonic chord, E major. If you’re not sure how this works, it might be worth checking out our post on chord resolution.

Again, it’s worth saying that this isn’t the only way of doing things. I’m building a fairly conventional chord progression here, based on movement from tonic to dominant and back again. If you were building up a song based on looped progressions, you would take a slightly different approach.

Anyway, to get towards my B major chord I need to play around with other chords in the key of E major. In this instance I’ve decided to get from my hook to my B major dominant chord via F#m7 and C#m7, like this:

[hook] → F#m7 | F#m7 | C#m7 | B |

Notice I’m sticking with B rather than going for a B7, which I think would probably sound a bit too cheesy and obvious.

A tune is beginning to emerge – there’s no real planning behind that, it’s just naturally growing under my fingers. Like I said, that’s not always the way I or any other songwriter develops melody, but it’s one way.

OK, so now I’ve got eight bars of chords, ending on a dominant B major – a ‘hanging’ sound that feels like it needs to go somewhere. I’m going right back to the hook, but this time I want to introduce some development. Development is a really important concept in western music, going back hundreds of years – and it’s as important in contemporary songs as it was in the symphonies and sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven.

In this instance, I’m going to add another eight bars that are a development of the theme in the first eight bars. Only this time, I’m not going to use that C#m7 chord. I’m going to go like this:

[hook] → F#m7 | F#m7 | B6 | Am6

Again, I’ve got the effect of a hanging chord – the sequence wants to move on somewhere, but instead of landing on B major I’ve brought myself down to Am6. Of course, the usual ‘A’ chord in the key of E major is A major, but it’s quite OK to slip in the minor, and it produces quite a distinctive effect.

I’ve now got 16 bars, and I’m going to keep developing the song. I wind up with 32 bars, a bit like this:

E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |
F#m7 | F#m7 | C#m7 | B |
E9 | E9 | A6/9 | A6/9 |
F#m7 | F#m7 | B6 | Am6 |
E9 | Amaj7+9 | F#m7 | F#m7 |
B7 | B7 | F#m7 | F#m7 |
B7 | B7 | E9 | E9 |
A6/9 | A6/9 | B6 | Am6 (…)

Two things worth noting:

First, 32 bars is a good, natural length for a chord progression. Other natural lengths are 4 and 8 bars (a lot of loops are 4 or 8 bars long), 12 bars (like a 12-bar blues), 16, 24 or 32 bars. All of those tend to sound like natural ‘finished’ chord structures. If the verse or chorus of bridge or whatever in your song doesn’t match one of these lengths, don’t worry, that’s absolutely fine – it’s just that you’ll often find your progressions falling naturally into the 4, 8, 12, 16, 24 or 32 mould because that’s how natural sounding progressions tend – more often than not – to wind up.

Second, I’ve probably got enough here to develop a complete song. I could think about adding extra little bits of bridges, or maybe a completely separate verse or chorus, but I think there’s enough interest here to sustain a song. If this chord progression is repeated four times – let’s say three times through with lyrics plus an instrumental, and we include a bit of intro and outro material, we’ll have something close to a four minute song.

OK, in the next ‘how to write a song’ tutorial we’re going to look at the chord sequence in a bit more detail, think about lyrics, and begin to sketch out our ideas in GarageBand.

Finally…

It’s worth repeating the idea that the whole process of writing a chord progression for a song is based on moving away from the tonic, to the dominant (or something like the dominant) and back again. We’ll go over this concept in a bit more detail in the next tutorial.

Update - April 2010

Quite a few people are asking me about the second part of this tutorial. It’s definitely on my to-do list, and I’m hoping to get it done soon. Apologies for taking so long, but I seem to spend my entire life shooting video to support my book at the mo. Watch this space!

Tagged as: chords, songwriting