Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Steven Snodgrass

July 26, 2009 - A few weeks ago, I asked for some reader questions and Sebastien Orban was kind enough to oblige. Today, I thought I’d take some time to answer one of his questions.

Sebastien wrote, “My goal while learning to play the guitar was to learn enough about music so I can create new work. But well, I have a hard time to wrote something that got a duration of more than 30s, maybe 1 minutes top. Not to spoke about adding bass or a battery sometimes…
The easiest thing for me, at the moment, is writing short melodies – no chord, no bass, no battery most of the time.”

I think this is an issue that many, even seasoned, songwriters struggle with. You begin writing a song, but it’s too short and you’re not sure how to extend it. First off, not every song must be of a prescribed length. If you’re trying to hit the magical 2:55 minute mark, that’s not necessarily a healthy goal for the music (unless you’re trying to follow the exact formula of a pop radio hit). Every song will need its own length to mature and develop itself.

You’ll notice that most pop songs on the radio are of a specific length and that is due to conventions that allow for more efficient radio play for the radio station to sell advertisement and play enough of the song so that they can move onto the next. All that being said, if you’re a professional songwriter and want a pop radio hit, then you will want to be aware of those constraints when writing the song.

So if you’re not worried about the pop radio song length but still think the song is short, you must figure out why you think it’s too short. Is it because you started writing with the idea that it would be a longer song but it didn’t hit that goal? Or is it because you know that the song idea isn’t fully developed yet? If it’s the former, you will have to consider that some ideas are fully developed in a short amount of time. It may be that the song is done at that length. Electronic music is a good example of this. Sometimes a song can be fully developed in less than a minute, and sometimes it takes over 10 minutes. Every song will be different.

If it’s the latter, than I think this is where experience will come into play. Is this vocal music, or instrumental music? If it’s vocal music, a particular formula has been ingrained in us over the last century. The popular Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus has been the structure of so many songs for so long, that it just feels right. If you aren’t using that structure, it may make you feel as if the song isn’t complete. Try using, and then adjusting, the formula to the song’s needs. You’ll find that the repetition of the chorus will help centre the song, and also make it longer.

If it’s instrumental music, you can either try to use the vocal formula above, or you can try a staple of many electronic songs which is to start simple and build up. The classic electronic formula is to start simple, build to a frenzy, cut to a more relaxed breakdown, and then either return to the energy state of just before the breakdown, or bring back the original energy from the beginning of the song. I’d like to make a slight aside here and say that these are all just conventions, but once you understand them, you can play around or even break off completely from them.

In your specific case Sebastien, it sounds like you’ve created guitar grooves, but aren’t developing them into songs. The problem with creating grooves that are not chordal is that you must have a specific chord progression in mind when you play them. This will give you an idea of where they are going and what you can do with them. Because the groove is short, you still need to think about how it might fit into a song. In standard groove-based music, the groove plays through out the whole song, so if you just have a groove and no other instruments to go with it, it will sound repetitive. Since it’s repetitive, you probably aren’t repeating it many times, thereby making the whole piece short.

If you are interested in guitar-based groove-centric music, consider listening to some blues. Not only do the songs heavily favor repetitive grooves but, more often than not, they utilize the exact same underlying chords from song to song. In blues music, the lyrics, solo instruments, and feeling make each song different from the next. If you want to get a good idea of how to work with the same basic building blocks and create something unique and your own, examine how they put together a song.

Really, the best way to learn is to listen to music you like that’s similar to what you’re writing. The song they’ve written works enough for you to like it, so deconstruct what they’re doing and apply it to your own music. Becoming good at songwriting, engineering, or producing is about being able to analyze the music you like, and figuring out what makes it successful. Good luck!

I’d like to make the “Question of the Day” series a weekly thing but that can only happen if I have enough questions to answer. If any of you have any questions, fire away in the comments or email me them directly at sean [at] keyofgrey [dot] com. Thanks!