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You've just finished writing a masterpiece song -- a sure hit. Your friends and family love it. You can hardly wait to demo it and drop it in the mail to a friend of your cousin's whose brother-in-law goes to a dentist who plays golf with someone who lives on the same block as the guy who cuts the lawn for Faith Hill. Are you ready? The more important question is -- is your song ready? As an unestablished songwriter, it's important to go over your song with a critical eye to see if it can be made any stronger before attempting to play it for industry professionals. In this article, we’ll look at five musical tips that could make the difference between your song getting recorded or not.
1) Don’t take too long to get to the hook -- You’ve probably once had someone tell you a joke that seemed to go on forever and you couldn’t wait for them to get to the punchline. Well, publishers, producers and A&R people won’t wait for your song to get to the punchline (i.e., hook or title). They’ll turn it off. A good mark to set for yourself is to try to get to the hook in under a minute. Over a minute and you risk making the listener wait too long.
2) Know how long your song is -- In today’s radio market, songs over four minutes are tough to get played. The majority of songs on the radio are under three and half minutes. The average song is around three minutes and ten seconds. This doesn’t mean you can’t write a song that is over four minutes long, but it does mean that it may be harder to get recorded and become a single.
3) Use a song form -- A lot of new songwriters would rather be "creative" and not write in a song form. The result is usually a song where the title shows up in peculiar and unpredictable places, resulting in an unmarketable song (it may be nice...but it’s usually unmarketable). Song forms are a tried and true way of devising music that is both memorable, yet interesting while leaving plenty of room for creativity.
4) Make use of repetition -- Repetition is a great musical device because listeners tend to remember the music easier if it contains repetition. A common mistake made by composers is thinking the music becomes "boring" when musical phrases are repeated. As a songwriter full of musical ideas, you can easily get caught up in trying to be too clever. This usually results in a song that has too many musical ideas and is harder to remember.
5) Contrast the verse and chorus -- In addition to musical repetition; your song also needs to have sections that musically contrast from each other. The whole point of having a chorus section is to have a section that sounds different from the verse. This contrast can occur melodically, harmonically or rhythmically (we’ll explore this in more depth in future articles).
While I don't recommend putting your song under a microscope during the writing of it, if you’re not getting the response you expected from a song, it may be time to look for a reason why. Maybe it takes too long to get to the hook, or there’s a lack of musical contrast between different sections. Keeping these guidelines in mind makes a difference.
Hope to see you on the charts!
-Danny
Danny Arena is a songwriter, composer and professional songwriting instructor. He holds degrees from Rutgers University in both computer science and music composition. He developed his songwriting workshops eight years ago at Billy Edd Wheeler's "Great Smokies Song Chase,” where he served as a songwriting faculty member. He is currently an Associate Professor at Volunteer State Community College in Nashville, a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University and a columnist for the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) Newswire and American Songwriter Magazine. Danny has been a guest lecturer at the Berklee School of Music, Belmont University and the NSAI Spring and Summer Symposiums. He is a regular songwriting instructor at the Nashville NSAI Workshop Pro Teaching series and the NSAI Song Camps. He has served as a judge in several national songwriting contests. Every spring he conducts his popular six-week songwriting "short courses" on Music Theory, Composing and the Nashville Number System. He currently is a full-time staff songwriter for Curb/Magnatone Music Publishing in Nashville and is also busy at work on developing his online songwriting courses. For more information visit his website at www.craftofsongwriting.com