WRITING
James Linderman teaches guitar and piano and coaches songwriting to students and songwriters all over the world. He is also
an academic ambassador to the Berklee School of Music. For more information, contact him at [email protected] or
visit www.jameslinderman.com.
By James Linderman
Song Design
A
s I was writing my newly-released Song Forms for Songwriters
workbook, I started to draw parallels between the crafting and
manufacturing of a song and the crafting and manufacturing
of other artistic and non-artistic consumables.
As I did my research, the two words that kept appearing were “ab-
straction” (which involves creating a version or illustration of something
that only shows a particular part or feature of it) and the word “design.”
I certainly knew about sound design since I had colleagues who
worked in that field, but I was not sure I had ever heard the term “song
design” and I began to see that this might be the name for the kind of
work that would allow those of us who write songs to create better ones.
Form
Of course, form is an essential element of any kind of design work and
since I had just spent the last 10 years analyzing and compiling 500 of
the most successful and iconic song forms for my book, I felt like I was
practicing and studying the foundations of song design already.
Of course, classical composers completely understood the impor-
tance of compositional form. They wrote menuettos, sonatas, and fugues
and poured their creative choices into these pre-designed frames. Writ-
ing to a form like a menuetto comes with some rules and stipulations
but it is surprisingly liberating since the writer can then focus on the
expressive elements and the structural decisions look after themselves
since they are pre-determined.
First and foremost, to be considered a menuetto, the composition
must sound like a menuetto. How the composer innovates their own
creative elements into it cannot be so vast that the listener can no longer
identify the form. For instance, it must be in 3/4 time and, historically,
people had to be able to dance to it with a series of small steps. A tra-
ditional menuetto is 32 bars long with an AABB form. See “Menuetto
in C Major” by Mozart.
Within the restrictions that come with writing to a form, it is then
essential for the creator to make a brand new work and not have their
music just mimic the examples that preceded it. Everyone who writes
music has a responsibility to move the art form forward. It is what sep-
arates those who paint, from those who paint by numbers.
In our day and age, you would get the impression that form is not an
essential part of the songwriting process. To create a commercially suc-
cessful song, you do not need to understand, or even pay any attention
to song form. I meet songwriters all the time who cannot distinguish
their verses from choruses and did not realize that they were creating
their own song form as they went along. The downside to this kind of
writing is that songs that do not have a strong, reliable form, no matter
how instantly popular or immediately successful they are, always die
as quickly as they rise.
58 • C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N
The urban dictionary refers to these kinds of songs as disposable
music – music that listeners find instantly appealing, but will abandon
for their next musical infatuation, sometimes within days of the first
listen. How commercially successful or popular these songs get before
they disappear obviously varies greatly, and the study of that trend is
not the focus here.
In Practice
Since my new book could be considered a design catalogue for
chord progressions, let’s look at a small section of the template fea-
tured on the second page. It is in the key of G and in 3/4 time.
The templates in the book display the sections of a song: the intro,
verse, chorus, etc., with boxes representing bar lines like this:
Intro
G Em Bm
G Em Bm
G Em Bm
C Am
C Am
G Em Bm
D F
G Em Bm
The chords displayed in this eight-bar intro are options so the song-
writer can choose one chord from each bar and determine if, within
this very stable and reliable form, they can find a pattern that inspires
a song.
That song might look like this:
Intro
G
G
Em
C
C
G F
G
C
Em D
Em
Another version could look like this:
Intro
Em
Em
Bm
Am
If you listen closely, you will hear a distinct similarity in these two
introductions because they have the same form and the chords in
each bar do the same kind of job, but there is also a significant differ-
ence. They each convey a different mood and therefore represent the
artistic choices of their particular songwriter.
Play through both of these examples a number of times and the
elements that make them similar and the elements that make them
unique will become clearer as you get your ear accustomed to this
analysis. Also try singing or playing a melody to this song part and see
how easy it is to set a melody on a progression that has a reliable form.
Many songwriters even go as far as referring to an element of a song as
being trustworthy as it relates to the other song elements.
This column is inspired by James Linderman’s
new book, Song Forms for Songwriters.
For more information or to purchase,
visit MusicBooksPlus.com.