3 Simple Song Structures For Beginners
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In this video, we're talking about 3 simple song structures for beginners. If you're a songwriting beginner and feel overwhelmed by making a song idea or song seed into a full song, this is the video for you.
We're going to talk through 3 basic song structures for you to know and try as someone just starting out with songwriting.
Transcript:
If you're just getting started with songwriting, then song sections and song structure can seem overwhelming. So let's talk about three simple song structures to utilize as a beginner. The first song structure to consider using is a song structure that is just verses or just A sections. There is no chorus, there is no bridge. It is just one section over and over and over. One reason to start with this is that this is just the easiest way to write musically, because all you need to do is figure out the music for one section, maybe one chord progression and one melody. Then from there, we just need to write different lyrics for each section. And this used to be a very popular way to write songs. Choruses haven't been around forever, much less pre-choruses and post-choruses. Even thinking about songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan, there is no chorus in that song. There is a refrain. A refrain is just one line or maybe two lines that repeats usually in a verse. So to stick with that example in "The Times They Are A-Changin'" there is a verse, and then the last line of every verse is the line "The Times They Are A-Changin'." So we can do a similar thing with our songs, but we don't actually have a true chorus. This is a great first way to write a song because it essentially means you don't have to worry about song sections, you just have to worry about writing what seems like a song section and repeating that musically and changing the lyrics every time. Now admittedly, this is a song structure that has fallen out of favor, but it probably is gonna come back at some point because cultures tend to react and then overreact to certain things. And right now we've been moving in a direction of smaller and smaller song sections where now we have not only a verse, but a pre-chorus and then a chorus and then a post-chorus, and then we still have a bridge. And at some point there's probably gonna be a reaction anyway, that and honestly, there's nothing wrong with having something different than what the norm is right now. Remember that at some point to have a chorus would be, "Oh wow, that's different than what everybody else is doing." Now every song has a chorus. So to go backwards and be like, "You know what? I'm gonna go back to basics and just have verses, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that and it's a great way to start." And as a bonus here, especially if you're recording or producing your own song, a great way to force yourself to get better at arranging and production is to have a song that is only one song section. Because now you need to figure out how to keep the song interesting for two, three, four minutes with there only being one section over and over and over. It's way easier to keep a song interesting when the actual music of it, the melody, the chord progression, all of that is actually changing up. Then it's just easier as an arranger to keep it interesting. You just have to not screw it up. But if you essentially have a 30 second verse and that repeats like five times to make it so that by the fifth time you're not like, "Oh my goodness, not again, please." That takes a lot of skill actually. So it's a great way to also work on your arranging and production skills. And even if you have no interest in recording your songs or arranging or producing your own songs, this is still a great place to start just because it is the easiest place to start where you don't need to really understand song sections. And it just is very simple from a music writing standpoint. But admittedly it is a little more difficult on the lyric writing standpoint. And that brings us to idea number two, which is a basic verse, chorus, verse, chorus structure. Now this is probably the easiest song structure of all, especially from a musical standpoint. And from a lyrical standpoint, it actually might be the single easiest way to write a song. This is almost certainly the easiest song structure to utilize for a truly modern sound. (Continued Here: https://www.songwritertheory.com/blog...)
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