Songwriters Discussion Room--to share thoughts, projects, etc. | Page 8 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

One thing I like to do when songwriting is find variations for a melody that I otherwise repeat throughout the song.  Usually I’m not making every iteration a variant — you need a baseline of repetition so that the variants can stand out relative to something. So for instance I’ve written a version of the old standard “Heart and Soul”

The baseline melody is:

C-C-C

C-B-A-B-C-D

E-E-E

E-D-C-D-E-F

G… C…

A-G-F-E-D-C…

Then I created new lyrics and had enough iterations of this baseline to accommodate a few that followed the traditional (above), while I also interspersed a few that had variations — 10 total, with 6 sung traditionally, and 4 with variants.

One variant for example:

C-B-A

C-B-A-B-A-G

E-D-E

E-D-C-D-E-F

G… C…

A-G-F-E-D-C…

You can see the variation only pertains to the first 3 lines, while the last 3 follow the traditional.

The way I came up with these wasn’t by a process of sitting down and saying, “I need some variants, how can I vary it?”  Rather, I would run the song (or parts of it) over and over in my head — sometimes away from my guitar, doing chores or taking a walk or whatever — until my own musical creativity just came up with variants, sort of just “bubbling up” often spontaneously.  Not all the variants came to me whole & intact: sometimes I had to tinker with a germ of an idea that I knew was good, but had to refine a couple of notes to make it sound optimal.

This isn’t quite a songwriter’s thought, but I didn’t want to create a whole topic around “Amateurs Playing Along to Pop Music Songs”.

Anyway, when I play along on my acoustic guitar to songs, I don’t try to copy or emulate the riffs or chords that the record is doing — I just like to make up my own riffs & licks to go along.

Now, many years ago I was different — I would painstakingly try to figure out what was on the record and try to copy it; but for some reason, I changed and no longer feel it necessary to copy.  I remember spending many, many hours trying to get down every last subtle nuance of James Taylor’s fingerpicking in Secret O’ Life and, to my OCD satisfaction, mastering it.  Now, I’m happy just to be coasting along with a more reliably grounded bass line.

Putting finishing touches on one of my songs, I have a repeated trope where I sing “baby!” sort of like someone would sing “oh yeah!” or “yeah yeah!”.  The “baby” gets repeated 6 times as it comes in a portion that is repeated 6 times. However, early on I realized I don’t want to sing the “baby” using the same notes all 6 times.  Then I hit on varying them every time.  So I’ve got a note to myself explaining (the chord is G major):

The 6 babies:

B—B

B—D

E—D

E-G

A-G

C-B-G

baby 2 spoons upward, notes B up to D

baby 3 goes down from E to D

baby 4 again spoons upward, E to G

baby 5 similar to baby 3 goes down from A to G

baby 6 fuses three notes, high C, down a half-step to B, then spoons downward to end on G

Two times in recent months I have found that I lost a song which I only had written down on paper (not transferred onto computer), and I hadn’t thought about those songs in a long time, much less sang them, in maybe a year or two.  So I had to reconstruct the lyrics (and remember a couple of chords).  One song was particularly difficult to remember, and I would just sing fragments of it in my head or under my breath at various times during the day, trying to relax my mind — and lo and behold, most of the lyrics came back to me!