How can you create tension using the rhythmic ideas in your song?
Recently I wrote about Gary Ewer’s great post on tension in songwriting.
His post is a list of tension and release related elements in songwriting – you can find more detail on each of them elsewhere on his site (and on this one!) – but it got me thinking about how tension and release can be found in the rhythmic elements of your songs.
Gary talks about hooks in songwriting, and how you should “a melodic/rhythmic shape that ends in such a way that the restatement of the hook acts as a resolution for the end of it.”.
Kylie!
The song ‘Can’t get you out of my Head’ is a great eample of this, a call and answer phrase with the first half rising in pitch (tension) and the second half falling (release).
The rhythm of the hook is also interesting – it employs a very simple but effective piece of syncopation.
- La La La La La La La La
The first three ‘la’s’ are on the beat, the next three off the beat, and the last two on the beat again. This gives us a simple layer of tension and release – notes on the beat are ‘at rest’, the syncopated, off beat notes add a hint of tension, before resolving straight away with the final two on-beat notes.
Any ideas?
I think there’s a much longer and interested blog post on the idea of rhythmic tension in sognwriting, which I’m not going to write at the moment. Instead I’ll end by asking for your input:
How can we add rhythmic tension and release to our songs?
My initial ideas:
- Small hints of syncopation in your riffs/hooks
- Unexpected phrase length eg. Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles
- An extra bar – eg. 5 bars in the bridge where the rest of the song is based on 4 bar sections
- A half-time section where the rest of the song is double time.
Any other ideas?
I’ve been having fun with middle eights. I’m not sure that taking a couple of measures off the end of those adds tension, exactly, but it prevents the music from becoming too predictable, keeping listeners on their toes.
I think when we say ‘tension’ in music that’s probably what we mean. It’s difficult talking about music – all the terms we have are metaphors.
By ‘tension’ I mean anything unexpected, rather than anything that feels ‘tense’ in an everyday sense.
erm… does that make sense?