How do you approach writing a bridge and a chorus ??

A

Alex_DeLarge

Little Hot Wing
I'm having trouble finishing songs, mostly because I do some riffs/progressions for the verse but its hard to do for the bridge/chorus.
 
Usually the easiest starting point for me is to move the bridge to another relative key of the song....if I was in G major I might try E minor or something off of the ii or IV chords...check this out as an example:

http://www.markwein.com/soundfiles/Felt - Over Pennsylvania.mp3

This is from an old lesson that has the chart and some other stuff for the song:

This is just a quickie lesson that sprang from a comment on a message board a few days ago.

Basically, the question is how do you learn songs fast?

For me (especially if I need to learn a large number of songs in a short amount of time) the answer is that I write out the "road map" of the song. The road map isn't much more than the sections of the song with the various chord progressions written out in order. I can get a better idea of the "bigger picture" of the song and also know where the potential problems are going to be pretty quickly. Then I'll go back and learn any important riffs or licks.

I am going to use my song Over Pennsylvania as an example. We've used it as an example in past lessons.

Click here to get the streaming audio for Over Pennsylvania.

Click Here and Here for those lessons.


My cheat sheet of a song might look like this:

Click here for a printable version of my scrawl
smile.png


overpenn.png


By the time I have figured out and written it all down I have the flow of the song fairly memorized. If I needed to write a chart out for the other musicians I am playing with it would be in standard notation but this shortcut works for me when I am just trying to cram as much music in my head as possible....

Check out Felts album Desert Center on iTunes!
 
Mike, but how that ideas came to you?? You were just jammin' with your guitar, or did you had an idea previously??

Starfsky, key changes might be a little over the top for what I'm trying to do that is simple songs with open chords and stuff :embarrassed:
 
Alex_DeLarge said:
Mike, but how that ideas came to you?? You were just jammin' with your guitar, or did you had an idea previously??

Starfsky, key changes might be a little over the top for what I'm trying to do that is simple songs with open chords and stuff :embarrassed:
Click to expand...


Probably a bit of just messing around with stuff and stealing sounds from other songs I had learned before :embarrassed:

Honestly, one of the best ways to learn how to write is to learn and analyze other peoples music...can you figure out which part of this song was "inspired" by Limelight by Rush?

Indio - http://www.markwein.com/soundfiles/Indio.MP3
 
Who's Mike? :embarrassed:


For choruses you have to go to the 4. That's a rule. Look it up.

For bridges, you have more options. Some kind of descending chord progression thingy usually does the trick.
 
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