Songwriting For Dummies by Dave Austin

Author:Dave Austin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

When people ask me what my forte is in songwriting, I tell them I’m a melody man. Writing lyrics has been a craft I’ve worked hard on and have steadily improved at. The longer I live, the more stories I gather and the more grist I have for the lyric mill. Melodies just tend to enter my head from nowhere. However, the more you listen to and practice writing melodies, the luckier you get at spinning gold from thin air. Just as no one has to teach a bird to sing, it’s much easier to write a melody than to tell someone how.

—Jim Peterik, performer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist for both Ides of March and Survivor, plus writer of hits for .38 Special, Sammy Hagar, and others

Understanding the basics of a melody

Analyze the melody of one of your all-time favorite songs. Get a hold of the sheet music, if it’s available, and learn it on an instrument — a guitar or piano would be ideal because you could then track both the melody and the way it works against the chords. Notice the intervals between notes, how many are jammed into one measure, the range of the notes (the distance from the highest note to the lowest), and each note’s relationship to the chord (in the key of A, the note A is the root or dominant note of the chord). If the chord is changed to D, the same A note is now the fifth of the chord (five notes above the dominant) and, therefore, takes on a whole different mood. Notice also how the melody shifts between musical sections and how the minor or major mode of the melody is used to emphasize the mood of the song.

As a songwriter, your goal is to develop

A keen sense of melody: The more you listen to and analyze great songs, and the more you nurture your own melodic sense through constant experimentation, the sharper it will become.

A method for creating a melody: Whatever works for you is the best way. It could be noodling around on an instrument until a melodic pattern emerges, meditating in a quiet place and letting the melodies find you, or creating beautiful melodies in the midst of total chaos. Discover what the wellspring of melodic ideas is for you and visit it often.

A way to collect and remember melodies: Whether you record your melodies on a pocket recorder (if you forget your recorder one day, try the quick fix of leaving the song idea on your cell phone’s voice mail) or notate them in note or number form in a notebook or on staff paper, it is vital that you formulate a way to freeze in time your melodic tidbits.

An ability to incorporate melodies into a cohesive song: The more you experiment and practice setting your melodies to music (finding just the right words that fit), the better songwriter you’ll become. Don’t be afraid to try a hundred different variations of your original

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