Embrace the Craft and The Chaos
It is vital that you leverage and enjoy the interplay and balance of the two opposing forces:
- Learning as much about music theory and craft and "rules" as you can and learn how things "should" be done
- The randomness and chaos of: "I have no Idea what this is but damn! I love how it sounds!"
Life is best when Chaos and Order can play together
Order of The Song
The order in which a song is written has nothing to do with the order in which the sections of the song are performed.
You can write the song in the following order if you wanted:
- riff
- chorus
- verse
- bridge / middle
- intro / outro
Rember Contrast and Continuity
Keep something familiar to stitch the song together, yet contrast the sections enough to give the listener a break from monotony.
Remember The Greeks
The Chorus was the part of Greek Theatre where a group would sing the gist of what's going on. Remember that when writing your choruses:
- This is where we all want to sing together, make it so they we can.
- This is where the big idea, theme, and what you are trying to say with your song goes
A Song Is Not Its Arrangement
The bare minimum or essence of a song is:
basic structure,
lyrics, and melody
A lead sheet is a nice example of an artifact of ‹pure song essence›
What each instruments plays is the arrangement. One song can have many different arrangements.
Get To Singing Quickly
Don't get caught up in the instrumental options before the place for melody and vocals are made. So get to singing and words as soon as possible. They can even be made up gibberish words for the first draft.
Make Your Mistakes Quickly
Instead of taking forever to craft the impossibly perfect "only version" - quickly make drafts and share them with your co-writers - then if there is feedback to change - quickly iterate - if not - hey it's done!
Great Songs Are Rewritten
So don't wait: get that first draft together quickly and then iterate later- so feel free to throw in placeholders to make sure you get to your first draft quickly.
When Arranging Be Aware of Density
Choruses should tend to be denser than verses
The whole song should gradually get denser, although there may be a section that is a bit sparser in order to make a final section sound HUGE!
A couple ways of making things less dense:
- Reduce the number of instruments
- Reduce how much each instrument plays
- Both of the above
One approach is to arrange "backwards" the most dense version (the last chorus) first and then thin parts out and lay them out in the reverse song order ( unless you want the most sparse to be the penultimate )