Iron Maiden are one of my favourite bands, and one of the most influential heavy metal bands ever. A great post over at ‘Troll in the Corner’ got me thinking about them, and listening to some of my favourite Maiden songs.

Fear of the Dark, the title track from their 1992 album, the last before Bruce Dickinson left (temporarily) to pursue a solo career.

It’s far from Maiden’s longest song, but at seven and a half minutes it’s a masterclass in how to manage pace and momentum over longer periods of time.

I want to point out two great ideas that could be applied to songwriting in any genre.

• Changing tempo – changing tempo is one of Maiden’s trademarks. This happens several times in Fear of the Dark, most notably at 2 minutes into the video, and in the second chorus at 3.18. They almost always change suddenly, which isn’t the only way to do it, but changing tempo in your songs can be a very effective way of adding contrast.
• Harmonic rhythm – or the pace at which the chords change. The first verse (2.20) and the second verse (2.58) have the same melody, but listen to the chord changes. The chords change twice as often in the second verse compared to the first. This is another great technique Iron Maiden use to build the pace and interest within the second.
• A static riff over a moving bassline. That first riff at 2 minutes involves the bass changing chords while the guitars play a static three note riff.
• The ABA middle section. A common feature of middle sections in heavy metal is the ABA structure. In this song we have a guitar melody as section A, guitar solos as section B, then a modified repeat of section A with the added ‘Fear of the Daaaark!’ vocal.
• A riff and chorus you can sing along with – Maiden have reached the point where they can literally draw hundreds of thousands of people to concerts, but even in their early days they wrote songs that seemed designed for stadium audiences to sing along with. What does that involve? – lots of repetition, and often melodies based on either the first notes of the aeolian mode, or chord notes.

None of these ideas are unique to Maiden or to metal, and can definitely applied to songwriting in any genre.

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One reason for the high marks was the song’s fantastic, subtle playing with songwriting conventions.

- The Bridge – The bridge happens after the second chorus, right? Not according to my student. Instead she put it between the 2nd verse and 2nd chorus. Right at the point I was expecting to hear the chorus again, I instead heard a contrasting minor key and a new bridge I hadn’t heard before. This the effect of creating a pleasing, balanced feel despite it being a short song. It was also suprising in musical way, which is always a good thing.

- 4s – Everything in popular song comes in fours, right? Four bar phrases, creating four line melodies, four lin verses, four line choruses. Not according to my student. Instead, she had a really effective verse that had a three line melody.

Neither of these ideas is new, and neither is a radical departure from ‘standard’ structure. However, they do show a young songwriter who is confident enough to play with conventions without abandoning them.

PS One thing we don’t mark on the GCSE is the quality of lyrics. This student could possibly use some help on her lyrics, and with my own songwriting I’m feeling the same, so here are some links on lyric writing:

Rhyme Patterns

Lyrics writing is an Art that needs to be Practiced.

Creating a List of Possible Song Titles

Five songs, one of which wasn’t really new at all. In fact it wasn’t even a song.

Seven Curses

Download Seven Curses

Started life as an audio sketch this one. Beyond the initial chorus I had absolutely no inspiration, so I had to rely on songwriting ‘tricks’ instead. These included the key change in the verse, the rather banal horro-film lyrics, and throwing in a widdley-widdely guitar solo rather than thinking of a decent bridge.

Fill my head up

Download Fill My Head Up

This was an improvised recording – I threw together a couple of chord progressions, improvised a vocal part and recorded that. Half way through that recording I decided to change key – up a tone again, like I did with Seven Curses when I couldn’t think what else to do.

After that I recorded three takes of backing vocals, and a couple of guitar solos. Given that it only took twenty minutes, I’m quite pleased with this. In particular I like the B Major chord on thechorus line ‘Fill my head up’.

Light a Path

Download Light a Path

I came up with the refrain for this while noodling about between guitar lessons a few weeks ago. Lyrically it’s supposed to be from the point of view of a person of faith. Not of any faith in particular, just general faith in all sorts of crackpot ideas.

I think the melody works for a couple of reasons. One, I’ve used a mixture of voices, including a synth sound. I’ve recently become very partial to a good synth sound.

The other reason is the change in mode – halfway through the melody it changes from major to minor. Gary Ewer has recently written an article about this, and in this case I think it works well.

Two

Download Two

This is the second of three pieces I wrote for flute and guitar during my degree. Not having a flautist to hand, I decided to realise it with guitar and synth. I’m particularly pleased with some of the chords in this: I was trying to come with chords with semitone/compound semitones in them eg. an E and F at the same time or a G and G# at the same time:

- 1 -
- 0 -
- 2 -
- 2 -
- 0 -
- x -

or

- 4 -
- 0 -
- 0 -
- 2 -
- 2 -
- 0 -

Mechanism

Download Mechanism

This was an attempt to write a set of steampunk lyrics – I’m quite happy with them, and also with the dirty synth sound and the chord changes in the verse.

In Summary

I’m hoping to do better next year, and also over this summer’s 50/90 challenge, which I’ll probably have a go at. All told, in the last year I’ve written 15 songs over two FAWMs and 25 songs for 50/90, as well as recording 8 singles for We’ll Write (a total of about 24 tracks so far). That’s a pretty good output, seeing as there aren’t very many throw-away joke songs amongst that (I haven’t got the guts to post the comedy songs that other people do!)

But next time, I’ll actually hit that magic number 14!

over the last few months I’ve been having regular songwriting sessions with my sixth form students. They’re a heavy metal band – a genre that has an interesting mix of originality and copycat songwriting.

Like any other genre, over time you can see clear innovations – metal has pushed modal and chromatic harmony into new areas for pop music and explored new guitar and vocal timbres.

However, generally speaking, any one band, album or song tends to fit into a wider style. You can listen to a song and say ‘there’s a Metllica style verse riff, with Iron maiden chords for the chorus, and a half time coda like Machine Head’s Davidian….’

My sixth formers are at the stage in their songwriting where they’re using other songs as templates. For example they’ve noticed the loud-soft-loud dynamics of Remember Tomorrow by Maiden and Fade to Black by Metallica and applied them to a song of their own.

Any long time reader of this blog will know that this is exactly the sort of ideas stealing that I approve of, but recently, and worryingly, my thoughts have turned to the idea of originality.

So, I have two questions for you:

1. If you’ve composed your own words and melody – but used chords, structure and other stereotypical ideas from a well defined genre, is the song original?
2. And does it matter if it is?

What do you think? Use the comments to let me know

A little while ago, I was interviewed by Sean McGaughey for his For the Sake of the Song podcast.

He asked me why I started Songwright, and why I was blogging about the theory and structures we use in songwriting. Despite this site having been up since last summer, until Sean asked me, I hadn’t really given it much thought. Songwriting is something I love, something I’ve done since I picked up a guitar, so it seemed obvious to start writing about it too.

But he asked, and I had to find an answer. I’ve thought about it a little more, and decided to share some of the reasons for Songwright’s existence. Here’s the first:

1. I love songwriting.

I love vocal music. But being a musician, rather than just a fan I love it in ways that non-musicians might not. Why? Because there are different ways to listen to a piece of music. You can just listen to the words, and enjoy them. You can hear the music, let it take you on an emotional journey, not thinking, only feeling.

That’s how most people listen to music and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But I’ve found I get a whole new level of pleasure if I know what’s behind the sounds I’m hearing. Hearing that unusual chord or key change is good, but knowing exactly what the change is, that’s even better. It’s like the difference between an ordinary person and an architect when entering a well designed building. The ordinary punter knows it’s a good space to be and enjoys it, but the architect understands all the structural details, the use of space, light, materials, airflow and design. They see the building differently, appreciate the craft in a way that the ordinary member of the public never will, and never needs to.

Music is like that too. The more you know about what’s happening, the more involved you can become, more moved, more attuned, more within the piece.

So one of the motivations for Songwright is to share my love of the architecture of songs.

So many blogs

There are already blogs about personal songwriting, songwriting circles, songwriting diaries, songwriting interviews, music business (so many of them), music technology, even songwriting zen and samurai songwriting.

There aren’t a great deal of blogs about songwriting architecture, about the craft of song, particularly if you want to talk about something other than lyrics. Songwright, in a small way, is supposed to be about for that.

There are other reasons, but I’ll share those at a later date.

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“All the posts about changing key and arranging instruments are useful, but before I start doing that, don’t I need a song to arrange? How do I get things written!”

There’s no point worrying about the bassline, the drop chorus or the guitar solo if you haven’t written anything yet. This post should give you a couple ideas about how to get things done.

Last month, as I’ve mentioned before, I took part in February Album Writing Month.

I’ve been writing songs for a good few years now, but in all that time I’ve never been forced to compose to such tight deadlines.

In the end I didn’t quite get the 14 and a half songs written, but I did write a lot more than I thought I would. Doing so meant changing both my working methods and my judgements.

Here are the ideas that helped me:

1. Be prepared. I made sure, for the whole month of February, I had a microphone set up in front of the computer, a guitar and tuner nearby and a notebook constantly at hand. As soon as I had an idea, or even before, I could start recording.
2. Just do it! Two of the songs I wrote were near enough improvisations. Rather than thinking about structure or lyrical ideas, I just started noodling.
3. Start with a first line Which obviously is where you’d usually start, but those two improvised songs started as a first line. That first line informed me what the melody and mood would be, and also what the story of the song would be. Both were on subject i never thought I’d touch in a song.
4. Don’t judge This was the toughest and most important idea to get hold of. The point of the FAWM excercise was to write fourteen songs, not to write fourteen good songs. I had to forget whether the song was any good, and just make sure it was written
5. Use up old ideas Thanks to my trusty notebook and computer archives, I could dig out all those ideas that I hadn’t finished and finally put some work into them.

All of which are ideas that are worth following in songwriting generally.

Before you can perfect a song, you need to write it!

Yesterday I mentioned Outkast’s use of an ‘extra’ 2/4 bar in ‘Hey Ya’.

I’d definitely advocate cutting out or putting in extra beats when necessary. A song needs to convey the words, and sometimes you have extra syllables that don’t quite scan in a 4/4 bar. Sometimes it’s possble to stretch or shrink the words to fit, but often the best option is to say ‘hang the bar line’ and do something different.

‘Say a little Prayer’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is a more sophisticated and interesting example of this idea.

Time signatures in the verse:
Three bars of 4/4
One of 2/4
Three of 4/4

Time signatures in the chorus:
One of 7/4
One of 4/4
One of 7/4
One of 4/4
One of 7/4
Four of of 4/4

Listening to the song, it’s quite clear that this unusual time signature changing fits perfectly with the lyrics. It’s also a technique that really stands out in Bacharach and David’s work, just one of the things that makes them such a unique and interesting songwriting duo (I could write a whole series about the songwriting ideas you could steal from these two. Perhaps I will at some point…)

If it’s good enough for Bacharach and David (and Outkast) surely it’s an idea worth trying yourself?

Oh, and when listening to Bacharach songs, I would advise searching for the Dione Warwick recording. the songs were often written with her voice in mind (and anything is better than Aretha Franklin in my opinion!). 

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Even the silliest pop song can have an idea worth stealing.

In this case I’d like to point out the time signatures at use in this song. Three bars 0f 4/4, one of 2/4, another two of 4/4, looped over and over for the whole song.

Adding in the occasional half bar is quite a common technique, Outkast certainly didn’t invent it, and clearly it wasn’t enough to make this song listenable for more than about thirty seconds.

However, it can be effective, and it’s certainly an idea worth trying out yourself.

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Well, I’ve written 10 songs I wouldn’t have otherwise, so that’s not exactly failure is it? But I’m not going to hit fourteen and a half, simply because I’m running out of time!

Here are the last two songs. I’m particularly proud of ‘Where Once They Had Hearts’.

Ideas to steal from them:

• An ostinato that stays the same while the chords change (E Fsharp Gsharp in ‘In the cellar at number 33′).
• Climaxing on a chromatic chord (the first chord in the chorus of ‘Where once they had Hearts’ isn’t in the mode that the rest of the song is in)

[audio=http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/songwright/tomslatter_whereoncetheyhadhearts.mp3]

Where Once they had Hearts

[audio=http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/songwright/tomslatter_inthecellaratnumber33.mp3]

In the Cellar at Number 33

I’m going to sum up what I’ve learned from my first FAWM adventure in this weekend’s post.

Over the weekend I also got involved in a very silly debate about the comparative ‘cultural significance’ of Radiohead and Aqua. It involved the sort of long pretentious discussion I was thankful to have left behind in my student days, and I should probably be ashamed of myself, but it was fun.

And it also made me think of that overplayed early Radiohead hit ‘Creep’.

The chord progression in this song is worth a look because it uses two chromatic chords I mentioned before. The song is in the key of G, and starts of with a G major chord. There then follows a B Major chord.

Is B major in G major? No it isn’t, it requires a D sharp that you don’t find in the key. So it’s a chromatic chord – the third chord of the scale only major when it ‘should’ be minor.

After that we get chord IV, C major. Which is in key, but the next chord isn’t because it’s C minor. Chord IV only minor.

So G B C Cminor. The B and C minor chords are chromatic. If you turn it into a C major version you also get the first chords to the verse of Space Oddity C E F Fm. Isn’t that interesting?

So don’t be afraid of stealing those ideas, definitely nothing new about them.

I promise I’ll stop talking about Radiohead sometime soon.

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