How To Establish Song Structure

Video Transcript

"Hi, this David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about studying song structures. Now as you write your own songs you're going to be looking for ideas in ways to build the structures of your songs. There are many different approaches to doing this. I think one of the most important things you can do is study other people's work. Much like painter's in school will study the paintings of great masters and look at the different details and different approaches done. You want to do the same thing as you write songs. When you have some time sit down with a recording or couple of recordings of songs that you really like, get a notebook like this and write down everything that happens in the song. Start with the intro, write down how many measures it happens for, write down the verse, write down how many verses there are when the chorus comes in, write down the bridge, write down the solo. Map out the entire song and take a look at it afterwards and say okay, what did these people do to make the song sound like it does? Once you've taken a look at other people's songs, then you can go to the next step and think about what you would do if you were that songwriter and how you would change the structure. Because you may hear a song that you really like, but then you may think to yourself gosh you know what if I could I'd go back and make the solo half as long, it's too long the out-tro takes too long or maybe we want another chorus here, maybe we can get a transitional bridge here. As you start to study other people's work and learn the techniques they used, you'll get to the point where you're ready to start coming up with your own techniques and that's really important, because if you don't look at what other people have done then you're really going to be restricted to your initial ideas. So by all means expose yourself to as many different songwriting ideas as you can. One last thing you can try too after you've been studying someone's song structure is to take a song that you've written, write out the structure the same way you did theirs, take a look at it and say hum what if I try what they did and switch your song a little bit that way. It's unnatural, it's not what you would instinctively do, but the only way you're going to build upon your ideas is to break with your initial instincts and try new things."