Songwriting for the Curious Guitarist

1. Preview: Hi, welcome to the course. I'm Dan Dresnk. I'm your guitar teacher. I've been teaching guitar lessons for over 30 years. I've written a number of guitar method books, and I published well over a dozen online guitar courses. I'm the perfect person to take you on your songwriting journey. This course is a really neat course because we're going to do a lot of creative stuff in this course. The fun thing about songwriting is that there are no real rules. You have to do it this way or you have to do it that way. We're just looking for things that sound good. And so we have guidelines or maybe best practices, and that's what we're talking about in this course. These are things that usually work well. These are things that have worked well for other songwriters, or these are ways to get started with the process. These are ways to organize everything. These are ways to come up with good chords. These are ways to put together a good melody with those chords. These are the things that we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how to do arrangements and how to take all the different parts that we're putting together and how to put them in sequence. We actually can wind up with a song at the end. That's basically what we're doing. But there is no real right or wrong way to do this. These are all suggestions, best practices. That's why it's a lot of funs because there are endless possibilities when it comes to songwriting. Our goal is to try to do something new, something that you weren't told to do, something that you came up with, something that's unique. That's really exciting. That's one of the things that makes songwriting so much fun is that we haven't seen it before. We haven't heard that before. In this course, we have PD PDF attachments. Be sure to get the PDF attachments, download them, save them to your device, print them out there for you to look at while we're going through the lessons. I'm really glad that you're here. This is going to be a lot of fun. It sounds like you've got a song in your heart or maybe you have many songs in your heart and you need to get them out, great. That's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to help you do that, and I'll see you in the course. 2. Welcome to the Course: Hi. And welcome once again to the course. I'm Dan Dresmi. I'm your guitar teacher. I wanted to take a few minutes and talk to you about what you can expect while you go through this course, what we're going to do in the beginning and where we're going to be in the middle of the course, the stuff we're going to be working on, and where we're going to be at the end when we get to the end of the course. I can tell you when you get to the end of the course, you're going to have a pretty great idea on how to put a song together on how to come up with a bunch of different parts of songs. How to come up with a chord progression for one part of a song, how to attach a melody to write a melody that works with these chords that you just wrote, put the melody with the chords and have a part, and then to write a bunch of parts like that and then ways to arrange all of those parts so that we now have a sequence where we've got essentially a song. That's where we're going with the whole thing. This is a lot of fun because like I said, in the previous video, We're trying to follow some best practices and things that have worked before, but we're also trying to do some new things, some things that have never been done before. We're trying to take a system that has been tried and true. But then we're also wanting to put something in there like a chord or a note or something, something in there that you don't expect, something that sounds surprising and go, good, surprising in a good way. And so that's what songwriting is. There's so many different ways to accomplish that, and that's what we're going to go through in this course. So many different ways to accomplish something that sounds different and surprising. In the beginning of this course, we're going to just do a quick refresher. I don't know if you're an advanced guitarist or an intermediate guitarist. I think some of you might be advanced and some of you might be intermediate, which is great. We're going to get right to the songwriting parts quickly. If you are a beginner though or em like a starting from scratch, I'm going to quickly cover off on the basics that we need to know so that we can understand what we're talking about while we're going through this stuff. Once we get through that primer stuff, we're going to get right into the parts, starting to write parts. Writing the parts is about understanding how to come up with a good or progression. The or progression, oftentimes, it just comes from classical music theory. We take scale chords or we take the scale and from that, we can look at the chords, and then from that, we can say these are ways that we can select the chords that they're going to sound good. Because we're not just going to say, we'll try everything. There's something we can point you in this direction, try this, because this sounds really good. Then from there, start playing around with it. It's not just like try whatever and just see what sounds good. We're going to start with these chords and then we're going to point you in the direction, and then from there you start tweaking it and seeing what you like and what you don't like. Because again, these are not rules. These are suggestions. This whole course is all suggestions. I would hate to influence a future songwriter by telling them what to write and to teach them a formula and say, this is how I want you to write all of your songs. These are all suggestions just to help get you started. But from there, I want you to really just let your creativity go crazy and to do as many rule breakers as you can to make the music sound good because that's all we're really interested in here is making the music sound good. When we've got these chords and we select the chords and we put them together in a way, and we have the rhythm that we like. Then it's like now we've got the chord sequence four apart. Now we need to put a melody over the chords. The melody is what the singer sings. If we're just thinking really simple about chords with singing on top of it, the singing has to have a melody. It has to have notes. That makes sense. If we're going to have chords and then we have to have singing, we have to have notes that the singing is going over. Every syllable that the singer is singing has to attach to a note. That's the melody and so we come up with a melody. We're also going to talk about lyric writing a little bit towards the end. Briefly. This is not a poetry class though. It's not a poetry class. I'm hoping that you learned a little bit of creative writing when you were in school. So just try to remember your poetry class is pretty much that. You're writing poetry. It's like you're writing poetry. Think of it in those terms. Just be creative, use a lot of imagery and a lot of emotions. And so you write a bunch of poetry, and then each syllable of your poetry has to attach to a note and that's your melody. The melody has to make sense with the chords that we wrote. It can't just be a random melody and some random chords, we're going to try to squish them together. They have to work together. When we're writing the melody, we wanted to make sense for the chords that we did. We're going to work on that and figure out how to do that. Then once we've got a really nice part. This could be verse to a song, or it could be the chorus, or it could be a bridge, or it could be a pre chorus, or it could be an intro or an outro. There's a lot of different parts to a song. Once we've got that part, then we're going to write another part to a song, and then another part, and then we're going to put these parts together in a sequence, and that's going to be our song. That makes sense? This is in a very fast condensed way, how to write a song. That's basically what's going on here. Is we're just coming up with chords and then we're coming up with a melody that's going to go on top of the chords. What's interesting about All of this is different songwriters have different approaches to songwriting. I was a member of the Songwriters Guild of America for a number of years. Spent time with popular famous songwriters. People that you don't know their names, but they've written songs for famous music groups, famous musicians. And a lot of famous groups and famous musicians have songwriters. We don't know their names. They're behind the scenes people, but they write the songs and they work with the musicians and they get these royalties, and it's rare to have musicians that write their own music. I don't know if it's rare, but a lot of musicians don't write their own music. They have songwriters, especially the ultra famous musicians. Although some do, definitely some musicians write their own music. When you're writing the song, you want to try to come up with something that is going it's going to resonate with you. This is going to make sense with you, and it's not going to be a random thing. So we have a little bit of this music theory that we have to learn how to do it. Also in regards to the poetry thing. If you've got some things you want to you want to sing about a topic or you have this thing, I want to tell a story, whatever it is, then that's a big part of what you're writing about. But as I was saying, different songwriters have different approaches. My approach usually starts with the chords, and then I go to the melody and the lyrics and then they go on top of the chords. Other songwriters might they might completely flip it. Another songwriter might start with the poetry, the lyrics, and they might say, Okay, this is the story. I've got the words. And now I need to turn the words into a melody, and then I have to put chords behind the melody. So Songwriters use that approach. There's a lot of different ways to do it. Like we've been saying, there is no rule that this is how you have to do it. You can do it so many different ways. But one thing that every songwriter would agree on is that you're looking for something that so at original and a little interesting, and you can't put your finger on why it sounds great. It just does. That's what we're looking for. And writing songs is so much fun because you can really just let your creativity out and you can really share that part of yourself with the world. It's a contribution that we're making as musicians to the world. Playing guitar and playing a bunch of other people's music is great, and it's definitely gratifying. But when we write our own stuff, when we contribute our own content to the world, we're actually leaving our mark. On the world. Because if I go through my whole life, and I just learn other people's songs. Then that's it. Then I had a lot of fun playing guitar, but I didn't really leave anything behind. Some of us want to make these contributions to the world, we want to contribute our own songs into the sea of songs that's already out there. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about how many songs are already out there. We want to make our contribution, we want to leave our mark. So that's what we're doing in this course. Hey, be sure to get the PDFs, download the PDFs, save them. This is going to be a lot of fun. Thanks for watching this video. Let's jump into the next lesson. 3. Guitar Basics (page 2-5): Okay, let's jump right into some guitar basics that you probably already know. But I want to make sure that you know these things just in case. So these are the things we absolutely have to know. First thing is, the strain names the names of the strings going from the low string as a low pitch onto the pitch or me A d g B on e. And we can see it up here on the town when we get a little bit further than the course. When we start talking about things like Melody, we may be using a little bit of Challenger. So it's good to be able to read Tab and you see the six lines representing with six strings on your guitar. We have it up here. Six lines. Each line represents one of your strings. You re tub as if you were looking at her guitar like this. You have your guitar, just slide it down in your lap and you're looking your strings exactly like you would be looking at a sheet of tablature on a piece of paper. Six lines on the top line is going to be the high string in the bottom line is gonna be your a low string and normally will have numbers And the numbers tell a split fret to push on What string But in this case, I'm just using the tablet your outline to show us the stream mates So e a de gene b e Some common sayings that people use our Eddie eight dynamite good by a and he dynamite. Goodbye, Eddie. Um, I also heard a and Dean go buy eggs. Eddie and eagle eggs. Um, Eddie and Dean go by x a d g e or a eight Dynamite. Good bye, a g So plenty Your a string pull did not present open Play me the a string and yes, uh, be strict a time I Good bye. Uh, play me the g string, Eddie. A time I go play me The high Eastern is in high pitch A He died like goodbye. Let me the low pitch e string. Yeah. Good. So you've got the string names, um, Or here. Okay. This middle keys. Right here. Uh, this is called the chromatic scale eso. This has been a guitar theory music theory, but it is absolutely crucial a little bit down the road. Like I said, when we start changing to different keys and when we start working on writing melodies, being able to find the notes on the front board is really important. So the chromatic scale is all of the notes in music, in music, on every instrument, its musical alphabet, every single note and the way it goes is goes a B C D E f G after G goes back to a A B C D e a a B C D e f g a b c d e f g In between ABC e g We have sharps and bless and a sharp is where is just one friend higher that okay and flat is one from lower them. So this little hashtag looking thing or pound sign number sign hashtag that guy's a sharp something that looks like a hash tag were number Sign is a sharp So, for example, you may not know this, but just take my word for it that this new over here in the fifth fret the high string is an a note. Okay, so that's it, eh? So I go one from higher than that. That's a a sharp. Okay, I go back to my friend. Thats ok. I go back. One friend Azzan a flat because the flat is one friend. Lower them sharp is one front higher than, like higher pitch or a fretwork and a flat is one note lower. Then lower pitch in the flat. We can see with a lower case. Be now. This is the piece. That chromatic scale that is confusing can be confusing but doesn't need to be explained to you. So the chromatic scales a B C D E f g and then just keep going around and around a b c g a b c d e f g In between we have sharps and plants. So for example, in between the a note and the beano a be okay, we have this a sharp The A shirt can also be called a B flat. Every time you have a sharp, you can also be called by it a flat name. So the sharp is what it is in front off so that a sharp is in front of a But it can also be called Toby. Flood it because it's right behind the B. So every time we have a sharp or flat. You can have two games, the sharp name or the flat name, and the sharp name is the note that it's in front. Off the flight name is the new this behind, but they're the exact same. That a sure is the exact same nose B flat. A sharp is the exact same nose. Be thought. So in our example, we had a on the fifth fret on the high strength that's in a We call it a natural. It's just a a a natural. I go up, one fret. That's in a sharp. It's also be flat. So here in the sixth fret, this noticed a sharp and is also a B flat. It's got two names every time you have a sharp or flat is going to have to names. Okay, um, because this could be confusing. When we start changing keys and you have to deal with Sharps and flats, they'll pop up every now and then. I don't want you to get too confused by, however you're not being tested on. This were writing songs, so it's okay if you get all it's just it will help you kind of make sense when you're writing this to make a little bit more sense in your ready. Um, okay, so the exception to the rule is a B C D e f g a B c D E f g. Everything has a sharp and flat in between it. The exception to the rule is that there's nothing between DNC. If you take a look right here at B and C, there's nothing between no sharp or flat between. Go right from beauty, See? And then over here it happens again. You Enough. There's nothing between enough. So no, he sure or f flood doesn't exist. You sharp and a flat do not exist. You just go right from Ito F So you go right from beauty. See, because be sharp doesn't exist and see flat doesn't exist. Go right from Beautz or if you're going backwards, you right from C to B. You know, upper back and you go right from each f or F t e. Okay, that's it. A B C D E f g a B c D E f g. Everything has a sharp or flat in between it the sharps and bless a lot to names the sharpening in the flat. There's nothing between B and C. There's nothing between E and F, and that's with chromatic scale. Now, what's the point of that? I assure you The point of it, the Max Cano is for this course is mainly going to come into use when we are writing melodies. We're going to need to be able to find the notes were trying to create the melodies. I'm gonna show you how to do that. But we're going to have to look at the court's and then attached abilities to the courts. And so we're going to really need to be able to count and know what the notes are in order to do that. Also, when we're changing to different keys every now and then you may encounter of our quarter, you may want to use a bar chord. And so the chromatic scale you're gonna count to find those courts. Okay, so how do we practice this? This is just general good thing to know in guitar study, um, I don't want to get too bogged down in this course with learning guitar theory, however little bit, if you know a little bit. You could do a lot of good stuff in song. Right? So we want to know just enough to be dangerous. That will be right. Really good. The way you practice the chromatic scales, take your open string. Plenty. That a string? Okay, this again in a string. Now just count up dramatically. So that's been a first fret. Stay sure. Just the same as B flat. Second for me from seashore or D flat. Same thing different. Six fret sharp working flat. Some e eighth fret way went right from you to us. Ninth Fret F sharp, which is the same as G Flat 10. Front G. Levin, Fred G Sharp, which is the same as a flat in this whole front. Hey, because right after we do, G sharp goes back to a okay. G sharp, which is the same as a flat G sharp is the same as a flat. And then we go to our any note. Okay, so g g sharp or a flap? A a told fret and then it just keeps on going on. H r e like that just keeps going. So we did that on the A string When you do this on a different strings. We start on a string. So if we start this on the E string and a lot of times when you are looking for a note to write a melody where the final court you'll usually be looking for it on one of your e strings. So these air gonna want to practice on when we're doing the chromatic stone and different string You always count from the name of the string. Okay, so e Eastern. So I have start counting from the e note, not the A no account from, you know, because it's the East drink uh, f right from a deaf. Because that's the exception. One of the two exceptions. Second fret. Sure orgy flat. Third fret G fourth fret Sharp War E flat K six Spread a sharp or B flat. Seven friends a threat. See, because we go right from B to C. That's the other exceptions to the rule Ninth Fret C sharp, which is the same is D flat 10 friend 11th fret sharp, which is the same e flat on the told Fred is e. Again. So we just continue on 13 friend F 14 Threat sure. So once you get the 12 Fred, the whole thing is 12 friends the same open. So it just keeps on going regarding the chromatic scale. If you're right now, if you're thinking, are you telling me I need to memorize all those notes? No, I am not telling you that. I don't want you to. That's not what this is about. I don't want you to memorize all those notes. I don't even want you to try. OK, that's not about memorizing the notes on the fretboard. All I want you to do is the way to memorize the sequence. Chromatic scale goes a h r B C c sharp d d sharky f f sharp g g sharp back to a. That's what I want you to memorize That and of course, your string names. And then when you need to find no, you're going to count up in real time, you're always going to count up in real time. So I don't need you to know that this isn't a sharp or g sharper here. I want to be counting up saying Okay, so I need a sharp. So are sharp, e f f sharp be sharp or pay. So you're always just counting up in real time, not looking at it saying I know all these notes. So don't worry about memorizing the notes, memorize the chromatic scale and be able to count it really quickly. And that's how you gonna find all of your notes to do all the work that you need to do. Okay, um, the last thing on once you talk about are the, um, the course that we're going to deal with for it, probably at least the first half of the course when we're going through the different parts of songwriting going to keep us relative to the key of C Major because the courts are pretty simple. So this is not meant to be a guitar course. We're tryingto impress anyone with our guitar skills. It's not about that at all. We want to write a great song, and so we want to just keep it simple. There needs to keep a C major, right? So the corpse that we're going to use, we've got seven courts or less. Let me explain thes air. The course that we're going to use. Um, we're this key of C major So we have C chord d minor chord, e minor court f chord, G chord, aim on record. And our seventh court here is B minor seven flat five. Classically, this would be the last chord in scale. Um, some writers don't use this court very often at all. Um so what some writers will do is they will instead of playing this classical B minor seven flat five. Which you here in a lot of jazz music, but you don't hear a lot of pop music. Popular songs don't usually have this court. It's a little too jazzy. So what songwriters will do is instead of playing this cord, they will take the fifth chord of whatever scaled her on the fifth note, and we'll just turn into 1/7 court. So our fifth chord 1234 Funds G. And so they will play a G seven instead of this view Minor seven, flat five. Okay, So when we get to the last chord, I think what's going to be our seventh chord? Seventh degree court were usually going want taking the fifth chord. 12345 Jeep was gonna turn into itself. So what that means is that our courts are usually going to be a C D minor D minor, F g aim, honor and jesu access. So we're just gonna run through these four gonna plan open and as easy as possible. You are. I know you're waiting for this one. F Okay, we're gonna do an easy F because like I said, we're not trying to make this super difficult. We want this to be super easy and fun and creative. Wanna let the creative juices flow f easy. Um, here's how to do it easy. F my father my secret. But this I'm just going to bring these two fingers. My middle of ring finger should drop them down a string. So starting on the B strain, he's gonna go. 123 Good. That's gonna be my easy us way. Regarding the easy f you can. A lot of people want to know about the high string way. Don't. It's not bad, but we don't really want that high street to ring out. It's not bad if it does, it sounds cool. But just for a pure f we could do is if you let this skin on the bottom of your pointer finger. Just rest up against it. Not pressing, but just muting it, resting up against the high string. So So it's muting it a little bit, so if we happen to strong it by accident, it's fine way happen to get the open a string when were strumming the easy F. That's OK, too. It's not understand what we want, but it is one of the notes in court, so it's okay. Way G Geo. People like to buy G with both the high strings on the third front B minor seven flat five just talked about starting on the A string. He goes to three and then 23 says the four middle strings of the guitar to 3 to 3 to 3 to 3 . So that is the B minor, seven flat five court you could use. It cools jazzy, but maybe a little too jazzy for you. Sometimes it's a little too jazzy for me when I just want a basic pop sound. So instead we will go for a G seven chord on. Does the traditional way to play G seven is like this like I'm starting a G chord coming in first Fret already . Sounds like we're getting somewhere. Okay, that's it for the guitar basics. So we will be moving on in the next video. We'll see you there. 4. Scale Chords (page 6): Let's talk about the scale courts. These are the courts that we are using to come up with the different parts of our song. Um, so in the beginning, we are going to try to flesh out all of the cords for the harmony of Saul. And different people have different approaches. Some people like to start writing songs with the courts, which is what we're doing, Um, and get all the cords and then put in a rest after that. Some people like to start with the melody, so they get a little tune, you can hum a tune or they play a little melody. And then they build accords around that some people will start with the lyrics, which we're not focusing on. The lyrics in this course were barely focusing on the leaders. Um, but some people will start with a lyric and then trying to place the courts behind it or to place a melody around it. So everyone has a different process on how they like to start getting into the writing of the song. Um, the way that I generally approach so in writing is from a harmonic approach. So I start with courts harmonies, courts Melody is the tune or the solo or the singing part The versus the vocal. So, um okay, so from a court perspective, why these courts? And that's what we're gonna talk about for a minute. Um, in my, uh, when I worked with guitar students, I will. When I get to this part of guitar lessons, I will usually inform people that these are songwriters tools, and that's what they are. When you get to a certain point of studying music theory, you start learning about scale courts, and when you're learning about skill words, it is songwriter stools. Songwriters used these tools to come up with the court's course that we're gonna work well together. So I explained where they come from so you don't have the sense on. I didn't just randomly pick these cords out these air old old ideas that have been used for hundreds of years. OK, so the course that we said we're going to use our C D minor in Bonner F G a minor, and we're going to replace that Be minor seven flat five with G seven court, the fifth degree 12345 it would turn into a seven chord and we can pump it into the end. Okay. Sampling that crazy be wonder, Simpler life. We'll just do it. Jesus. Okay, so these cords are coming directly from the major scale. What is the major scale that sound familiar? The way that is C major scale. You've heard of your whole life. It's the most popular scale in the world. Could be a Yankee. I played it and see we're going to do it QC for a little bit. There are 12 keys total as we saw with the chromatic scale. So we're just starting on the C note. That's what it means to be in the key of C means we're just starting on C note. But we could start in any of the 12 keys. Talk about that more later. Okay, So in the key of C, we were playing the major scale. The major scale has seven different notes. I mean, that last note is a C again. So it's the same is my first note. C c. 123 one Because I can keep on playing the skill on guitar thing. Theo, It's everywhere. I can play the C major scale everywhere. You just keeps on going on going back. A setting descended, but it's really only seven notes, and it just keeps on going in the seven notes of the C major scale. Part of the reason we're doing the C major scale is because, like I said before, it's simple. It's easy. Part of what makes it easy is that is the only key of all. The 12 keys is the only key that doesn't have any sharps or flats in it. No shorts, no flats In the key of C C major. Every other key, there's 12 keys you playing cute A with Kiev, a sharper B flat where they keep be. And so there's 12 keys, just like the chromatic scale. There's only one key C C major that doesn't have sharps or flats of it. Every other key has at least one. Some do. Some have three Smith, four Sharps and flats. But you see Major is the only Kia has not, you know, so that's why we're doing it. Just keep it simple. The nose of the C major scale or C D. E f G A B CD of G A B So it's all the natural lips scale courts is when we take these notes from the major scale and we can start associating a court that goes with each one. Okay, so the first new with C note gets associated with C. Major court denote gets associated with the D minor court. Thes e note gets associated with an even minor for the F note Gets associated with F major core. A G note gets associated with a G major court gets associated with an A minor chord on the B notes usually can get associated with the B minor seven flat five to be classically correct. But what songwriters do is they say, you know this B minor seven flat five chord. Most of the notes in it are the same as the notes in the G seven court, and that G seven chord just works so much better. So we're going to be note associated with G seven and then it comes back around Teoh First court again. Secret. Okay, so a couple things about the seven scale courts Um, what's interesting is thesis e quince of how goes Major. And then there's minor minor on two majors and then 61 is a minor. And then the last chord is the seventh course. All right, where we start changing keys down the road, that sequence of major, minor, minor, major, major, minor and seventh, he's going to be the same. That will always be the same. So we're changing keys that we go to some other key. The first Court is gonna be a major court. What are key is, and then the next two chords uranium miners with this and then the next two chords are gonna be majors, and then six court is gonna be a minor. And then that last court is going to be 1/7 court major seventh chord. Does that make sense? So this is because thes notes are coming directly from the scale and I don't want to get too much into music theory, but if we get into the court construction of it, we can see how each of these notes comes to work with the cord. So this is a trick that songwriters have been using for a long time, and these scores are always gonna work well together. So we're going to put together different parts of the song and we're going to start jumping around using different combinations of all of these cords to try to get different parts. And some of these were going to be our main key for the song, and some are going to be temporary keys. Um, I think probably the last point I want to make about the scale cords is that the first court is obviously going to be the major, as in from the major scale. So if you were trying to write a song and you wanted to show that it was in the key of C Major, for example, then you really focus on that secret a lot where you were to resolve your other core changes to the Sea Court so we could think of the first Court is being really showing the major scale the songs in the major scale. If we wanted the song to sound like it was in the minor scale, then we are going to look at the six scored 123456 It's a minor. So it is relative to the C major. That's a term of when to use every down. Then we'll try not to use it too much because I don't want to confuse you. But when we say it's the relative minor or the relative major, what we're saying is that is part of the same groups in the same key. It's the same group of scale courts. So if it's the realms of Minor is a minor, is the relative minor of C major. That means that they're part of the same key, that part of the same group of courts. It's just that when we're focusing on that, a minor were saying Either the song is in a minor key because it's in a minor or this part of the salt is going to sound like it's in a minor we could bring back, start showing that it's in the major again, going back to focus and resolve on the C chord for resulting on the a minor court they were showing Okay, this song where this part of the song is going to be in the minor key. So there's a lot we can do with these seven chords way. Sounds great. Okay, um, so I think that about covers it. I just want you to know that we are not randomly picking courts. Not yet, anyway. We may do that later on, but right now I want there to be some very old and ancient reason behind what we're doing. Kind of standing on the shoulders of the Masters. The great musicians and songwriters that for hundreds and thousands of years have already been doing this stuff because they figured it out. And now we figured it out. So we're going to use the same ideas that they had. So go think about this. Familiarize yourself with the concept of the scale courts and I'll see you in the next video. We will start moving on to the next section. 5. Song Parts - Arrangement (page 7): Let's talk about the song parts. The arrangement of the song that we're putting together so off the song parts should all sounds different. They are within Zemke. Probably it's always, probably because there are no hard and fast rules. But if we're trying to make it make sense a little bit, that they're probably all going to be in the same key, um, there one of your relative to each other, maybe bouncing between the minor and major, the relative minor in the worlds of Major, some of the other courts in the scale court wrote. But they should all have different parts. They shall be unique and be kind of a new, interesting, exciting little part of the music that is an important piece of songwriting is having an interesting arrangement. So what we're going to go through is coming up with us different options for each of parts of our song. Um, when we're doing that, we want them to. When we put them together, they should flow from one to the next. And that is an important part of arranging is making sure that you have a smooth transition from one to the next. Like the last court of a part goes well into the first quarter of the next part, but they should all have their own personality, their own interesting sound, because we want the music to constantly be interesting and exciting. We don't want it to be too simplistic when someone listens to our song. We want the song to go in all these different directions and really, we want the list or to feel like, Wow there. It's a huge epic story that just goes all over the place, and it just keeps taking me the different places and keeps surprising me. That's what we want. We want to keep on surprising somebody. You don't want someone listening to your song and after the 1st 20 seconds, saying, Okay, is the whole thing going to sound like this? No. It's going to keep on changing and keep on going to these different little parts, these different things to make it interesting. So if you think about it, if you think that your song is a song that you might play for the rest of your life, make sure it's a good one. You're gonna really enjoy every time play it so I put a lot of work into it in the beginning. So that is for the rest of your life is always gonna be this wonderful thing that you really took the time to make it interesting all the way through. The listener will never get bored with it. Okay, so the different parts, um, the intro takes us into the song. Obviously, what's interesting is that the intro and the outro are very similar. Kind of. Their function is basically the same. The intro is going, Teoh take you into the song and the outro is going to take you help of salt. And so you you have unlimited options on how you can do this. In general, you want to kind of ease into the song nothing too abrasive and start building up that you're going somewhere. Something is happening. We're starting. The train is at the station and you can hear the engine starting to rebel because the train is getting ready to go on a trip. That's the untrue and the altro would be the opposite of that train is entering the station from a long journey is slowing down and slowing down and coming to a stop. So the intro and the Outro have a similar function. Take you into the song We're taking you out of the song and the Intralot Altro as everything else should be unique. They should have their own little special sounds. They should be a little bit different. Maybe 3/4 played a little bit differently, or there's a little bit of a liquor rift that's unique. It's only played on the Outro where that's only played on the intro now they could be the exact same thing you could say, Well, you know, kind of in a hurry and I'm not looking to make the song epic. I just want something that's concise and simple, so I want to have the intro of the answer will be the same thing. That's fine. There's a lot of songs that are like that, and, um, it could It could have the exact same sound because sometimes when he intros taken into the song, you could just as easily take you out because it's not that aggressive or hard just yet, um, diverse. The verse is where the a lot of stories happening lyrically, eso I think of the verse as being a solid background where it's an opportunity for storytelling to really happen. Most of the story is going to actually happen. Universe. And what I wrote here is just a basic parts of the arrangement these air, the basic parts that you would see in an arrangement, and I kind of just pull them out here you might not want to use All these parts may just want to use a few, but I just put all of them out here so that these would be the main options that you could use when putting your arrangement together. You may there are songs where they just be one part could these diverse and, uh, you know, lyrics all the way through it. And maybe the melody will change a little bit to show that, Oh, there's a kind of a course here. And then it comes back to the storytelling and others, of course, here, back to storytelling. But the music will be pretty much the same all the way through, and there are some songs that I love that are like that. But you know that you have to really be a masterful songwriter in order to pull it off. So generally the verses are going to be. You don't want them to be. You don't want Teoh be too aggressive with music. You don't want there to be any anything to brilliant happening. Wanted to be background in an opportunity for the lyrics to tell the story. Whatever the story is, in a lot of songs, a typical song there will be lots of verses, lots of verses and lots, of course, is those were the two main components of a typical pop song or rocks or any kind of popular song. Lots of verses and lots of courses verse chorus for scores for his chorus. So the verses telling this story and then the chorus is the hook. What does that mean? The hook for the chorus is the part of the song that everyone remembers. If there's only one part of the song that you remember, it's gonna be the course. This is usually true. So any kind of song, the part that everyone remembers, where the only part that everyone can sing, like remembering the lyrics. But I remember this part. It's gonna be from the course because the chorus is that good feeling. It's the best melody. It's usually pretty simple, but it's just a great easy melody that's behind these good, powerful cords ends. Of course, not every song is different, so sometimes he wants out like that, but in general is going to be the best Sally part of the salt. It's the hook. And so this is the part that is the most memorable part of the song. The best melody, the best lyric and usually the lyric will be the same. In the course, the records will be the same. Melody will be the same. The lyrics would be the same every time against the course. Usually it'll be the same courses, same courses, same course of same. The verses will be same music, and the melody usually be pretty much the same. But the lyrics will be different cause we're telling the story. Verse Juan will be the beginning of the story in the North. Of course, the member will part of the salt, and then you have a second verse and I'll tell the middle part of the story and you'll have , of course, same great memorable part of the song, and then you'll have 1/3 person this could be the name of the end of the story. Have a story ends. You'll go affected, of course, again, the memorable part of the song so verse chorus verse corresponds course. This is a typical rundown of how a very basic songs written verse chorus verse course first , of course, so these parts can be repeated multiple times, especially the versus courses. I will arrange more complex songs for myself for our students. Um, So, for example, if you took this approach to a song like Stairway to Heaven On and you write down all of the pieces the intro, the verse chorus, bridge, all the different pieces and you write it down, it's going to take up a few columns on a sheet of paper. Because the arrangement is massive, it's huge. Song goes in all these different places, and so you learn all the parts, but you need to know when to go to which part because the parts change so frequently because it's such an epic song, and, um, so that is what the arrangement is. But sometimes those parts of the same, every time you see the verse, it will be the same. Reverse a. The way the music is on the verse, a part where the verse be the way the music is in the verse. Be part. So if you've got different music for the same kind of verse, you can never say diversity. There's a lot of variations on how you can put together your arrangement or your parts parts that you're going to use. You can come up with your own terminology on how you want to name the parts of your song. There's just nothing wrong with that. You should do that. Okay, so we've adversity. Course, of course, is the hook. The hook is the most memorable part of the song. Okay, you're gonna keep on repeating it. Every time you come to the course, the most attention should be paid to write in. Your core issue Course should be great, because if you have an interesting story and really great solo, but your course is not that interesting, your song might not be that great. Um, so the chorus should be the best part of your song Should be the part of the song that everyone remembers. I made that mistake in my younger days when I write songs, and I would have lots of different parts of my music. And the song will go in all these different directions, and I you know it. I'm technician. So I spent a lot of time doing a lot of guitar solos, long extended guitar solos. So that would have what I thought were great guitar solos long, possibly too long and a lot of time on solo and not enough attention spent writing a great , amazing course. And so that's something that I've improved over the years. Spent more time on getting a good course, Okay of the Bridge Bridge. The bridge is a deviation from everything that's happened in the song so far. So we going into the song Converse got Chorus for scores for scores, and we have sort of a theme going on. Now. Song has taken shape were clearly going in this direction with Song. The bridge is a part of the song where we kind of go in a different direction temporarily, just for this part of the song, ready to go in a different direction. We are going to stay relative to the original courts. We're staying with our scale courts, but we may take a a temporary key from the scale cords that makes it feel like we've really gone in a different direction. We'll look at that a little bit later on when we explore bridges. So but again, the bridge is an opportunity for us to add a surprise, Another interesting piece to the music because you don't want this on to become predictable When, uh, when people are listening to the songs like, Okay, I heard the first, of course, that heard diverse again. It was the same music. And of course, again it was the same chorus. And the listener may be thinking is the whole song I'm gonna be like this and like, there's gonna be a solo It's gonna sound kind of same The whole song from selling this You want to hit with the bridge that's gonna take a song in a different direction. Surprise! Good people love that Sounds cools interesting. All right. Song is really taking me in a whole new place. Now that's the bridge. And then the bridge is gonna bring it back. Okay, Typically, after the bridge, we're gonna go into the chorus with the verse again. So brings you back into the salt solo when you are writing a song. If you want to put a solo in it, that's fine. Um, the solo can go one of two ways you can. A lot a certain number of measures for the solo. For example, I'm putting 16 measures in here for a solo 16 bars for a solo. Um, so 16 bars on one more will be 12341234123 Bars 2341234 ones, five bars. So each far has four beats. And so, if I said I'm gonna do 16 bars for a solo and I'm just gonna do what out for the solo was like, We're playing a song to see Major. And so we're just going to say you got 16 bars to do a guitar solo. So for 16 measures, just play whatever you want. See, Major, you could take that approach in. That's fine. But if you want your song to be really coming from your brain and you're bringing love and you don't want to leave anything to chance, then you may write the solo. So you're going right note for note. The guitar solo and could be 16 bars. 32 bars, eight bars could be four bars. You could just be a title for measure solo. Sometimes that's all it takes. So, um, and you may we'll talk about Solo's a little bit later on. But my advice is to have a plan. So when the soul comes, have a have an idea of theme of what's gonna happen either write it out. Note for note. We're have a, uh, melodic idea on what the solo should be centered around. Great. Um, we'll talk about soul is more, but you don't want this solo to be extended. I just will lead Guitar Player started playing solo with keyboard players. Start playing solo Love. Just go for a good long time when they're dung will just not at us. We'll move on to the next part. That's that. Could be, uh, making people lose interest in. So you don't want that to happen? You wanna keep control over it? Make sure that's the right amount of time. Break back. Good. Um, we have the altro, which we discussed. Altro is similar to the intro. And here we've got pre course. So there are other parts of this arrangement that we did discuss recourse. We'll talk about that for just a minute. Pre chorus is exactly what it sounds like. It is another opportunity to surprise you. Okay? And so if we're going verse chorus, first course, that's our basic layout. Verse, chorus, verse course. Um, we may want to throw on a pre course. Okay, this is something that I have done to make my writing Interesting. Drone Prix courses. Pre course. Okay, so I have ever play. Members have my course ready to go, but before I go into my course, I want to add another surprise part. So pre course pre course. Could be two measures long. Could be four measures long. It's not that long. Keep it kind of short. Two measures for measures, not that long. And it's gonna be something to help him build even more powerfully into my course. Okay, so when I get my course, I want the pre course to set me up even more. To go right into the course is more powerful. What I mean set me up. What I mean is, we have to get our transitions really nice. So when we're going, it's a verse course. Okay, go from reverse. To of course. Um, if my last court way took from these skill cords, um, we have to reverse engineer. If the first court of my course will say it's a seat, were in the key of C major. So first quarter of my courses going, B C court. So, um, there are some course that will be stronger and some that are weaker. That can be the court right before the secret. For example, playing my verse about to go into my course first quarter, my course. I said to see, So what's the last quarter of my first gonna be right before I hit that? See, that's really important. Does that make sense? So, for example, if the last quarter of my verse is maybe an e minor chord first course, of course, is the C chord. Is that the kind of effect that I want to have happen? Or maybe the last chord of my versus going to be in court? Okay, they have different effects. So does it have the effect that I'm looking for? What if the last quarter of my verse is gonna be a G chord that my first quarter, of course, is a C court. Okay, it's a little bit more powerful. We're starting to see how the different courts could have different impacts on the next court. And when we're going from part to part, you always have to look at what's the last chord and what's the first chord? And is it a good transition? And if it's not, then one of those two courts should change. If you have a good first court and a good part, that is usually the last court. And sometimes if it's just like, well, it's not a great transition. But I love this part, and I love this part. Then that's an opportunity to stick in a little Segway part, which will be something like a pre course. Okay, could be a pre verse pre chorus. Something like that was an extra part that helps you bridge from the two pieces that makes sense. And so this is the kind of stuff that we're going to talk about. Aziz. We go on, but this is your basic arrangement, and these are the These are the different pieces. So as we're going through it, we're gonna talk about how to put them together, but a big part of songwriting. We're just trying to flush out the quarters in the harmony right now. The pieces. It is going to be about our transitions going from one part of the next. A lot of times you can have this great part and a great part in great part, but they don't Segway into each other very well. And that's because going from the last four to the first Court, okay, and that's all we're not to change. We either change that. We can add in a better bridge in between, and they're both viable options sometimes. Adding in the extra part just spans the song. They said, There's even more stuff going on, and you can fix that transition. So, uh, go contemplate the different parts of your arrangements and I'll see you in the next video 6. Counting Beats (page 8-9): Let's talk about counting beats, how to arrange your cords in a way that you know how many beats too strong each court. This is really important, and you can come up with your own methods for writing this down. But you should definitely write it down. When you are in the song writing process, you need to be documenting what you're doing. Don't wait until the song is finish to record it or to write it down. Write it down as you are writing a song as you're composing. Write it down on a piece of paper. It's great to have some kind of little recording device. You got your phone or your computer or your tell it, and most of those have some kind of a simple poor around there. So I would constantly recording all the parts state or writing. Um, just keep a folder with all that stuff. I have a piece of paper also. It's good. Have just a hard copy of this stuff on a piece of paper and you just make nose and I'm going to show you an easy way to write down court progressions and to keep track of how many beats family. Strom's for each chord. Okay, So, um, the first thing that we want to talk about is we're going to do, um, mostly quarter notes. We're just going to talk about the basic beat, and the basic is the quarter note. So if we were saying we had in every measure, okay, every measure is going to have four beats. And so and the measures When a reading courts down, we could just use dashes. Every dash could be a new measure. Sometimes insect ashes people to a big line, which is going to be kind of like a measure break. Do you do there big line to separate for me? It's I like to use a dash just easier. Simpler. Never tell my CIA dash. I know it's a measure, which means somewhere inside of that dash is gonna be four beats total four bays for rests . Some combination of that. And that's if we are in a 44 time. Um, all right, so when you see a court by itself, we're just going to see him is going to get four beats, Okay? It's gonna get the whole measure. And so what we're doing quarter notes, which are the basic beat. So I have four beats for just going to say it's like 1234 Good. 12341234 234 Continuously. I'm not speeding up or slowing down on. I just go right from one measure to the next measure. Consul in 1234123412341234 Constantly. Same tempo. Not too fast, not too slow. Unless you wanted to be, um, problem with mentioning that tempo is the speed of the song. How fast were have slowed. Beats go tapping 1234 So if we're going on a fast tempo would be like 12341234 It's pretty fast. If I was doing a slow tempo would be like you for you bring war. It's a slow tempo. You can make your song any type of you want. Just probably keep it the same tempo for the entire saw. Tempos should not change. They can, but I don't think it's a great idea. It's not usually done. It's just probably not a great idea that I would really recommend you don't change the tempo. Keep the tempo of the same for the whole song. There are no rules, but keep your tip of the same for the whole song. Um, the tempo is the thing that people latching onto So there, really, our years air looking for repetition. We're looking for what is the same that I can latch onto. So keep the tempo of the same for the whole song. Slow. It's fast. It's medium pace. He with same. Keep it even in the same full salt. But you can start it off. Whatever you want. Slow, fast. Where? Okay, so if we have one court and measure, we're going to assume it's going to get the whole four beats. 1234 So they're gonna go for peace of the sea. This first line. These are just ideas here. So four beats on a C four b, c g court for me, it's on C chord and for bees on G port. So just with quarter notes way, Theo. Okay, Now off course. In between that we could have some smaller beats. We can have some eighth notes. We could have some 16th notes If we have eight notes, then we would just be saying Aunt. So in between all the quarter minutes 1234 we could have aunt. So be, like one and two and three and four. And huh, so I could stronghold the notes. I still have to give everything for bees, but just going way with eight notes, we can play all of them. Or some of them were none of them. It's our choice. Do anything we want so I can play. May be the first to bees will be quarter notes and that will put in the ANZ for bees three and four So one and then just courtrooms on the rest just before now, in rhythm, we can also use rests and rests. Give us an opportunity to add silence in Okay, So anything was be recalls of your arrest. So 1234 we can either strong or we could have silence our choice. Strong or silence. So what if I wanted to put a rest in? Um, let's say on beat three B three rest. Rest way. What if I wanted to play? Um 12 I'm gonna rest on three, but then I'm gonna go and four do the rest of the eighth notes that and of three before in the end of four. But rest on three. Okay, struggle. Right. Okay, so we're starting to get some different ideas here. Um, if we were doing 16th notes so we had 1234 and then one and two and three and four ends the 16th notes would be if we're going faster. We're going like one e and a two D and three and four. And so in between the one and we're putting it e and up. So if it was, like one and two, three and four EMS now it will go one and two and three and 40. It works the exact same. Where? That it doesn't see the eighth notes. 16th notes. We can put in rests. We can put him in when we want to. We can rest on the 16th note so I could be like the o waste Are pretty interesting rhythms by using 16th notes and a couple of arrests here in there. So lots of options there with the court notes, eighth notes and 16th notes. Okay, But the general idea is that we only wanna have four beats within each measure, and usually when I'm flushing out a core progression, I don't focus too much on the rhythm. In the beginning, I just want to get some really good core changes. I want the courts to stand on the round with a very basic rhythm. I will make it usually make the rhythm or interesting a little bit later. I want the courts to stand on their own with very basic rhythm. Okay, so when you see one poured inside of a dash by itself, it is getting for beats. We'll also point this out here. Four beats. Okay, when we have a 44 time, that's when we're saying we have four beats in a measure. 4/4 looks like a fraction. It's not. A fraction is telling us that there's four cornice measure than these four beats. Sometimes another popular time signature is 3/4 Looks like a fraction, but it's not is 3/4 notes in a measure, so that would be three beats of C three beats of Jean. Tributes of C three beats of Jean were in 34 which would sound like, wait three as a really popular time signature said. And you could make some great songs using 34 time and everything else works the same. Eighth does work the same 16th notes with same. We're just doing it within a 34 time way. A lot of different options there. Okay, let's go back to a 44 The most common time signatures for 44 beats in the measure. Alright. Writing basic courts now, when we get to the second time here. Right, Um, if you see two chords within a dash, each one is going to get to beets. Okay? Because the measure has to eat well out to a total of four beats. And so if we have two chords in a dash, each court's gonna get to beats. So to see, to me, it's a G four of C four of C. All right, so is playing that middle life simple, right? All right. This is a great idea for when you are, just give a piece of paper and get is and you have your guitar. You're just jotting down chords. You wanna build a look at it later on and remember, exactly how many beats you did for each court. Like I said, you don't have to write any interesting rhythms just yet. If you have the right amount of beats, this is enough to help you remember exactly what it was replying. Okay, Now what if we want to do a change that's not in the middle of the measure? So, for example, um, I want to, um, once you get the, um I want to get the last before is going to be the change to the G. So used these slashes here. It's a show that we see a slash is telling you play the previous court again, So play seek or slash says play again. So play a secret again Have another slash c court again says three C courts the one she court somebody go C C c g. All right, so this measure right here is going to be like, Okay, So basically, if I wanted to change on just before, the best way to write is to use the slashes and is telling me when I see a slash saying in the previous court again, for however many slash is that there are so play the sea and play again because one slash then played again because another slash this three C's and then I played before is the G okay. And so something that you may do Also just to give yourself a little, um just to remember is you may use the slash just to add in a reminder to yourself like, let's see twice. And then I played the G twice, so you can use slash is to be yourself reminder. But if you want to write it down to where you know you're changing the cord, I'm an odd beat. Um, Then you got it was just used slush. Oh, you may have something where we want to change cord. Um, right on b two. So, for example, find see g and then I would have slash, slash si g slash slash Don't tell me a place see me to be o c g slaughter slush that makes sense. And so obviously we're gonna be using all kinds of different chords were going to be mixing love in all kinds of different ways. But the main considerations that you want to be thinking of our want my song to be 34 or a 44 time. By the way weekend, we can change the time signature at any point in the same song. So this is another thing that we could do to make our song Writing interesting as a matter of fact, is one of the things the Beatles did a lot in their songwriting. That would be John Lennon's contribution. One of his contributions. He was one of the He was one of the guys who thought that during compound time signatures I was gonna make music more interesting, and he was right and want to say Compound. He would do it in ways that was sort of tricky, so you wouldn't really know that the time changed you. This song sounds like it's just rolling along, and the listener is completely unaware of the fact that the time signature has changed. It may change for a little bit and go back, and so that's a compound time signature. Maybe we'll be playing for four few measures is 44 and then we'll do it 34 and then we'll go back to a 44 and then we'll do a few measures of 34 We went five for five beats in a measure and a 646 beats in a measure and then back to before for 345444 and changing it around like that. Those air compound time signatures where more than one time signature going on. And, um, this is a really interesting thing You could do so always barren lines that the rhythm is a huge part of what's going to make yourself interesting. So, uh, if you're looking to come in Jackson fresh life into your song, consider going. Taking another crack of the rhythm. You can change the time signature. Say I want to dio for beats of Seve that I want to measure. I just do three bees or something. They want to go back to a four for the way you do that is, you will make a note at the top of the very beginning, you'll say whatever the key signatures were. Four foresee. All right, for four looks like a fraction there is no. And then on the measure where you wanted to only be three beats or five minutes or whatever the changes, you'll just write it above 54 or 34 Whatever the changes. And then on the measure where you wanted to go back to 44 were changed to something else. Just make a note right there of the time signature. 44345464 Whenever it is seven for whatever it is that you want to be, you make a note right there at the beginning of the measure where the new time signature happens. This is how you write music. So you can be sitting there with your guitar being on course for your piece of paper. Just jot down some core progressions use of your dashes and your slashes. Your 344446474 And you can create some pretty cool songs in the core progressions. So, um, go work of this and I'll see you in the next video. 7. Major & Minor Keys (page 10): let's talk about playing in different keys. So in your pdf, um, I have given you a, uh, breakdown of all of the 12 different keys and the court roads that go for each of the 12 keys. This is going to be useful to you because you are going to want to write songs in different keys. That's important. You don't write songs on different keys, and there are a lot of advantages to mixing up your keys. But the first point I want to make to you is that anything and everything that we're talking about in this entire course can be applied to any key. Okay, so any key that you choose, you can apply everything that we're talking about is going to be all the same stuff, all the same ideas. All the same tricks could be applied to every key, um, a lot of different benefits to changing keys. Um, the first benefit is just to get a different sound just purely to get a difference out. So maybe instead of playing in the key of C, you want to play a kid deep where you want to play a key of e flat? Who knows you just want to get a different sound, so you don't want all of your songs to sound the same. Um, also it musicians tend to play the same eso. You've heard that musicians will have a certain style like this person has that style of playing in this person has that style play. Um, maybe they both you know, let's say they're both rock musicians, but they'll have their own style. Even though they're both rock, they have their own sound. You can tell that this is this person, and that's that person because they have their own style. So it's the same with songwriters. Songwriters usually will tend to write in the same style. What I mean is that will tend to go for the same changes tend to go for the same devices on DSO. If you told a songwriter write me 10 songs in The key of C major, it would be a stretch for that person to come up with 10 different sounding songs, all in the key of C Major. Of course, you could do it. Course you could do it because there's so many different things like we've already talked about, got all the corners You've got a your disposal at least seven. So far, there are more coming. But then you've got all your abilities. You can play with you once a rhythm and time signatures stuff that you could do. So, of course, you could get 10 different sounding songs on the key of C Major. However, a songwriter will figure out a couple of things that they like that they think sounds good , and they're gonna want to try to use it as often as possible. This is something that you can do by changing keys without it sounding exactly the same. So if I do the exact same core progression, But I do it in different keys, for example, I'm going to go todo see that way. Okay, so let's say I wrote a song and I use that part of it in the salt. Now I have to write another song. Um, and I really like that a lot, but I don't want to repeat myself because I already wrote that song with that in it. So let me try that move in a different key. All right? Says the first chord. Third and fourth quarter. All right. So let me try that kid. D Right. So the first chord, third and fourth court. So I'm gonna go D chord of Sharp Meyer and G core Theo. You hear that? I'm still using the same device, but it sounds a little different. Let me try the G first chord. They're a core and fourth quarter. I think so. I can use this device. May want to tweak a little bit if I was actually doing just taking device and putting in different keys. Tweet the rhythm a little bit. So it's not a direct revolve of something I've already done. But just by changing the keys alone makes it sound like OK, something's different here. Okay, So different sounds is a good reason to use different keys. Also, I'm a just like the shape of certain courts. Better could be a simple Is that certain course sound better than others to me or to you? So I may want to change keys for that reason. Um, the There have been many studies throughout the world off off the psychological effects. Um, your brain when you hear different keys eso for a long time Psychologist Stephan studying what is the brain feel or think when it hears this key here speak? You see? Was it think when he hears a Q E flat was that they're gonna Here's a cute D and there have been a lot of similar findings in these dice in different groups, different countries. We found that the brain responds similarly to certain keys. So that is another reason you may want to write a song in a specific key. This is something you can study more later on. Um, and it's arrest. It's definitely interesting. One of the things that I have read when I've looked into it is that one of the most pleasing keys is key of B flat. So e flat, many studies have found, is the most pleasing key soothing, pleasing. So if you wanted to write a very easy listening, saw something that was gentle, that you may write in the key of e flat, a lot of marches or military or maybe something more aggressive songs would be in qg songs that are more brilliant or spiritually. 10 B and Q D. So these are things that have been found in the studies that I've read. I've read many studies over the years because it's arrested. It's definitely interested in your brain here. These does differently. What happens? So that could be a reason. Here is a really important reason that the keys of songs will change is for the singer. It's for the singer. Okay, Um, So, for example, if we were doing our move that we did just a minute ago and, um, let's say I wrote a song and I wrote cords and I wrote the melody and I wrote the lyrics Gates my soul, But I'm not a great singer, So I've got a friend who's a great singer. Some couldn't get my friend and they're gonna sing it. And so it's OK, Here's the lyrics and years Melody and I think this this okay? And so we start playing it and Singer says, you know, great song, but this is not a great key for me. So can we, instead of doing it in the key of C instead of going though, see mrf and doing all that stuff in the key of C here we tried a different Keith. We just do the entire song and every key. We'll just move all the courts up. Just one move up to keep d were the key of E or the key of F or the key of G. Whatever. The key is that the single wants and so we could just shift all the courts up. It will be the same. Same changes, basically, but it will be in a different people. Just move all the cords up, and so you'll still basically have the same song. It'll just be in a different key, and it will be to accommodate the singer. Um, and this is something that's really frequent in recording studios is songs that are written in a lot of recording. Studios will be written using Roman numerals so that we could easily change the key. Instead of writing C and D Monitor, you'll have ah, one RO, a new role and then a lower case to rub. So that's telling me the first scale core is and then his major because its upper case than the second scale courts of minor, because it's lower case and so to change the key, just change it to whatever. So if you said first scale cores uppercase major, the second scale cores lower case conspire. So if they said playing q C, c d minor And they said they haven't changed it to the key of D is trying for the singer and says D and E minor exits in case wild orchids to change it to the key of E. Okay, Givi. It's gonna be an E and f sharp minor because it's just keep on shifting it. And it's easy to do to accommodate the singer so you can get the best singing on the recording. So that's another reason to change the key. Okay, I want to make, um, at least one more point on the, um on the keys. What we're doing with one key, we could be in the major or the minor. The major key is going to be as if we were focusing on the first court cell assay. We're just in the QC, okay. And so well, keep wrapping everything back around with, See all the course tend to resolve to seek, or that the song is in a major key because first quarter of the scale court row is the major scale or the major port. So saying it's in the key of C major means that we're gonna keep on C is gonna be the gravitational force. Okay, everything's going to orbit around that sea. Everything is going to revolve around the sea. We also have a song go that way on. So in all different parts of what is going on, maybe kind of wrapping it back to see, maybe not quite as quickly as I just did, but eventually be coming back to see. That's kind of saying this is in the key of C major. That's how I know it is because I want to come back to see I can also write a song in a minor key. Okay, By using the exact same options in courts here, the sixth court in the road is going to be my minor key. And I realized that I've got three different Meyer chords in every row. Okay, Got three or four minor chords. But this six, which is a minor in the QC, is going to be my Meyer key. True minor key. So when we talk about the minor scale, um, that would be coming from the six chord. 123456 It's a minor. So if we wrote a song and we said, You know, I want to write something a little edgier, a little darker so I wanna have it be in a minor key. I still want to use all these courts, but I want to focus on the A minor. Great. Just revolt everything around that a minor. You can still use a lot of these courts. Just that you're going to think of the A minor is being the main focus. Okay, And that's how you write a song in a minor key. Um, so let's try that way you can hear it now. Just shifted everything because now we're in a minor key, even though we're dealing with the exact same courts. I just kept on bringing everything back to the A minor court, and so any parts. And before, when I was going through the parts of the arrangement, you could either be the entire song could be served in the minor or just a part of the song could be centered into the minor. What I mean by that is a great example is, but morally all. Marley had this technique that he used in a lot of his already where he would write. He's got verse, chorus verse course, and so the versus would be in a minor key. And then the chorus is would be in the relative major key. Bob Marley did that all the time. He did that for a time of his music. So let's pretend that, um, we're writing above moralism, so our versus gonna be in the minor key. So let's say work you relative to the Q C major. So we'll do our versus around eight miles. We can bang around course as long as we keep going back to a monitor. Wait, of course that he shifts to Major Theo way. First way too coarse sea. So come early to that all the time is part of limit. Makes it some writing really simple and interesting. And Graves, because he gets the most out of scale courts showing you the minor key and the major key all in same song, just going back and forth from one of the next. So that is a great technique that you can use in your own music. Um, so we started off by saying that any of the things that you can do in one key. You can do this in any of the keys. So as you're changing keys, feel for any experiment with this stuff? Um, and we can see here that we change keys. We start dealing with war bar chords, so bark words start to pop up. If you're uncomfortable with bark words that you're going to want to stick with the key that has a minimal amount of bar courts. KFC major is great for that. But if you're not scared of park works, then please. By all means, start shooting around a different keys. I would caution you if you hate playing bar chords or markers really difficult for you. If you pick a key with a lot of bark orders and your plan is your goings, you just avoid the bark words. You really limit your options. So be careful about that. Um, don't pick a key with a lot of bar chords if you're thinking you're not gonna play any of the work worse because they're too hard, because your options here just would become too limited and maybe missing some good court opportunities there. I'm not playing those courts, even though they're hard to do. They might be really good sounding. So key working. You can comfortably play all the courts so that you have access to everything that you could do is you're experimenting with coming up with your core changes. Um, and I think that about covers it for this video. Um, what you could do in one row, one key can be major and minor. This could be applied to all of the 12 keys. End. Of course, we are not simply limited to just rooting on the major or the minor for key. We could try some other stuff, and we'll talk about this later on. But we could do something like if we wanted to root on the second court. Okay, There are no rules. Just guidelines. Right? So if there were rules, then there would be a formula. No, say, write a song just like this, and it won't really be your soul because you did it just like I told you to. You're supposed to do different things. I'm supposed to try things, um, that you were told to do You just guidelines. But you could say I'm going to write a song based on the second quarter. Make this one center the gravitational force, Um, or you could pick the court. It's another common one in songwriting, of all styles of music, all styles of music. Because I have studied all styles of music and in all styles of music, there are generally four of the keys that are used to be rude on commonly, and, of course, is the 1st 1 Because that's the major. It would be like the major key. And it's the 61 because that's the liner keep. It's just a straight up plan on minor keys to 61 And then after that, there's two more. It's the second in the fifth. Okay, Second, which is called the Dorian. So you can have a song in the Dorian mode with Dorian Key, where you could have in the fifth, which is called the Mix O Lydian Key. Um, and so you'll see that sometimes Ondas, much as I would love it if we had a lot of songs written in the third and fourth, Um, this f just just just doesn't happen. They for whatever reason, those courts don't seem to hold strongly enough, but who knows? You could be the person that could write some songs that are rooted in those keys. That sounds really awesome. That's the whole point years. We're trying to do new things, always trying to do new things. So go contemplates the different keys, play around with being able to grab the major and the minor sounds from one key, try it in different keys and find some different keys that work well for you. And we're going to start putting our parts getting a little deeper into the different parts of the songs, and I'll see you in the next video. 8. Intros & Outros (page 11): Let's talk about intros and Paltrow's. We talked before about how the interest me Paltrow's, should work you into the song or work you out of the song. And they're both very similar. And how they do that. Sometimes when people are doing intros and ultras, they'll be the same. They will have the same music, use it songs they have taken you out of the song. And so that's something you could do. Or you could have something completely different for each one. Teoh be another added surprise element, something exciting, different. So I want to just do something basic for in Intro. So here what we've got is I'm going to say, Of course, we're in the Q c major still, and we're going to write a song in C major. So our intro is going to be simple. Okay, so I got a measure of see secret, and then I have a measure of escort and I want to do that whole thing four times. Do you see it? Enough measure of seeing a measure of death And where is he? The whole thing four times. So I just did this little bracket here. I went times for says, telling him to go see C N F c the enough see the NFC than enough. That's gonna be my intro. Okay, so just dealing with this piece right here can see the f time sports your whole thing four times. So the way it's written is going for beans on each one. Now. My my plan is that maybe once I get into the song, there's gonna be some struggling. I might be a little bit more bringing more energy into the music, you know? So maybe the song is going to start out just with some guitar strumming, maybe some struggling and singing. And then, as we get it past the intro into the song, maybe the release of drums or some keyboard or base or electric guitar who knows what may be just Mawr strumming right? So maybe it's just me and my guitar, and the whole song is just going to be in my guitar, only something lighter in the intro. And then once I get into the verse, we're gonna start struggling and bringing more energy into music. Okay, so I create that dynamic. And like we said, our analogy was the train the choo Choo train. So the choo Choo train is at the station. It is not moving. And people are getting on and you can hear the engine is starting to rev up, and the train is just starting to slowly move, and it's going to start picking up speed. And that's where in true is not to be. So if we just have four beats on each one, So very basic idea. What I wrote down here is going to be oh, way just a c chord and the F chord and did the whole thing four times. But when I want it gradually bring you into it even more than that, So going to try a picking batter? Okay, I'm going to do a picking pattern across the courts. So I was playing quarter notes, so I'm gonna try eighth notes, go one and two and three and four end for each measure. I'm gonna try a few different things here. Okay, So for the c chord, um, like okay, when I do that twice, just across the middle strings, that was one into end three words and then I'll try with the F court will go. Um bigger from Europe industry, Theo. Okay, so that's an option for us. We try another picking pattern. I'm just going to go like this for it. If you're trying to look closely at what I'm doing, I'm just doing I'm going to go through a very issue, different things and trying out all these different ideas. And when you're doing this when you're actually doing kind of like a riff or a lick like we're doing right now, you have your piece of paper. Just draw six lines on it and it's like the tab and just write down the picking pattern that you then you sell on you like it is good to try a few different ones out. So, you know, you didn't just go with the 1st 1 is going to try a few different ones out. So for the CME to go like this way works could be different. Just gonna do the same thing. But I'm just shifting down the string, OK, so I could do that. That works, too. There's a lot of different options here. Let me shift it down again. Straits, Theo. So I'm just picking on different strings as I'm changing the courts one into injury in Florence. And the thinking pattern could be whatever you really could be. Whatever. We're writing a song. So there's unlimited options here. Um, and that is going to slowly takes of the song because like I said, maybe when we get to the verse, we'll start strumming. And so we just want to do something gentle or for the intro to take us into It s O. That would be a good option for an interim. Something to just take you into it kind of shows. Here's what we're doing to see court in F court. But we're not banging on it yet, not strumming on it. What is picking through it? Doing something a little mellow. Now, the outro could be the exact same thing. Okay, we talked about that before if I wanted to do something different for the altro, but I wanted to use the same thing. So same thing would be I'm still going to see court in F court. Andi, I still dio times four. Um, cause you never work. It's all about the transitions. So when we're doing the in true were coming in from nothing coming in from silence so we can do anything we want that the best thing to do from silence is kind of easier way into the music because you're coming in from silence and then you're going into the next part, the little bit more energy. After that, we're getting to the altro. Getting to the end of the song were coming from all the energy, all the energy of the song, all the energy of music and trying to kind of concluded without it being some abrupt stop. So we want to sort of break down a little bit. So the true it can be the exact same or can have a little bit more energy than intro. So we're still very see enough. It could be maybe something. We're picking a couple strings at a time through the courts. The what I did was, um, at the end. I've got a secret myself. Do you see a measure of sea than a measure of f Times Force and the whole thing four times And then I have one c with symbol over here. Okay, It was like I I'm all almost curve up. Tom's got done in the middle. That's called off Ramada Ellen teaser for Modest. Sometimes you'll see them at the end of a piece of music. Basically, what it means is that you're going to just let the last chord ring out, okay? It doesn't have to end at any certain beach. Just let it ring out. So see with Ramana Reddy chord with Ramada symbol next to it, just basically ringing out until it gets so quiet the court stops on its own. So that's the way I like to do just to kind of show that it's not supposed to be. It just stops right there at the end of the strong so we could do for the altro. Just a variation on the picking that we did for the intro. Ondas just meant to be taking us out of the soul. So maybe we would do something for the Ultra where we would be doing a combination of strumming, picking so way. Something along those lines just have a little bit more energy than we started with Untrue . But Stills started bring down and come out. That's the basic idea between the interest in the Montrose now theme. The cords epics were pretty arbitrary just the fact that we were in the key of seeing Major . We said we could be doing a song in a minor key so we could be in a minor, right? Same scale courts as the C major. So what if we were doing a minor to enough? Okay, we used the exact same idea. So both of these intro and the Outro could both be like a minor tune effort, a minor to whatever court, whatever it is that you're writing could be a month to d minor a minor to G two g seven in minor to eat better. Whatever the court is they like. Well, course. Okay, You could have five cores were all seven chords or three chords. Wherever records you want is trying to do its simple to show you some ideas and approach, doing the interest on the interest. So if we're doing in line or tune F for intro last one didn't work at all. So Okay , a lot of different options there, And then, of course, for the outro, we do the exact same thing. Were is it where we're picking two strings at a time way. So in a different opportunities for what we could do is just a matter of what you like best . What sounds best to your or your creative vision is time. Okay, So I think you get the idea in trust Paltrow's you want Oh, he's into the song and he's out of salt. So just like we talked about with, we want the court of the end of a part to work. Well, with first quarter of the next four, there has to be a good transition there. There should also be a transition between the energy. Okay, We don't want to always be so abrupt, you know, off quiet to Slevin. Hard to quiet, to slam it hard. You want to kind of work your way up? Kind of like a train, you know, train is leaving the station core train is entering the station coming to a full stop. So you don't want the listener to have to work too hard? Teoh, get to that place emotionally. You want to do it for that? Make it really easy. Okay, so go start working on writing. Cool intro and a cool altro. You can save the altro for last. If you come up with a good intro. Um, then you can always kind of duplicate it for the altro. When you're done writing a song or you may say, You know what? I'm going Teoh do a variation of the intro for my altro and, um, and when you hear it, you'll say, Oh, just like how we came into this song like that was a little different. Okay, no rules. Just a lot of this. So we'll work on your intros. Paltrow's I'll See You Next video. 9. Verse (page 12): Let's talk about rating versus So a verse, as we said, is meant to be sort of the background music. While this story is told by the story, I mean the lyrics on DSO we want to create a forum where we can focus more of the lyrics in this story than the music. Not that it shouldn't be interesting, but it shouldn't be that interesting. We want to just have some good music to have his background for this story. Okay, so I'm going to give you some ideas on how to put together some cords for a good verse. And, um, there are no rules. These air just suggestions, but I'm going to explain myself as we go. Okay, so we're in the key of C major or for some of these examples, we are relative to the key of C major. Okay, um, so up here, I've got the cores that are available to us. The first example four verse would be going. See, according to an F court. Um, so we did this inner intro and outro. It was because I was anticipating that we might be doing something like this with the hearse. Let me explain why the f chord the F is the fourth court. So 1234 the F is the fourth. This is the 1 to 4. Progression is probably very most common. Um, movements in all music, certainly in pop music. Um, certainly in blues and jazz and bluegrass and folk, um, it is one of the most common progressions in most styles of music is one to force the simplest movement and one of the most common ones and part of the reason that it is. No, you could just say, because it sounds good and it does. It sounds good, but there is a deeper reason behind why it sounds good if we if we look at some of the other courts. For example, when we go to the fifth Court fifth chord, it's something that you see, but it's usually stamped up for something. The course. It's a pretty brilliant move. It's a big, big move on DSO when we go to the fifth chord, that's something that's a big move, and you want to save up your big move for the hook and for the course. Like we said, we're not looking to be that interesting just yet. We wanted to have some background music. If we go to the second cord, that is going to be. It could work, but it's not that big of a change. So it's kind of sounds like we're Goldring scale. I don't want to sit here, go through all these chords and explain why the fourth is the only good one. You know any of these could be good courts is just that The fourth happens to be a good harmonic movement. If we go to the third chord, the third course starts applying this harmonic device where the courts are stacked in thirds as the course themselves are built. And so when we start doing that harmonically, then we're starting to create thes sort of these tertiary stockings harmonically, which means that we're building in thirds. So that could mean that we're doing an extension of the court. It's, ah, music theory out of control, basically. But there is a better movement when we're going to 1/4. Not to say that a second the D minor, where the e minor, the third or even the G would be a good one. The a minor is one that you could see teetering back and forth between one and six. But you could do the D minor in the evening. You could do any court. There are no rules. I just want to show you one of the most common ones for reverse. And because it's common, I don't want to feel like, Well, I don't want to do something that everyone else does. Try it out and you can manipulated by using rhythms and you're picking pattern in trying different things like that. But like we said, there are going to, even though it is a common core change. Once we start getting into adding the melody on top of these cords, there are lots of different possibilities for us. So even though it's common core progression, once we start adding melody and there's a lot of ways for us to continue to manipulate our song, once we get into the melody, not to mention the rhythm stuff that we can do to it Okay, in our first example, uh, see to it sounds like way. Of course, we wanted to do something a little bit more energetic with our strumming throughout some teeth news way. Wait up to 16. We want to 60 few rests way. Now. Let's take a look at the second example. Just expanding the and on the idea of the one before matting in the five. But I'm moving it quickly, so we're not hanging onto it. So almost two beats of each two C's to F's two G's to EFS is kind of going to froze. Okay, what way? Let's add in the eighth notes to everything they want. End to end change three and four ends change. Good, Good, good, good, good, good. Okay. So something we could do. Um, what if our song isn't in a major key with foreign minor? All right, so we're gonna try some examples where we're doing it in a minor, Still relative to the C major scale courtroom. Um, but our first, a minor example. Going a minor to a D minor was interesting. Here is um obviously we're now in minor world, and so there's a lot of weaken starting off on a minor. Good. Any other court we want, Um, and by the way, we don't even have to start with a minor. Like I said, there are no rules. No middle so we could do anything you can imagine. So even if we wanted Teoh B and C, we don't have our first strong Buc court. Could be something else. Um, generally, here, the key is gonna be your first court. That's generally true. Not always, though. It doesn't have to be. You could start your progression on. Not the key. Okay, but generally it's going to be so this we're doing it. So now we're back in Liner World. So a minor is our first court. Going to D minor was interesting about this Is that I'm using the exact same intervals the same distance that I used a pure Okay, So when I went to see the F, it was 1234 wants the fourth. Okay, 1234 But now we're going a minor D minor. So what if I present that? A miner's about 112 34 So still doing 1/4 movement? Okay. 1234 To deem. Honor. Still fourth movements, just their different court, other miners. But I'm still going to get that fourth way way. Good list. Get a little 16th. That's in there. Okay, Okay. sounds good. And we're trying to build some background music to tell the story over to sing the story. Okay, let's look at the next example. 4th 1 So here, going Aymar de e minor. Do you are, um and we're going to beat science one doing the exact same thing here that we did here. Okay, um, going here we went. 145 which is 12345 I'm doing the same thing here when I add in the evening, You know, the a minor two de miners 14 also 1234 I thought you miners the fifth. This is the same distances seeing movements. Is this just from a modern perspective? Okay, this is us trying to get the same kind of feeling and movement, but from a modern perspective. Um, using the exact same skateboards was Listen to it way. Ah, way Do my direction of my strong differently All down versus alternating down and up Because hitting the base note first when I'm starving all down every time I had the basic first good. OK, so here is interesting to me, we could try. Um let's do this Bottom line and then we'll go here to the C f G F one. So that's up. Well, see how we're starting to get a lot of different movements going around surprises and exciting different changes. Okay, so when it comes to verse writing, you want to be careful of what it starts getting a little a little exciting if you have a lot of lyrics and a lot of millet, a lot of melody and layer going on over the verses. You don't want to distract too much from that, Um, with with too much interesting music. And I know that sounds counterintuitive. You want your music to be is interesting. All the time is possible, But really, the best thing you could do is to create a forum for the story and build it up, bring the music and make the music really interesting in certain points and bring it back down to a certain point. Going to be the chorus could be the bridge could be the solo. So they're going to be plenty of opportunities for you to bring the music of energy and to really, uh, to really showcase it. But over the verses you want to create background. So this is a way to do that. And if we can get a lot of course changes and still keeping background, that's even better because we want the music to be interesting, but not the focus for the verses. Okay, um and also we, um we have just barely been playing with the rhythms here we're going through. These courts were either going quarter knows eighth notes for a little bit of 16th notes, so we haven't really done too much with putting rests in. That's something that we could always do is to pop into more rests on bees are pretty basic . What I'm doing here is pretty basic. So we could absolutely expand on this. We could use more cores, used different courts. It just depends on what it is that you're trying to accomplish. So we could have a verse where we're just meandering through. We could try different tricks where we're grabbing difference if records were moving through the courts in a different way. Um, so, for example, with alarm to try something like I do every third chord. Good. See what happens if I try? Every third quarter really was C chord minor chord g chord. Then after G seven Teoh way, way back to see court played everything playing every single chord and have to be a minor and be back to see court. So that's like a truth that you could do. You could also do that by going every fourth court. Let's try that. Okay, let's go every fourth quarter. So we really see yes g seven that are going to go to the he butter Okay the way. And we did it. So we cycled through going using fourths eso This is something we could do. Those changes were not that abrasive and going through the thirds and go through the fourths. So that's something that you could do. You could also just walk ups, walk up the scale courts if you wanted to keep it pretty basic minor, because the point is that none of those changes are brilliant. They're okay. They're cool. This I'm good, but they're not brilliant. And we want to save up the brilliant for the course, and any of those would be good examples for stuff to do, um, over verse. So go work on that. And by the way, I mentioned this before It's west. Say one more time. All of this stuff can be done in any of the 12 keys. Okay, We're just right now sticking in the key of C major. But you've got 12 keys at your disposal. So you could try this out in any of the 12 keys. If there's a key that you like better where you just want a different sound. So feel free to experiment with this in any or all of the other keys. Um, and play around this, start working on some different verses were keeping notebook. I would have a notebook. Um, paper. Um, that's just your songwriting scrap. No notebook and start writing down ideas on there. And also, as you're doing this, recorded where the pieces just record 20 seconds. 30 seconds of what you're doing well for yourself. Playing it on your phone on your computer, on your device, record yourself just toe have just in case. Just in cases like, how was I playing that? Well, you can listen to it and you've also written it down on your piece of paper. Okay, So go work on putting together a good sounding verse and I'll see you in the next video 10. Chorus - The Hook (page 13): less work on putting together some great sounding courses. So we said that the chorus is the hook. This is the part of the song that people are going to remember over all the other person is all this is the part of the song that people will be singing, Um, the only part of the lyrics that they can remember the melody that they can remember. If there's only one part of the song that someone remembers of your song, it should be the course. And, of course, lyrically is usually the same words, same lyrics that are just starting over and over and over again. And so the song should be able to stand on its own, just with course. Eso We need the course to be brilliant. Okay, we need them to make a big statement. So let's go through a couple of different examples for courses. These air just ideas. There are no rules in song writing, just ideas, suggestions, Cem stuff that's worked well for other songwriters. That's all we're talking about. But it's always good to try to break new ground highly encourage. Good. Okay, so the first thing that we got and we're looking at these skill cords for the key of C major of top. Same as before. Um, so in the key of C major, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go see core to G court. Okay, this is 12 of five. All right? See, is the one 12345 the GST fifth. So we're going to go 1 to 5. So let's see what that sounds like. Sounds good. All right. You know, being my guitar just yet. Even though when we're really playing the course, we're gonna want to know all the instruments are gonna wanna go to war Velocity. Um, get a little bit more power and energy. Okay, so let's try that with this. Let's try with strong. Ah, driving based 16th notes. Um, go with some 16th. So it's a one e. And to be end of three and 4123 just like that. Let's throw in a couple of rest since about 16 progression. Okay, Good, good, good, Good. So we can already see a one possibilities, rhythmically. Now let's go back to the eighth notes for just a minute. OK, so we're going like Let's throw in a couple rests on the eighth notes, um, on a rest of DRI, that's my play. Seeing the ends of three and four. Good. All right, so we get a lot of possibilities. Just two courts, Right. One of the five CNG. Now, let's try the 2nd 1 Um, to kinda see to these RG a measure of for these on the F like that one. What? Now, when we're writing our courses and our verses and all of our parts, we may just come up with will say, OK, maybe I like that a lot. Um, how many times don't want to play it play place. So if I want twice, I do my bracket in the good times too. Just for myself, for my own notes. When I'm writing it down Times four in my bracket. Times four for times, six times eight or however many times I want to play it. Um, Okay, so let's do this. 2nd 1 was add in some eighth notes to Okay, once you end three have foreign one into a three for it. Okay, good. I think, uh, 16th this stress 16th. This good sounds good. Sounds good. is getting us there. It's exactly what we want. For course. Okay, keep in mind, we haven't even touched a melody yet. So once we start adding a melody on top of these courts, we have lots of opportunities to make this thing really brilliant and powerful. So we just want the course on their own to stand on their own. Then what we have melody on top of it is just going to be wonderful. Okay, so what if we are writing a song in a minor key? So how do you have a good powerful course when you're in a minor key? All right. So let's look at that. Um, the third example here go to be. It's on the A minor, um, two of G to that to the G way. Okay, Um, sounds familiar to me on and, you know it's OK, Teoh sort of borrow an idea from another song. It sounds like a really famous, uh, songs course to May. I don't want to say it, but I'm sure you've heard it before. Hello. I don't want to rip it off. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that the rhythm, the tempo and just some of the important things about the the dynamics of the song. Our unique There gonna be a little different so I could make my own good. So, um, going to try this one with a thats good way. Good, good, good, good, good. Okay, let's try something totally different. So in the last example, here we are. We're sort of doing the reverse of this. Of the third example, we're going to start our chorus, not on the of the core of us. The keys of key is a minor. In this case, we're going to work up to it. So we're gonna come off from the after the g to the A minor. Okay. F g m r. Right. Um, and let's also do something else to manipulate this one. Let's lowers have away down a slower tempo way down. Should give us a much different sound. Okay, um, cause what if we're writing a song in a minor key at a slow tempo? You still want to have a good, powerful horse? Let's try. It's already on, like, three. You're that works total. It works. All right, let's add in eighth Okay, one and to all right. Even better. Let's try with sixties, that's one E and two e and a 34 tonsils. It's really else. So that is how we get a powerful course in a minor key or a major key off. And like I said, we have these course they stand on their own when we have melody on top of it is just going to be icing on the cake. It's going to be great because we have so many different possibilities. So we just want to make sure that we don't watch it. When we get to the military, we want to make sure that melody stays in line. Powerful, brilliant. Um, because I find that we also have a lot of options there. We could go on a few different directions with melodies. We want to make sure that we keep the energy level high on the course, of course, is the hook and theological should be the best lyrics of the entire salt. So, um, this is some credit easiest for writing courses, writing hooks, and, of course, we could be using these other courts. The other course that we haven't looked at there's a lot of different options for writing. Of course, if I said to you when you write me five courses in the key of C major five courses in Kiev minor, you should be able to do it easily because you've got enough options here and you'll come out with a bunch of different ideas. Now when you're writing and trying to come up with these different parts, especially the course trying different things, don't just try something and and say, OK, that's it. I mean, it might be it. It might be it. You might get on the first try. That happens for sure, but it might not be it. I mean, there might be something better if you keep on looking. So I had a hard time with that concept when I first learned it was a pro songwriter told me that did not go with your first thing. Keep looking, even if even if l of your first thing was great, keep looking just in case. The other courts, the melodies, Thea, other lyrics keep looking for other options, just in case there's something better, Um, and you may be thinking, well, you know everything I come up with is going to be brilliant. Everything I come up with is going to be genius. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. But maybe there's something even more brilliant. More genius if you keep digging a little deeper. So just explore all the cords, all the different options, and write these down right down the good ones and the ones you don't like. Put a big X over and the ones that you do like circle. Make sure that you document what you're working on. Okay? All right. So I think that about covers, courses, go work on writing some good courses. Good hooks, Andi setting us up to start putting some great abilities on top of your courts. And I will see you in the next video. 11. Bridge (page 14): Let's talk about writing really good bridge. That bridge is meant to be a new shift in the soul. We're still staying with the original skill cords, but we want to take an opportunity to go in a different direction temporarily with this all . And so what we're gonna do is we're going to play with some of the unused courts or we're going Teoh, go with temporary keys. Different temporary key. Um, one thing about that is if we've been focusing on kids, see or a minor now we're going to start looking at some of the other courts besides see in a minor to focus on temporarily while we're on the bridge and the bridge just like everything else. We want to make sure that our transitions are good. Okay, keep saying this cause it's really, really important. Um, when you're putting all your parts together, the parts of your soul you've got your intro verse, chorus, bridge um, your solo in your true when you're putting them next to each other, you want to say the last quarter of my intro is going toe transition really nicely into my first court of my verse, The last court of my verse is going to sound really good, followed by the first quarter of my chorus, the last quarter of my choruses going to sounds good next to the first quarter of my bridge . The last quarter of my bridge is going to sound good going back into the first quarter of the chorus. Transitions are really important, so it may stand on its own. Very good. For example, you may have a goods having bridge, but if it goes into it, it's like this big, weird jump that's too much that could be dangerous. Or if coming out of the bridge back into the chorus is too much of a jarring change, that can be bad. So you want make sure that the transitions they could be difference, but you don't want them to be that you don't want to sell to difference. Um, and again, this is very subjective. Um, okay, let's take a look at the bridges. So I came up with two quick idea is that we can use, and so far let's just take a quick listen, what we've got so far, some of the ideas we've got the general theme of what we've done. So we've got, like, way, Theo, course way using. Um So if we were doing something like that and then we tried example number one. So they got a transition. Used to be good. So that courts example is going so coming off of an F court. Lefcourt is in the last quarter of the chorus. So I'm gonna try going into this d minor chord for my bridge way Sounds all right. It sounds all right. What I'm doing is so doing the course, see, g f The last port of the course was F. And I'm going into my breaks. I want to see what the f to the D minor on this first example sounded like It sounds OK. Um, I in my bridge, this first example I am trying to use some of the course that we haven't really used much yet. So the, um, de miner in the IV iron, Those were the two that we haven't really messed with too much yet. A little bit, but not much, so I don't really get them into my bridge to try and get different sounds to try to take this song a slightly different direction we'll keep it in the same, uh, same solar system. So one more way. 16 throwing in a couple of arrests. They're basically when I say arrests, I'm just not making contact and keep swinging my hand. One E two, Unit three and a four una Just not make contact on all those drones to get arrested. So way now. Now it's important that I'm able to get back into the course again. So from going back into the course after the bridge, maybe I'll do this four times or eight times. We'll go through this whole thing for a time. Something like that, maybe twice. Who knows whenever I feel like, um, but I need to be able to get back into the course. So the question is, Is that a minor going to be strong enough to take me back into the sea court? Don't know. We have to listen to it to see okay, go through one pass of the bridge and then I'm gonna try to go back to the course. C o. Yeah, it's good enough. Enough. It's not super powerful, but it's good enough work, and we can pump it up with the melody when when we start playing with Melody, we can use that to ramp it up to kind of give some extra boost. So that is an option for Bridge. And by the way, we are not even doing anything that's really risky. So we were just strumming course. At this point, we could be adding in some rifts. Licks to hammer ons, pull off slides, bends. There's a lot of little things that we could be doing to as frills into the to all of these parts. You'd example? Just do this one more time. Dio. All I was doing is I was just playing around the court to do some walking and some ham rods pull offs kind of within the notes of C major scale. I know the notes that I could go for, but what you would be doing is for your cord. You be looking for some little notes that you can do Cem walks and some little riffs around to kind of move one. Of course, of the next, um, and when you get something that is really good, you want to make a note of it, because if I if I do that every time I was playing that bridge, but my riffs were always different. My licks rule is different. That's not good. I want my legs to kind of I want to get my best licks and I want to make sure I have them in their every time. So I want to make a note of do this lick over the d minor chord. Do this leg from the E minors of the A mater. So make a note of it. Write it down. Document this stuff. Okay, let's take a look at these. Second option for a bridge. Um, e minor F e minor D minor. See what sounds like way good, Good, good. Good. Doing some 16th. No strumming on that one. Okay, now we've got two considerations. The transitions going into it and come out of it. Okay? So I'm gonna do my course again and see if because I'm coming out of the chorus from the F court, remember? So I need to see if the F court to this e minor chord is going to sound okay. Does a great way. Okay, The kind of works. Now, what kind of works, too? So what I did was. I went from chorus into the bridge, the second bridge and then one past. And I went right back into the course again because my second transition as I needed to make sure that going from this d minor back into the sea court, the chorus was gonna sound good. So, um, if it didn't, I was gonna have to change it. Either. He's the 1st 1 were changed that court to something that was going to sound better going into the C chord. But it works. This is to overtime in chorus. Second bridge course. Okay, It works good. So, um yeah, I'm conflicted. I like both of them. So what I would be inclined to do is, um, I worked Consider, if I wanted to make the song long enough, know either combined these or on my used to bridges. No reason why I couldn't use two bridges If I had two bridges that I really liked and I couldn't see any good reason to get rid of one of them, Then I might use both. So, for example, um, on a go intro verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge verse or after the first bridge, I go into the chorus that I might do another verse that I might do the second bridge. And then, of course, and then solo another stuff. You see what I'm saying? I may try to find a way to stick both bridges into the song in different parts just because I like having all this different stuff like this song going in different places and keep in mind I keep saying this when we start putting the melodies on top is going to give us a lot of different options and powers going a lot of real life to the song. So Okay, so, um and of course, you could always out of your riffs in your licks, which is going on at a little bit more life to it. So go work on putting together an interesting bridge. And what we did in the 2nd 1 that I like a lot is the D minor. The evil are two quarts that we really didn't get a whole lot off play before. So we gotta love modern de Meyer in the mix. One of the point with bridge. I know that we've been talking about doing a C major. Um, you were rooting a solemn QC measure. And we've also talked about writing the song in the queue a mile, so to do minor song. So you just take the same exact approach. If we were in the key of a minor now, obviously the first bridge would be we have to write it a little differently because we're trying to do something. That's a shift from where we were when we were in the key of a minor. We had a lot of d minor going on. So doing our first court to De Meyer access, we were using a lot of D minor. When are a minor key and we're not gonna end with a letter that would make sense. So when we were in the minor key in Cuba Minor, we want these blood court. So we were using before. Okay, um, same goes for the second bridge. We were using a lot of e Meyer and D minor. So just normally with verses and courses of the A. Meyer So, um, yeah, I just want makes sense to put them in the bridge. We want to use the course that we were not using in the bridge um as you want to watch your transitions. So that is one of the most important things. You want the song to flow nicely. So good transitions. So go work on putting together a bridge used to courts that you haven't used yet And make sure the transition's work nicely tested out going into it and coming out of it, and I'll see you in the next video. 12. Solo (page 15): Let's talk about putting together a really good solo for your song. So we talked about how, uh, you don't want to just wing it when it comes to your solo. If you were playing yourself live so where playing it out, then you can just have a good time within wing it and student extended solo to do a 30 minute long solo if you want Teoh, but for recording your song or if you were pitching it to maybe someone in the industry that you were trying to sell your song Teoh. Keep it very short, very short and have it pre written. Probably note for note. So we're not wing it. I would have it completely written. And, um, I'm going to show you a couple of difference of methods for putting your solo together. Um, so the tried and true method of guitar solos is that they will be played over the chorus or the cords of the chorus. So imagine the chorus is going on and the singing and then the singer stop singing and the guitar solos starts. And so, but the guitar style will be played over the courts of the course. This is a very typical scenario. A lot of times chorus is going to be the same as the solo. Sometimes bands will write a new part for the solo, as in new courts, for the soul to be played over like a bridge on and it could be the bridge or could be a second bridge or third bridge, which is going to be used for the Marcelo. A lot of bands that have lots of solos, um, will do things like write bridges specifically for guitar solos. So there might be a 16 measures or 32 measures or 64 measures Bridge written just for the guitar solo. Different courts for the review solo that comes back to subversive in the Koreas. And there may be a bridge, which is all new cords for a new solo, but the typical rock and pop song is going to have the cords of the chorus, And so he played on top of that. So that's what we're gonna take a look at it right now. So in our example, we are going to go with the CGF chorus. Um, and we're just kind of trying different things here, So cgf course. Um And then what I did was I wrote, um, soon challenger of your on the white board. Six lines. And this is what you're gonna do with your piece paper. You're just gonna write six lines. And as you're trying out different things on the guitar, you are going to write it down under tab, the notes that you like That sounded good. And I am just doing a row basic one pass guitar solo Wish I wrote down. And, um, you may want to take this idea and just expand on it and just keep on writing different parts to do four bars or eight bars or 16 bars. Just keep on writing parts. What some, um, musicians would dio is they may just have, like, a real simple solo just repeated a few times. Um, you will hear certain guitar players who are not not virtuosos their basic guitar players. But they're pretty good songwriters who would use this method where they would just write, have a little bit that sounds good and just played a few times and be done with it. Okay, so we've got I've got my guitar plugged into my and my looper pedal. So we've got the courts, of course, which are? Ah, put Looper. So we could hear what this solo sounds like on top of it. So So what I think is on trying Teoh get a good Sanick solo. I want the notes to sort of reflect what's going on with the courts. So the two beats of the C chord trying to get some notes off that are around a C court. So got some see notes here that are geek or trying to get some notes. Stuff fit into the gene core. Do right here and then over the F court only gets notes that fit with the deaf. So he kind of bounced down here until I had this f note. So all my notes are pretty simple, and they're all just reflecting the cords that were going on S o what this sounds like, is I Can I just come up with that with them? I think it kind of works with it. You could put any rhythm you wanted to. It's a great idea to record it with your phone or computer or device. Just get your quarter and courted. You probably don't even know that it's got a recorder. Might be called a voice memo or something like that. But some around there there is probably a reporter built into it. So find it, use it and start recording stuff. Let's see what it sounds like with the courts. Way sounds great, Totally works. So if my solo was going to be the nose is gonna play this four times in these courts. No, I would be a good short and sweet guitar solo. Um, you know, and I may be playing it up. Inactive, maybe. Do it spends on as slides. I may try toe frill it up with some techniques. Um, gives some more of. I brought odes, bands, slide in some of the nodes and just trying to make these few notes right here sound as sweet as possible. Every single note should be given special attention to sound as good as I could possibly make it. But from a from a song writing perspective, this is a good starting point for guitar solo. So you do this Times four work on my guitar techniques to make it sound as good as I can. And, um, and that's it got a guitar solo. Now I may want to do something more in depth in that I may say, Well, I like that. That's pretty good. But I want more. So then I will just keep on experimenting. So this is the first part, and then we'll do this again. Something else other knows that work with Secret geek or the F chord. Go until I get something good there. Do 1/3 part fourth part, and then I'll just tile together. Now, just like everything else that we've been talking about, we will make sure that our transitions are good and makes sense. So we want our notes to tie into each other nicely, so we don't want it to be disjointed. And we don't want to seem like it doesn't make sense. Like there was this idea that, or there that idea and just took these ideas and put them next to each other as to flow as to seem like one thought. Okay, so you're always going from one note to the next. The last notes of the first last moved to the first note. Um, so when you are putting your solo together, make sure it flows and make sense like it's one thought, Um, and it's a great idea to pre write your solo, because what you could do is to give herself just one measure, were maybe four measures. And then from there you've got a theme. And so there you go watching point. So if you wanted to do an extended solo, if you're playing live or if you're jamming your sewing with friends, you can just you have the theme and you can do an extended solo theme. I mean, you've got the basic notes, Melody, and, um, you can kind of play around with that Milady that created embellished Millie we've already created. And this also could give you some ideas for when you start working on the melody for the lyrics, which we will be doing here shortly. Um, and by the way, the the way that I was kind of approaching this was by using the C major scale. So if you if you said well, we're Q C major. So go for the C major scale. Now, if we were doing something in the key of a minor, if this was one of our A minor courses, guess what? Using the a minor scale be looking for notes. And so maybe our chorus was the F g A minor. In which case that would be trying to find notes that fit from F G the A minor would for little Millie short, sweet, that just fit with the A minor. Of course it was juicing. Process it. Either. Repeat that four times where I could come up with three war of, um, and stream altogether. Um, and then I would have my Marcelo out recording it on my device. I'm writing it down piece paper with six lines in the tab of making notes so that tomorrow , when I come back to play my solo again, I'm not trying to remember how to do it. You don't want to be in that situation. So you want to make sure you write it down right away. Like while you're holding your car right after you come up with it the second you come up with it, write it down and recorded. Don't let don't take a break. Don't go and then come back because you're not gonna remember it telling you you will not remember. Write it down for it right away. Otherwise it will. We go on. Good. Um and so I think that about covers it for guitar solos. You could just mournful work by approaching it this way. And if you know me that you know that I'm a huge believer. Improvisation. I love improvising, love winging it. I love being creative in the moment, but that is not a great approach when it comes to song writing. And I have made mistakes with that passed by leaving in too much space for the for the live improvisation when the thing that is called for is to have it perfectly written pre written solo. Um So, um, take that, Aziz. You want Teoh and go work on your guitar solos. I'll see you in the next video. 13. Pre-Chorus (page 16): Let's talk about pre courses. The idea of the pre course could be applied to any part of your soul. So the pre chorus could be thought of as a pre verse or could be used as a pre solo ah, pre bridge. Um, the pre chorus is. It's a miniature bridge that's used to get from one part of the next, and the rial function of the pre chorus is Teoh. Build up the anticipation of what's coming. So we know that the chorus is meant to be the most exciting part of the song. The part with the highest energy, the most memorable melody. And so we want to do you lay the, uh, delay the gratification of what is to come because we know that we're heading to the course , and we want to just take our time getting to it and build it up with recourse. Okay, now, as we've said several times already, we want to make sure that our transitions makes sense. So we want Teoh think that were coming from, and we're going, um, so in our first example okay, we are coming from, let's say the verse and then we're going into the course of the pre course is going to go in the middle of the verse and the course. So what we're doing with the verse one of the things we're doing with the verse was just D C and way First, Any sense going into the e minor? Okay, so one more time, then going to the first pre course. It sounds good. Now we want to make sure that that transition is gonna be good going into the first quarter . Of course, our course is C g f. So it's a secret. So we want to make sure that the G to the C chord is gonna be good ISS because 5 to 1 is always gonna sound good. It's a brilliant, powerful change, so we know it's going to work. Let's listen to it anyway. Okay. So going here into the course. Yes, it works. Okay, let's listen. Do it one more time. Let's go. The last time, the verse in the first free chorus and then into the course. Okay, way. It's great. That sounds great. Okay, So free courses work now, we could go just directly from the verse into the course, or we could use the pre courses. Our choice. Let me give you 1/3 option. We could, um, save up the pre chorus for sometimes. So, for example, will go verse chorus. Then the next time we over scores and then maybe the next time we reverse pre course. Horace. Um, so that's an option to only use the pre course sometimes sometimes we'll just go directly into the course without recourse. Sometimes we'll use it. Your fourth option. Um, first free course, second pre course. What I mean is, we're gonna always use a pre course, but we have different pre courses that we're gonna use to really make the music interested . Whoa, that's a lot of a lot of stuff going on. But, um, that is a really followed out arrangement. If you were doing something like that, you're using different pre courses is like using different Burges. We're gonna have first bridge and second bridge, and they're going to be different. Court changes, different core changes, different melodies, um, or could be different. Court changes. Sam Melody, We'll talk about that later on. Um, but if we did alternating pre courses, that's another option that we could use if we happen to have a 2nd 1 That sounded good. Um, have not tested the 2nd 1 out. So let's try this second pretty course to see if it sounds good. Let's just listen to myself. Yeah, it sounds good by itself. I want to test the transitions now. So let's see where to go from the verse CFCF area from verse into the second recourse and then into the course. Okay, Now, I know it's gonna sound good going into the course because I've got the same ending than before. The G chord is going to sound good. Going into the sea court of the course we're really looking for is to see if it sounds good going from the, uh, the last quarter, the versus an F to see if that sounds good going into this d minor court, it's just it de monarch. Or there we try that again. Way. Yeah, that works. Okay, so imagine this, right. I'm going to do verse first. Recourse. Um, of course, having a diverse second pre course, course way, way. They both work. They both have. Great. So we're really starting. Get rich arrangement now because we're adding all these different parts and they all sound good. Now, this is going to give us a much greater task when it comes to writing the melody. Because we have to make sure the melody works well with the course that we've got. And since we're getting all these different ports is gonna give us extra work to do when we're coming over the melody. But that's part of the fun. At the end of it, we're gonna have a really, really wonderful song, a lot of great music, great music. So, um, go work on some pretty courses that you can use. Um, and the best way to start out writing a pretty course is to start by looking at a course that you've got good. Don't write the pre course until you've already written the chorus. So look at the course that you have. Look at the first court, the course and say, Okay, how do I get into this first chord? So, like the last quarter of you pre course should go right into the first quarter of your course and a five court is a great way to transition into it. So if the first quarter of your choruses a C or where the first quarter in the row is 12345 The fifth Corps is going to be a great last quarter of your pre course because you're gonna wanna going 5 to 1. It's gonna work every time. So go work on coming up with and also pre chorus or two or three, and I'll see you in the next video. 14. Melody Note Options (page 17): Okay, let's start working on putting some melodies together. Melody is what we are going to be. See, that's what we're going to attach to the lyrics. Okay, so the harmony is the courts, and Melanie is the the lyrics singing the solo But we've got the solo covered. So and we've got all the courts covered. We have all of the cords for all of the parts for a song. We've got the arrangement and we've got our own courts put together. We've got the rhythms So we've got this song pretty well fleshed out. At this point, we just need to get Cem melodies to go over the courts and lyrics that we can attach to Melody. So, uh, this I'm going toe bring you guys directly into the most powerful Melanie writing tool that songwriters use. And it is the arpeggio, um, usually in guitar lessons. Arpeggios are kind of scary thing because it's there's a lot of music theory involved in understanding arpeggios, learning arpeggios. So I put a lot of thought into how to make this as easy for you as possible because we're not here. Teoh, get all into the mechanics and the theory of guitar music kind of stuff. We want to start writing songs. What? The tools to get the creativity of us and onto the paper, not to the recording. So I've got a great, easy way to start working on melodies getting into Europe. NGOs. Okay, so at the very beginning of the course, we did some guitar basics, and I showed you the chromatic scale where we were counting to find the notes on the strengths. I hope you've worked on that a little bit. If not, please go back and review it. Three chromatic scale. We're going to start using it right now. Um, so I have these two basic shapes appear that I'm sure you it is a little miniature major or video and a little miniature minor arpeggio. That's all we need. We need a little mini shape for Major. Many shape for a minor, both in the key of G. We know that because the high note is a Gino. Both times the third fret. So here we've got 33 and four for the G major. So the high note people started line. Oh, so is the fried third, Fred and the fourth and then the minor is all third for us. So the third front third front on So when is all the third front? That it's a minor arpeggio, which we use for minor courts? And when it's third fret third fret and then fourth friend or one fret higher on G Street, that is G major. Or did you were a major shape arpeggio? Okay, so this is important because we are going to plug this in wherever the court is telling us to play that every time the court changes, we're going to do a different arpeggio, and we're going to just plug it in wherever the court tells us to. So, for example, if we had a G major corgis to Jean Court, then we would go to the third fret at 123 because it's G. We know that because we counted it up with the chromatic scale. We know because I wrote it down here. But if we didn't have it written down here, always say's Well, look, Fergie in the high e string. OK, it's the height Eastern Yes, sure G So years G. So now I have a G chord, so I'm going to plug in my major shape. And those are my three are Paju knows that I need if I had a G higher court, for example, that I was just do 333 i, which is my minor arpeggio shapes Just plug in whatever the court tells me to do. If I was looking for if I had a minor course So I need to use your kid you to find a minor foursome e g sharp 1/5 fret and we said a minor. So I have to play the liner ship. Those three treasury, it's all the same. Frets. So it's gonna be 555 Noser, my three notes. Okay, um quick bit of theory. What is arpeggio? Arpeggio is just the notes of the chord. It's usually played like a scale. So we're just taking the court whatever the court is, and we are identifying all of the different notes from that court one at a time. And arpeggios are the ultimate songwriting tool for millet ease. The reason for this is because we're going to write melodies based on the arpeggios, and this is going to give us notes that blend perfectly with airports perfectly okay. These are these air like you cannot go wrong. So as long as you followed a couple of steps, I'm showing you right now. You're gonna come up with beautiful, perfect melodies every time, every single time. Great, um, where you could get in trouble reading abilities is when you start using the full scale so you can use modes you can use a full scale on, and this will get you. There could be some interesting ideas, and it could get you some sounds that the arpeggios will not give you because there's so many options. But because there's so many options you can also pick knows that are not as strong. The arpeggios air Onley strongest there only great notes When I'm working with guitar students and I started teaching them, have a solo music scales has using things like that. Um, I will. Most of the time I will have them learn how to play Children salts. These are adults, but I want them to learn how to play Children. Songs like the farmer in the Dell on the itsy bitsy spider and row, row, row your boat and all that kind of stuff. Because Children songs are really simple melodies, their memorable and they are mostly written using orchids units and that support because when you're learning how to solo on the guitar, you want to learn how to build a cohesive solo that makes sense and then also follows the courts and so Children Songs is a great way to learn how to do that. Because thes Solans are very simple. They are built using your pet Jews, and they are perfect melodies, perfect melodies. There's not a single bad note in a silvered song, so we're going to use that same approach here with or saw right now. I don't want you to think, Oh, so we're writing to the results. We should be so lucky. But no, we're not. We're not ready Children, something. We're ready. Some really cool songs for us. We're just using a tool that all the best songwriters use and it is their videos. So here's how it works. This is going to go in kind of like two parts. And so the first part is being able to find your pigeon knows, and this is how we do it is by going to the High Notes string and of whatever the court tells you to do, and you pour it into shape. Okay, The major shape is Fergie s 334 in the minor shape is 333 But whatever the route is, you go up to it and you find the shape. So down here, I've read three court examples. Okay? C chord F court in a mire. Ford. So let's start with our C court because we've been dealing with C a lot. All right, so the quarter seat, we need to find the arpeggio notes, so we have to find a C on the high e string. Okay, Chromatic scale. Counting up E string. You f sharp. G g sharp. A a sharp B c. Remember, we go right from B to C. We go from eat f were from being to see So it's here on the eighth Fret. Okay, it's a c major court, so it's gonna be 88 on nine. Those there are three notes. You good. So those are the three notes of the sea Court. So these three notes are actually all of the notes that make up our our full see court. If we were analyzed them, we would find that no. So see your energy, your e good. So if we look at our C court, see e g on a C on E. So it's all C's, C's and G's. And so what? I what I do and what you need to do this you need to when you find the note. This is maybe a little painstaking for you, but this is the best way for you to get the perfect melody when you find your secret. Count up. Dear arpeggio, shape your three notes. You're gonna have to count up on each string and find the name of each of those three notes and write them down right next to the court. It's what I did right here. See, e g. I put in princes, so I know that the notes of my C court or C E g. We're going to use this later. Okay, Right now, just trying to figure out what my options are. What notes I could use for my melody or my C court. Now I know. See court See, e g. Because I used my because you're sure to guide me next. I haven't left port. Great. So I'm going to count to my f e f this F major someone employed in my major shape. Just 11 on two. Now I'm in a Taliban each string and figure out what the note new Mrs He F says F B c. So see in this G G shirt says in a so f c. Okay, so I write that down, thanks to my F court, wrote F a C. If I look at my F court, I could even look at my full. The bar board and I have f note and see what f A out in a C note. So they're all EFS A's and C's. That's all I have. And so, even though we've got all these different strings and those that were playing their Justin mix of these three notes, and that's gonna be true for every single major chord and every singer, every single minor chord they're just going to be made of three notes just got jumbled altogether. And that's why this simple little arpeggio shape is just three different notes that we need . We need to know what they are, and so we jumped him down, okay, drop down right next to the court. Last one. We've got a minor. We already did this, but we'll do it again. So a Myers cam about the high e string A minor e f sharp e g sharp A Okay. And it's minors with Stop doing my minor shapes. It was 55 on is a is e f after g sharp A Okay, I read that down and then was this one so B c c sharp d d sharp e says e. So write that down. And then what's this one? So G string g sharp. A sharp B C c. So I write that down, so a e and c OK, so I write that down right down a c. Um, I have of running the arpeggio notes down in order of the scalp. Um, but it's funny, doesn't it? Really Does not matter. What were you right there? And you're going to figure out life you're in just a little bit. So now that we know what these notes are, we want Teoh play around with using them together. So, for example, when we have a seat court waken play e note, it's were you note. So I just had my e string so that, you know, could be part of my melody. Or I can use a G note Jean over here, or I've got my c note. Obviously, which is part of my C court. Theo. A lot of those b R options for picking a melody note over the Sea Court and is now that we have to pick one, we can use one of our over to evolve or three. We can use all three of them to put together a string together melody over the C chord if we want Teoh. Um so we were just using the arpeggio shape to identify what the notes are. Once we know notes are we can start bringing back down here to a place that's maybe more manageable for you. You may be more comfortable counting up from open because it's a little closer to nut. You might already know what these notes are from playing or may just be easier. Just cause you also count is high. So ultimately it's fine. We're gonna bring it back down here to start piecing together are melodies, and this is where the real fun stuff starts to have it. But the thing that I want you work on right now is ah, wine you to go through some of the course that we worked on and start figuring out what these notes are so right down. Like, for example, of d minor. So for deem, iReport and I want you to count up, go to D minor, write down the names of each of those notes you're going out to kill up and stand. You're gonna identify counting up on each string so you can identify that note. Write it down, make sure you can it properly, so it's counted twice. If you have to make sure you get the right note support, it will be one of the notes of the court. So you will be one of the notes of the court. If you check it against the court, that's a good way to do it. Um and we've got the G chord. We've got the monarch ord. We have the e minor chord s court. Um, Chan's secret G chord. I think that covers everything. Um, So look as each of the cords identify the notes and job down the names above the court about the reason that you really need to get good at doing this on your own is because we are gonna change Jesus a point. You're going to change cues. You're ready, Song. Different key. The key over then see, were a minor. May I read something? D you flat? We're a So when you start changing keys, you're going to need to be able to find the notes from each court. So this is an easy, easy way to do it. And like I said in the next video, I'm going to show you how to start string these together to start creating perfect abilities. Right now, we've identified the nuts, so we know what our options are. So these are are known options and in the next video, because we're putting them together and actually making melodies so pretty excited about that. So start going through your towards your basic chords and finds the arpeggio notes. Write them down next to the court and I'll see you in the next video 15. Connecting Melodies (page 18-19): Let's talk about connecting our melodies. Now that we've talked about how to identify the possible notes that we can have, well, every court is being played. We want to figure out a way to pick these notes and to connect them as the cords were going is the course of going by. And we want tohave smooth melodies. So if we were going to sort of connect the dots, if you think that there's no cure for the scored and there's a note right here, this court and no right here in this court, if we were going to connect those dollars with line, we wanted to be a smooth and straight A line as possible. We don't want it to be doing these big jumps and my big jumps. What I mean is, we don't want to be jumping several notes every single time. We don't wanna be going, um, like, for example, if we're on a C note, then we don't want to be being doing a big jump to a G note because that's a lot of jumps you're going to see d E F G big jump. What we want to do is we want to do the smallest jump possible. So, for example, for on a C note, If we have an opportunity to go to a D note, which is just one away, then that would be better than jumping all the way to the G note before on the C note that we have an opportunity to go to a B note, which is one backwards. Also one way. It's better than doing the big jump to the Gino, so we want to do the smallest movements possible. This is one of these secrets I would say to creating a smooth melody is you want to have the smallest movement possible from note to note from court to court. Um, and the way that we're going to do that is by looking at our three Arpege Eunice 3/4 tones , and we're going to choose the one that is the closest to note that we're all so we'll take a look at that in just a minute. Well, the whole point of what we're doing writing melodies and we are going to be singing or someone is going to be singing these melodies. Maybe it will be an instrumental melody. Maybe there will be no vocal being will just be playing it or some instrument will be playing this melody. But a lot of times it'll be song. And so when you are matching up the lyrics, the words Teoh the notes. You can kind of at the note as many times as you need to in order to get to match up with syllables. So that's one of the things that we'll talk about. There's a little bit later on, but you want to think about how many syllables are in each word that you're using. And so, for as many syllables as word has, you have to hit the note that many times eso every syllable is a note. That's the easy way to think about it. And so when you're ready your lyrics, you'll kind of consider that, um, or you'll have to just play the notes several times in order to get that many souls for the word for when you're actually going to be seeing it. Okay, so I've got two examples I want to talk about, Um, the were doing the verse example of the sea courts of the F court because that one pops up along, talked about and then later on, we're gonna do the bridge courts because we've got a couple of reports there so we can experiment. Quoted that and we're just sticking with Europeans units. So, um, as we're going along, we want to look for these smallest movement. Now, what we did was for each court, we started off a little homework. We wrote down the cords, so this the courts diverse. And then we did our arpeggios where we looked for the notes off the for each court. We looked at the three arpeggio notes, and then we wrote those down. So already did that work for you. Um so often, See cord, we have C e g. The notes. We have C J. And then for the F it's f a C. Those are the three notes. Now, the reason that we use the arpeggios instead of just going for the courts because you could look at the courts and say, Well, it's just the notes in the courtroom, and that's true. The reason the arpeggios is faster and cleaner is because the courts will have a lot of redundancy, a lot of the same notes, and they won't be in order either. They'll be mixed up in different words. So the three notes and there will be a lot of repeats. So it just takes you a lot longer. And sometimes it's harder to see what the order is supposed to be of the three or veggie onus. So doing our little system of the major shape or the minor shape is a lot faster Way to do it. Now we jot down the names of the notes, and then ultimately, what we're going to do is we can focus down here. So this is going to be easier for you to count. And we're going to look for these notes down here like around the open. First fret second friends third, Fred, right around this area. So it's really easy for us to count. We have to cut the chromatic scale. We want toe do it as quickly as possible because we're not trying to do theory exercise here. We're trying to write a song we want to get into his quickest can. So, um, if we start with R C Chord and we're gonna start with R C note, we're going to go see quarter the F court, I'd have a guitar plugged in Teoh looping pedal. So we can kind of hear the courts and the notes as we try this. So let me get the cords going here, okay? Just explain to you what I'm doing isn't going along. Uh, so over the secret of the F chord, the first thing I'm doing is I'm just hitting a C note right here on the B string. First fret just hitting the see. No, because we have see, in the sequel, we also have a scene in the F court. So we talked about doing smallest movement possible. Sometimes the best movement is no movement at all. If you could just hang onto a note as the courts change, you create a very cool little harmonic device. So I'm just going to keep playing the scene of and we would be singing the seal. All those single notes on playing would be for the vocal. Okay, As we're going along, I may be doing different rhythms because you have to imagine, um it's like talking and I'm saying different words and I'm using very syllables and words and there's a rhythm and a meter to the way the speaking or if I was singing you would be the same way. It would be a rhythm or a meter to the way I am singing. And so I just want to mix up, get a bunch of different syllables in my notes. Okay, Um, now let me try going around some of these different notes. So this time I'm going to go to start on the cacs were G in the Sea court and then I'll go to the A note for the F court and just kind of go from there every time the court changes, I'm going to play one of these three nose for each court. Every time the court changes on only one play either see e g or the C Chord or FSC or the F court. We're gonna start seeing how we give these abilities to come out. Starting off with the open G string, - show you what I did there. Start on the G string E chord. Hey, wait for the off court. Then we want to see stayed on, see note for the C chord and the F chord. Good. Then I went to the high e string open for the Sea Court F note for the escort. And as I was climbing up, I went to the G note for the Sea Court on. I kept on going up to the A note on the fifth Fret for the F court, and I wound up going all the way to the Eighth front, which is a high C with C Court, and I can hang on that note I can keep on climbing, and here we're starting to get into the singer. How many octaves Singer sing? Because I've already gone past one active about octave and 1/2 at this point is going from sea to the sea is an active um, and so the average singer could do inactive to an octave and 1/2. Some great singers can do two or three octaves, Um, and so if you've got someone is capable doing matter, if you could do that, that's amazing. Good for you on def. You can do that, then you've got a lot more room to play with because you could go for the low notes to the high notes. You just keep on building like that. Okay, so let's try that again? Strike again. Um, you know what? This time I'm gonna start on this E no time to go a little bit lower here in the storm This E no on the D string Second fret Just start climbing, OK? And keep in mind a Z We're doing this melodies can a send melodies comte de sent And so it's up to you on what the appropriate thing to do is, um Melodies don't always have to a cent Sometimes you could bring back and bring down and just move a setting Descend Keep on switching back and forth But ultimately they're meant to be going somewhere So okay, I'm going to start here on this e no second fret on the d string. I'm just staying with the rule of my place. See, or e g over the C chord or F or a received over the f court. Only now you may be thinking, Well, um, you may be thinking that you're not that fast in finding these notes, and that's fine. There's no rush, because what? We're writing this stuff down. You scratched out six lines on a piece of paper and when you know experimenting with these different notes and you're counting out Where are the F? Sunday's sees were the season that used G's and you get couple of knows that like you write it down, say the F chord. I really like these notes, See Corner like these notes and then over the next corner, like these notes and you write it down, you're making notes so we don't have toe were not improvising. Cure. We are a little bit where we're trying to figure out which what we like. Eso We have to experiment with these different ideas to figure out which are gonna be the things that go in the song. What are the notes that going in the song? And those things are the ones that were writing down. Please write this stuff down. If you're thinking that, uh, maybe it's too simple. Of course you'll remember it. You you might not. It's happening me plenty of times where I thought, uh, this is so simple. Of course I'll remember it tomorrow and something about it. A little tiny new lots. Like the rhythm you forgot or, uh could be just the way that you went from this. No, to that forgot it. So please write it down. You will thank me later. Alright, let's try this again. - Way cashed up. So I was trying Teoh a sense and descends and do some stuff like that. Now, um, we generally wants we said we want our melodies to go kind of in a straight line so we don't want to be doing these big movements. Every now and then I would do a jump two notes, but I usually wasn't doing a bigger movement that was trying to keep it One note in any direction, either a sending her descending when I say one no a v c e a g one of those notes a B c d e f g So I was either going up to the next note or back to the previous note of a B C D E f g . Not fret notes, Um, and sometimes I was jumping to notes, and sometimes we have to, because we can't always go one, but we can most of the time go one note to accord to 1/4 tones. Okay, so I think that we I think that you understand how to do that, that kind of makes sense. Eso over two chords we saw how we could make a really pretty melody that was just goofing around for five minutes. And if we got into it a little bit more, we will come up with more ideas, some different movements that we could do that we like, um, ends. We're, of course, always reading them down. Okay, Now, let's take a look at a little bit more involved. Core progression where we've got some miners. Also. Now, the fact that the courts are minor doesn't really matter doesn't change anything that we're doing. We just follow the exact same rules. Um, So John down the notes that are in each chord, and we tried to do the smallest movement from note to note as the course change. Um Okay, so this core progression Levy, let me get this one in here. So So you know what I'm doing? I'm just trying to pick a known and try to enter my way to the next court without going too far. So starting off the d monitor cord started off on an F note. Okay. Over the d minor court. It's 1/3 friend here in the D string. Um, but, you know, let's go even simpler than that. Go open t open deep on, hang onto it again. The denote for the G court and then I see a B r. Sorry to see you know what? I could play in the monitoring. And you know what? I could play on the same line so I could do this whole thing with two notes Dino place and you know, twice. Just try that one. - Okay , so now I'm playing around with the f d minor. Then I go to G on G, hang out of the G for the E minor. If we have an opportunity to stay on a note, then sometimes we want to do that. Just stay on the note. As the court changes, it shows that we really are on top off the melody and the harmony We'll make it work together. Um, from the geo. - Ok , um, let me recap what I'm doing. So I grabs the I was on the Where was that? I guess I was on the d, and I stayed on the d and then I went to the ease. Yeah, okay. And, um yeah, let me take it from Take it from this year. That's what it was from this. A note on the court and then I should be de here for the D minor Sam T E G. I don't have to stay on the note. If I have an opportunity to stay on a note, I could take it or I can move so I can go G and G or G. And then question is, what's the closest note? I could go backwards to eat up or I can climb up to the be. So going from the GTO do a little bit of a shift up. It's only two notes, so something that singer could dio. Um, it's where you go. These huge jumps works more than two notes. That's where it starts getting tricky for singers to be accurate in hitting those notes. Okay, so let's try that. I'm gonna pick it up from the, um, pick it up from the A on the G string, for sure, the way I work. So one of the things that we're seeing here is that the biggest jump we're going to do is going to be about the to know jump to notes of M V C E f g A B, C D. G. So on a C note, then I can go to an e note. If I'm on a C note, I could go backwards to a note. So that's gonna be about the biggest jump of going to do. But usually, if I can, if I want to see note, that could go one to the deep or if I knew back want to be that is ideal. Sometimes I could just stay on the sea as the course change if I'm able to, um, but just cause I can stay on the note doesn't mean that's the right thing for the song. You have to make that judgment call. Um, what's don't right? They for the music. What's the right thing for what you're trying to get across? Um, and so there's different options as we can see. That's why we have to play around with the melody and see what the best option is when we're coming up with the melody for the versus. You may keep it simple on Gwen. You're writing your hook, the melody for the courses. You may want to start building up so that the ability starts a sending and going higher to follow the hook. Um, and there is no right or wrong way to rights. The melodies. There are formulas, but I formulas air dangerous. And if you if you follow for me love and you're not being creative and there's nothing coming out of you, there's nothing artistic about it. It's just a formula. It's kind of like I told you how to solve this math problems ago. Solve the math problem. You know, it's not really writing. I want something we're getting that comes from you. That's something from your creativity and your emotions in your brain to your experiences. So that's what's meant to happen here. Um, not also should sound a life. They should sound all different. So you have to experiment with different melodies and try trying different things out. But this is the general idea for coming up with ability. What's really cool about this is that we have not touched a scale at all in order to do this, and our notes are perfect notes. So these are landing and perfectly with quarters. You hear it yourself. All I'm doing isn't doing the court tones, but I'm stringing them together in a smart way because I'm trying to make sure that not doing Big Johnson small movements. So making sure I take the time to pick only the small movements. So it seems like it's flowing. Okay. And, um so go play around with this. Go through all of the court progressions that you've gone through so far and write some melodies down. Um, this is going to I think that if you spend a little bit of time working on this, um, have your guitar and a pen and a shoot paper scribblelive six lines for the tab and start making notes right down the courts tends the notes that you like for the Melanie recorded. Also, I think that if you start working on this is going to really change the way that you think about playing the guitar. There is very much of a chicken or the egg concept. When it comes to melody and harmony, melody and harmony. Melody is solos where the single notes Harvey is the courts, the chicken or the egg. So which one came first? Did the cords come from thes scales or did the scales come from the courts? Very interesting question. I don't really have the answer for you. Um, because they are completely intertwined there, Completely intertwined. Um, we can derive the scales based on the courts, but we can also drive the course based on the scales. And they can change depending on which perspective we look at them from. Okay, So what I mean by that is we can if we were going to reverse this whole process right now, we start with the cords. And then we say, Here are the notes of the chords and the notes of the chords will be our options for Melody . We could reverse this whole process and say, I'm just going to start with a couple of notes and then we're gonna take these notes and see what courts have these notes in them. Then those will be my courts. That's an option for you. There are so many different options for some ready. So many fun things that we could do to be creative and try different approaches. So, like I said is chicken or the egg which came first, which came first. The courts were the notes. I also question. All right, so enough philosophy. Go work on connecting your melodies, choosing your notes and stringing them together in a nice, smooth way, but in a way that is perfect for your soul, and I'll see you in the next video. 16. Outside Chords (page 20): Let's talk about using outside cords. One of the things that I feel like I haven't said enough in this course is that you should be breaking the rules plan and simple. When you're writing a song, you should be breaking rules. You should break a lot of rules. The things that you're not supposed to do does exactly what you should be doing when you're writing a song. What we have been talking about is, um, some of the some of the conventional wisdom, the stuff that has worked in the past for other composers, So it's good to know the rules. But then, once you know them and you learn them, then it's good to break them. Sometimes it's good to know them first before you break up on the other hands. There is the thinking that if you know too much, that could be that because if you have learned too much, then that could kind of make you a formulaic, um, formulate person who you're not really operating from a place of art. It's more like you're a technician, and so there's a difference between being a creative person being a technician, so you wanna be creative. You want to break the rules, use all the stuff that we talked about is a foundation. Um, the way that I approached some writing is I like to use all of the conventional wisdom stuff that we've talked about. Um, and I will use about 90 to 95% of it, and I will adhere to 90 to 95% of all of the conventional wisdom that we talked about and then about five or 10% of it. I will break the rules because I want to try different things, and I want to create sounds that have not been created before. If that's possible, I'm trying to do that. I don't know that's possible, but I always trying to do that. So that's where our goal is. And the only way we're gonna do that is by breaking the rules by doing things that no one ever told you to dio doing things that I didn't tell you to do. I'm just trying to give you ideas on how to break the rules. So one of the great ways to break the rules is to use outside cords using chords that are not in our scale. Cord rope. What I mean by that is maybe don't use too many of them, but use a few you want use one court that is not in the scale. Court road. Okay, so if we're playing our song in C Major, we're going Teoh, come up with a couple of courts that are not in the court row And that could be any courts . They could be any quartile, literally. Any course that you could come up with now certain chords will sadly, garbage. Some courts will just sound bad, and some course will just sound good and you won't know why, and no one's gonna know why. They just sound good. They're not in the row. They're not the classical cords, but for whatever reason, they sound good. There's no explaining if it sounds good. It sounds good. It sounds like garbage. It sounds like garbage. There's just no explaining certain things. That's why you have to experiment with different different courts to try to find the sounds that you're going for. Um, okay, so I've got two examples of outside courts and how to approach the melody and the court itself. When we stick to the basic idea of just using the arpeggio to get our notes. That's always gonna keep us in line. It's going to make sure that the melody and the court are always working together. So that's what we want. Um, so keep using the arpeggios even when you're using an outside court. So Okay, look here. What I did. Waas Gods on the top line, We are taking the verse. Ports are verse corners. One of the first words we've been using is the C chord to the F court C f. Now, what I'm doing is I'm throwing in outside court in the middle, um, cell during two weeks of see that I'm doing to bees of an e Chord, then four days of the F now the e chord to E major. So that's what makes that an outside court in our scale court row. It should be an e minor court. Right? Go. C d minor e minor. So should be in my report, but I'm gonna put a e major chord in it outside court because it's not supposed to be there . So first, let's just see what it sounds like you to see. Two weeks of C two p's of E four. So I kind of like it. It tells different. Sounds good. Okay, Now we have to figure out an approach for the melody s o. I am just going to write down the notes of the E major arpeggio. So all the way to 12 e b g sharp, uh, so e g sharp and be all right, so any of those notes are gonna be good. So what I want to do is I won't start connecting my notes in a close way. I know that I got C e and G. I could do. You're so let me get portable first. So you know a c chord. And then the note on the court? Yes, court. I'll go to the Gino Gino for the C quarter because the c e g. So what I can do on sequence I'm gonna go for the G sharp or the equal, and then for f f A c fact. So I'm going to do it ain't over the f court, and that's going to give you a little chromatic walk. So let's see what that sounds like. - All right. Can you see the possibilities already lots of possibilities, and that's just from taking one outside court. All right, um, now let's move on, Teoh. Like I said, we don't always get that lucky. I I had played with this before, so I had an idea that the equal would sound good. But you've got tons and tons of different courts, so we could try any court that's not in our row and try to put it in. And then there's the question of where do you put it? I put it in the middle, but we could put it in there before the sea put it after the S, um, it's so there's just unlimited possibilities. And then, of course, what the court is going to be the outside court could be a major core. Could be a minor court. Basically, it's an outside quarter of its not in a row. So any court that's not in a row. Then, of course, we've got all the extended and ultra cords which we haven't talked about, barely talked about anything like that. We've done a G seven chord, but any kind of assess to assess 46 scored minor, six chord, any kind of seventh chord dominant. Seven. Minor, seven major. Seven to finish. Seventh. The ninth Modern I major nine. Dominant nine. The 11th to the 13th Diminish courts and then any of the ultra cords. So there's a lot of different kinds of cords is the point. And so any of these courts Aziz, long as they are, they are outside. So none of those extensions with it anywhere with what's going on in her skill, Quirk wrote, We can try him out. Um, okay, so let's try down here now. What I'm doing down here is taking the chorus courts. So our course was G C g enough. It was two means of C two, these of G and four base of F, of course. Waas way doing according for the last two beats B flat having a B flat. It's good to me selling garbage. We'll see. It's not terrible. Not terrible. Um, and sometimes when you have something where it's like OK, I don't hate it, I don't love it, but I don't hate it. Um, you can make it better by bringing the melody. Once the melody hits it and we start applying our melody to it, you can some times really improve the quality of how is you? Okay, um B flat to be flat chord. The notes are B flat, D and F. I could just come up here to my six friends. Just be flat, which is the same as a short. And it's major. So B flat D now one of the things that we do when we have Elsad cord especially one that really is different, like this be fly really kind of sticks out. Um, up here this equal it somehow float Even though it's an outside court, it somehow it seemed to flow. Uh, this is B flat. It kind of sticks out a little bit. So one of the things that we can do to make it work a little bit better is to take a like Melanie note like Melody. What I mean is, we have be five d enough, So why don't want to do is I want to try to get a note that is going to mix. Maybe with this f eso what's a note in the B flat that's also in the F court? We'll be flat D and F the f right. So over that B flat. If I play an f note, if I also play an estimate of the F, then I should feels who creates, um, sort of the illusion that this is meant to work. Let me report the courts way we owe. Do the whole thing with knows Gino and and then I'm playing an f note or the F court and the B flat. Uh, so let me try. Um all right, I'm going to try something else. Going to climate his Go see that on the sea. Quarter Dina of the G chord in an effort for the last 21 My major strike way. Okay. Oh, it's a work in progress. At least we have the whole thing coming together. Um, so and the way that I feel about that b flat is it's OK. I don't hate it. I've heard worse and have her better. It's OK, but at least we are open running, and we have some kind of a melody that we're working towards. If you had a court like this and you loved it wants you to know how to start getting the melody in there to make the melody start mixing with the courts that are next to it. One of the things I was also looking for is there. Is there a way for me to take these notes and connect them to the sea? Um, so one of the things that I could dio I mean, the B flat is another. Away from the C. D is also note away from the sea. So how would we do that? Um, I could go a B flat C I love that. A b flat C trouble. So C note on the c chord chord on the beach. Black word Hey, again around the world. So we're a little bit Keep experimenting with this kind of stuff, Trying to either match these guys up match to be flat to the sea so that I haven't even melody so And that was just randomly picking a B flat core so we could have picked any court and try to work it in. That's how you do it, Um, and try to come up with something that no one has ever done before. Completely new sounds. This is there are ways to do it and you will get lucky sometimes if you just keep on looking for different courts. And when you are coming up with your abilities, remember to keep on getting that note as many times as you need to for as many syllables as you have in your lyrics, because you're gonna be singing these melodies. Okay, good. I think we've got that covered. Eso break the rules, Break the rules, Break the rules and I'll see you in the next video. 17. Dorian & Mixolydian Keys (page 21): Let's talk about writing some songs or parts of songs using the keys of some of the different towards in our scale, Court wrote. So far, we have discussed using the major key and the minor key, so that would be the first court in the sixth chord. Uh, first chord Ski FC and zero would be see Major Song and See Major, and using the A minor as a key would be using the minor so a minor would be using six. But we can write some songs or parts of songs accessing he's or temporary keys using some of the other chords. We talked about this briefly before. I want to go into it in a little bit more depth. Um, there are seven courts total, so any one of the seven chords could potentially be are key in the hierarchy of the most popular tonal centres, the key centres. Obviously we have the major scale where the major key is most popular. The second most popular would be the minor key, Guy said during the six court would be the second most popular. I would say that the third and fourth most common are kind of tied um, and that would be using the seconds which in our case, is D minor. And the fifth wish would be G and we Since we have Major the first and minor for six, we call the 2nd 1 Dorian, and we call the city one make. So Lydia make so Lydia. Okay, so the Dorian and makes a Lydian our potential keys for us and this will set us up to get some new sounds from the courts. It's all about thea other chords in relation to this key. So when we say, for example, that we want to play something indeed, Dorian Dorian Now all of the courts and it's the same courts. It's just these cords. But now they're all in relation to this guy being the key. And so it's all the distances is the types of chords, the majors and miners and the distances away from this new key, the door in Cuba, and it sets us up to be able to create some different kinds of sounds. Um, the Dorian is probably best described as a funky admire. Okay, so the Meyer is a miner's to six and is very just straight minor. So it's got all the dark tones that we want. Um, and it's just very minor that Dorian is a little bit more funky minor. So it's a little bit war without consider to be upbeat. Maybe a have your lighter? Um, we still have all of the same notes. You still use the same scale. If you were taking a scale approach to playing, we would find our melody notes the exact same way using the Europe NGOs. But we can come up with different kinds of core progressions by picking these keys. So I wrote down an example for each one. The Dorian good example of how it would sound would be going from a D minor chord to a G chord. Okay, so let's see what that sounds like. - Way good now. Like I said, we've got all of the other chords in relation to it so you could go D minor to any of the other chords as long as we started making our focus. D minor and everything starts gravitated back toward the D minor chord, but I start throwing in some of these other chords, play around with, maybe see with F also, so let's try player out of the other courts and bring it back to D minor way . Okay. You see how we're getting some different kind of Ah, little bit more of a funky sound from that? Yeah. So that would be the de Dorie. Okay, let's take a look at the mix. So, Lydia So this one is going to be in the qg guys the 5th 12345 So the G make so, Lydia. These names, by the way, in case you want to further investigate them, their mode names their modes so you can get deeper into each of these notes and the scales they get associated with each note or each court and those air cold lows. And so the seconds notes of the scale where the course is the Dorian, the fifth is called the Mix O Lydian. Now the basal Lydian is best described as, um I would say it's like a funky major scale. Okay, so they're both kind of funky. The missile Indians like a funky major scale. So it's got all the qualities of the major scale, but a little bit more funky, a little bit more of almost like blues. You'll do it. Um, all right. So the progression that's we have G f cf two beings on each one. Let's see what it sounds like to me. This sounds like a lot of songs that we've heard before. Um, it's got aspects of, um, take the money and Ron. Sweet home Alabama. Um, Angel is a centerfold. Um, a lot of ah, a lot of popular songs have used Missile Ian as the key where Rules of London So a lot of a lot of mixed ability. And we here in pop music because it's like the major scale, but it's got a little bit of an edge to it. Um, ends. So we've got a lot of movement going on here That doesn't have to be this much movement as long as we keep bringing it back to the G chord, only focusing on these courts. But the G chord is going to be the okay . We could start seeing some possibilities with playing around with a mix of Lydia. Like I said, in the beginning, we can use the Dorian or that makes Olympian to be the entire song so we could say the entire song is going to be based on the door, it or the pixel idiot. Or we could say we want one of our parts to be based on the during the mixer. Lydian. So we may have a bridge or a solo where we're going to have the courts be in the Dorian or the facility in. We can ship back to major or the minor. So these are just extra options for us now. When I first covered off on this I missions that we don't usually hear songs that are rooted on the third chord or the fourth chord. So that's true. You don't usually hear someone's rooted on the third court, where the fourth quarter as the key. That's not to say that you couldn't do it. So if you wanted to experiment with that, to see if you could come up with something that seems like it could stand on its own as a key. If you could get the third poured for the fourth quarter stand on their own solidly as a key, try it, go for it. Absolutely vile means my bill will pull it off by experimenting with adding some passing chords into it. so that might be the trick to making that work. But in the meantime, I want you to play around with the during and the mix illion. And, as always, we have 12 kids. So we're just focusing on C major here. Everything relative to see, Major. So there's 12 keys. So every time you are on a different key, second Court is going to be the door here. Okay, so your first minor chord he come to That's the Doory. The fifth is going to be the mix, Olivia. So in whatever. Here, on 1234 5/5 chord is going to be your mix, Ilian. So go play around with that. I'll see you in the next video. 18. Lyric Writing (page 22): Let's talk about lyric rating. Lyric writing is a pretty important part of songwriting process, and I am not a creative writing teacher music teacher. But I have been writing lyrics for a really long time, so I'm gonna give you some pointers that I've learned along the way. Um, when you are writing lyrics, you want to write a lot, so you will sit there and you'll say what I want or don't want to say what I want to talk about. You need to just start, right? Just let it flow, start writing and right as much as you can fill up a page with words, you can cross stuff l later on, but you want to start just writing as much as you can get your thoughts on the page. Once you have a lot of off off lines, words, sentences, stuff that you want to say, then we can start cleaning it up in paring it down and making it work with music. So ultimately all this stuff is going to be so some. But you are saying by somebody else. So we need to match it up with our melodies. Um, okay, so let's go over a couple of the basic points, so lyric writing is essentially writing poetry, right? So if you've ever in poetry, um, if you had any school assignments where they made you go write a poem that's basically what lyric writing is your writing poetry? It may rhyme, or it may not. Right, so that's up to you. That's your call. Um, not all there's have to rhyme a lot of them do eso You could get a rhyming dictionary or there are rhyming resource is that you can find so you can find some resources of rhyming dictionaries weakened by a rhyming dictionary. Most people who write a lot of songs will have a rhyming dictionary that they're always looking up for words that rhyme. Okay, so the first point I wanted to make was minimal wording. Minimal wording. What I mean by that is you want to use the fewest amount of words to get your point across . You want to use the fewest amount of words to your point across. If you see a line and it's like, okay, this is the first line of the first verse. If there's any words that don't need to be there. They don't absolutely need to be there giver of cross them out, put a line through them, erase them. So any words that don't need to be there, get rid of them. Minimal word. You don't want a bog people down with the whole of words. Just get rid of anything. It doesn't need to be there, OK, fused amount of words to say This story, um, meter meter is about how we the rhythm of the words, How many syllables. So every thing I say has sill levels, so each that was 10 different notes. So every syllable, every syllable has to have a note associated with it. So think about that while you're writing, some people will write lyrics with the style of the little space in between the syllables. The words will actually be broken up by syllable so that they can imagine putting the notes to attach to the syllables. And it is a great and smart way to think about connecting your lyrics to the melody because really, that's what's going on. A lot of people will write lyrics and the right of melody and with all of our time matching it up because there's too many syllables or not enough syllables to go with melody. So these things have to completely match up for every syllable. For every piece of a word, every syllable there has to be one note. It could be the same note across multiple syllables, but it still is going to be a note for each syllable. So consider the meter the rhythm when you're writing your words, which also would take me all the way down here to small words, wrote down small words. Have you ever met someone who is, Ah, pretty smart person where they think they're pretty smart and they like to use big words just to show you that they're smarter than you? So we've all met people like that. That's cool. You know, that's good. It's going to use, Ah, a comprehensive vocabulary. That's great. When you are writing lyrics, though, you want it to cast a wide net, which means that you want as many people as possible to be able to relate to your song. So you don't want people to hear a bunch of words that they don't understand and to say, Well, I don't know what they're talking about understand these words. This song is too smart for me. I don't like it. You don't want that. So you want to avoid using words that are too brainy, too intellectual? Watch out for that use words. We could cast a wide net, and the largest amount of people will be able to relate to your song. That's what we want Walkable to relate to our song guys trying to relate to people. Okay, which takes us to universal theme. Universal theme. Um, obviously, you can write about anything you want your song. You could make it really personal. You can have a lot of inside information that no one is gonna understand because it's all super personal to you and you're making references that maybe it's funny to you and your friends, but oils that doesn't know you people won't understand. So be careful about that again. It's about casting a wide net, and this is the art form of some ready of lyric writing is to try to say something that is personal to me. Um, but I want everyone to be able to hear it and to relate to it in their own way, even though it's personal to me. I want all kinds of different people to be able to relate to it. Does that make sense? It's a tricky thing to do, and it takes a little bit of practice. But if you choose your words the right way, that even though you're saying something personal about yourself, people of difference, backgrounds and experiences can all relate to it. They'll relate to it differently, but they will be able to relate to. And that's the most important thing. So universal theme, trying to make it something that everyone can relate to. Everyone breathes there. Everyone has love. Everyone has fear, anger. Whenever it is, everyone has feelings, you know, think of something that is universal, that everyone can relate to, and then he could speak from a little bit of a personal place. But if you get too personal, too introspective, it's too much specific about me in my life. Then I will be making it so that a lot of people will not be able to relate to it. So keep a universal Okay, Um, imagery, imagery, imagery, imagery is something that when you are writing poetry, they tell you use lots of imagery imagery is where you paint the picture. You paint the picture, so the pick is your paintbrush and thief. Fretboard is your canvas, and all of the different notes that you pick are the colors the blues, reds, greens, yellows, all the different colors. And every time you play a note, you're hitting the yellow and blue green red. There's all these different colors coming together, and I'm creating imagery right now. I am trying to show you how when we talk about these things, it makes you picture it in your mind if you can imagine a paintbrush and canvas, but is my pick up my guitar, These colors coming out? There's a picture being drawn, so try to paint a picture in people's minds when you're telling this story, trying to paint a picture for them. Don't make people work too hard to imagine what you're trying to say. Use a lot of descriptive words so that people can immediately in her mind see your idea. Lots of imagery. That's a good thing. Don't make people work too hard to understand, or to imagine you pay the picture for them imagery, Um, and the last piece of advice for lyric writing of God is average four lines perverse. And this goes back to where we started, right? Lots and lots and lots of words. If you have a general idea, Um um, for example, I'm going to write a song about a person that I know. OK, so I know a person. I better write a song about that person. I'm not going to use their name or I'm gonna change their name. But I'm going to write about them because there's some interesting story about this person . Just write a lot, right? A lot, a lot. Just get your thoughts flowing and get a lot because we want to have when we're going through a verse. It's a general rule phone Could do what you want, but average of four lines perverse. So four sentences, which would be maybe if we were doing four measures is going to be reverse, remember? And we're two measures and we're gonna go times for So what we want is we want one line, one sense to be one pass. So if we're going to see is the f just those two measures, we want one sense to be able to say over the sea and the F. So we need to do that four times to do one verse that makes us so you four lines for livers . What if we're gonna have three verses in this song? You need 44 and four. That's just for the versus. The chorus is, um, can go different ways. I have written courses where I'll have one line and I'll just keep on repeating one line. If I could get one great line, I might just repeat it. I might say the one line a couple times, Say the one line twice or say the one line saying it four times. I may treat the course kind of like a verse where I got four lines for different lines on debt will always be the same for lines every time do the chorus, but it might be four lines long, and you may decide to sing over a bridge. You may decide to sing over in Altro or an intro, so that could be extra lyrics that you have to write for that stuff too. So you're as you can see. We're gonna need a lot of words here, and it's gonna go fast. You'll be surprised how four lines You can sing four lines really? In about 2025 seconds. It'll go real quick. So right, lots and lots of words. Oh, also, I was be mindful of the fact that there are. There are a lot of people that talk about songwriting. I will show you how to write songs. I'm sure you have read a hit song. Um, the Thief, the hit song writers Or, uh, let me see this differently. The hit songs being written are not usually being written by the artist performing, so it's brand the artist think of as a company. It's business, and there are songwriters behind the scenes who have are using these formulas. Now. These guys are master songwriters. They know exactly what they're doing. And there excellent. Would you do? Um, they are excellent at what they do. They are better than me. However, they are using formulas because when we talk about casting a wide net, they are masters of casting a wide net, and that is what a lot of commercial music is today. Um, and this is my opinion. Commercial music used to be a lot more interesting. 10 2030 years ago, 40 50 years ago was a lot more interesting on. There was a lot more to it, love or creativity to it in difference from song to song. Today we hear a lot of the same formulas from all the different artists. It could be the same group of guys writing songs for all of the hit Orestes because a lot of the music sounds very similar. It is very formulaic. Eso If you're trying to write a song that you want to sell to one of the in separate hit artists, then you want to try to fall that formula. If that's not what you're trying to do and forget all that stuff and just write from your heart right, something that you think would be a great song. Because 99.9% of all the songwriters in the world are not selling their music there just writing because they have a song in their heart, they need to get it out, and that's what I want you to do. So write something meaningful, write something original. Okay? You don't need to write something that is already being done by all of the hit song writers write something that matters. Okay, so I think you get points. I'll see you in the next video. Go write some lyrics, right? A lot. 19. About Recording (page 23): well as we're starting to wise down the course, I wanted to mention to you about a couple of options for recording your music. And, by the way, what an amazing age we live in. What an awesome technological age we live in. 20 years ago, if you wanted to record your music, you would have to get this piece of hardware and you have get discs or cassettes for real reels and all these cables hook it up to your equipment and cost a lot of money. And, uh, now we have free computer programs that we can use to record in way higher quality than a lot of that. Will Equipment was capable of what an amazing age we live in. So cool. So I wanted to take just a minute and mention two of those free programs, and these are extremely popular programs. I have been recording music for probably over 20 years, so I've seen the progression in the technology, and like I said, we had the old hardware where you would be using a reel to reels and cassettes and CDs. And then we started getting the early computer software and the early computer software was amazing because it could do things like you could do infinite tracks. So when you used to have a big piece of hardware, you would be limited by how many tracks you could record. Maybe I only have an eight track reporter or a four track quarter, so I can only do four different tracks and play them simultaneously. Um, for example, of the guitar on one track the drums on a second track. The vocals on the third track ends the base on the last track, and then I would have to figure out that I want to get my keyboard player. I want to get him on there, so I have to take some these tracks and bounce him over one track and then get a keyboard player on one of those tracks. And I was able to free up, and I start losing by quality of the audio. When computer technology came out, we started getting infinite tracks. There's an unlimited amount of tracks because it's on a computer and that programmed. The software has caused a lot of money, though eso now we are in the present day, and there are better Softwares that are free. It's amazing. Okay, so I want to mention hopefully at the time of watching this video of these Softwares were still available and available for free. Um, is audacity and garage bands. So if you are a Mac user, if you an iPhone or any kind of Apple product, you're probably already familiar with GarageBand where you've seen it on your device or your back your iPhone. GarageBand is Apple's free recording software suite, and it's great. It is a really great full service recording program. It's free. To my knowledge, it's on all the apple devices where it's available, at least for free on all the apple devices. Um, I have not used it a lot. I used a little bit not much of an Apple user, but I've used a few times to help other musicians because I'm pretty familiar with various platforms and Softwares. So I felt other people to get up and running on GarageBand, and it is a great software. If you spend about an hour, two hours with it, you get the hang of it. It's pretty intuitive, easy to figure out, Um, and like I said, you've got all the bells and whistles that you could possibly want. It doesn't mawr things than you could possibly want it to do. Um, the top one is called Audacity. I love audacity. I use audacity all the time. Like I said, I'm not an Apple user. So audacity is the program that everyone else would use. Now, here's the thing. Audacity could be used on any platform. So, to my knowledge, you can use it on a Windows machine on Apple. It could be used pretty much on almost anything. It's a free open source program to recording. Program. Um, like Raj, Bet all of these recording Softwares are pretty much the same thing. They all pretty much do the same stuff, and they all kind of have the same interface. They'll essentially work the same way. So if you know how to use war program and to see another program, it's pretty easy to you'll figure it out. All right, pick one of these two eso. If you are a Windows user, then you'll use audacity. Use on ste. If you're a Mac user. Also, if you are a Mac user, um, then you will go for GarageBand or destiny. You know what doesn't really doesn't matter. Just think one big win and start learning it. You're going to use this to record your music and so spend a little bit of time. I'm not going to give you a tutorial on how to use Softwares. Cause music teacher, Not a computer teacher, but it's easy to learn. Both of these programs are designed for anyone to be able to use them, so I just want to give you a couple of points on recording. You can record a different instrument on as many tracks is want, so you would put maybe your guitar courts on one track and then you would record on a second track and you would maybe do your singing and you can listen to the first track, the guitar chords and you're singing at same time, and then you'll go to the third track and you'll put maybe a melody on their on your guitar . You can listen to all three of the tracks at the same time. You go to the fourth track, and you can have your friend is a bass player. Put some baseline on there, and then 1/5 track could be a keyboard in 678 track of your drums. And there are drumbeats. I believe that these programs have that you could just plug in drug needs to change the tempo, So there's a lot of cool stuff that you could do to start developing your soul, especially when we are getting into the arrangement, is that we can take a very surgical approach to how the arrangements put together because we have the That's a different kind of visual where we can really see OK, this bit is this part of this bit is this part, and we can really just look at it piece by piece. So good programs with great for composing. They give you a wonderful ability to control all the different parts of your song. One of the things I would recommend you do if you're kind of new to this is to use the Metro Noon function. All of these programs have a metro know which is your clicker. It's got a clicker for the tempo. So you set the tempo at whatever you wanted that you could listen to how faster slow it is , but the Metrodome is gonna be the quarter minutes off faster. Slow the quarter notes. We're going to go. 1234 or if you go faster is 1234 ones. If use lowers one do three get set for everyone to be General rule thumb for veteran home is anywhere between 101 120 is going to be an average medium tempo, so between 101 120 is a medium tempo. Okay, the higher the number, the faster is the lower the number the slower is going to be. And then you can export all that stuff. Writer down and get an MP three and you can send it to your friends. You put it on YouTube, you can do it, everyone, let's do it on your phone. So it's a lot of fun. Recording is a whole lot of fun on. And this is something that you could also do while you're in the middle of the writing process. You have an idea for a part of the song. Go on the programme, record it and see that. And that way you come back to it later on. Listen to it just to remember exactly what you were doing. So anyway, This is one of the things in the modern age that songwriters will use. You've got it at your disposal. It's free to take advantage of it. Spend a few hours learning how to use this stuff. It's not that hard. And I think you'll have a lot of fun with it. Really. Open up your world and your possibilities. So go check out one of these two. If your windows you're using audacity if you are Mac, your garage band or audacity Access. All right, go have fun with that and I will see you in the next video. 20. Pro Songwriters & The Music Industry (page 24): Let's take a few minutes and talk about pro songwriters. Professional songwriters. This term is, ah, generic term. A lot of people will say, You know, the songwriter, professional songwriter, and that can mean different things. So I want to explain to you what means or what it can mean. Um, you don't necessarily need to be blown away. Somebody tells you they are in professional songwriter. Now, before I begin telling you about the pro songwriters, I want to let you know that I am not a pro songwriter. I am a music teacher. Pro songwriters are really busy writing songs and selling them. So I am a music teacher and that's what we've been doing all this time. Okay? And also we have basically two categories. We've got what I would consider small time, big time. Okay, small time songwriter and big time songwriter. I do not mean that to take anything away from either one of them. Small time guy to I'm talking about, because both of these are what I would consider to be dream jobs. Dream jumps like the best job that you can think of in the world, even being a small time, some rare would be amazing. Amazing job, so you may not have any interest in selling your music, which is great. You will have a lot more freedom to write anything that you want. You can write from the heart. You don't have to worry about criticism or rejection or any of that kind of stuff. So that's great. Like I said before, 99.9% of all of the songwriters in the world are not getting paid. They're not selling their music. It is difficult to sell songs, not impossible, but it's difficult. You have to put in the time put in the work, and a lot of it is also about having the right connections, meeting the right people, getting your music in front, off the right people. That has a lot to do with your ability to sell a song. And if you are lucky enough to get an audience with someone who can make a decision on whether or not to buy your song, please be sure that you've got a really good song. That's what we've been talking about. This course is getting ready to write really good salt and getting a lot of tools to get us that we can write a really good song. So if we're ever lucky enough to be in a situation where we have someone who can make a decision on whether or not they want to buy one of our songs, that we are gonna have a really good song, that we can show them, that's what we want. Okay, so let's talk about the difference between big time and small time. Small time songwriter is a, um, what I would call a que writer or edit writer. Okay, Q. C or edit writer. And these are people that sell their music for commercial licensing. What I mean is that when it could be a commercial, it could be a little snippet of their music that is used TV show when you watch TV. If you pay attention to it, there's almost constantly music in the background. So most TV shows constantly have some kind of music in the background, and all of that music is being written by Q writers or edit writers. And these were people like you and me, and all they do is they just write little snippets of music, and they create their own libraries, and they will put him in these brokerage houses. Thes publishing houses, publishing houses have deals with the television networks, and they will go through what for the kinds of music that they want. And they'll say, I want to use 20 seconds of this song when you 30 seconds of this song, 10 seconds of this song. And so for every amount of time that they put your song in a TV show, you make a little bit of money. It is a little bit of minds, not a ton of money. It's a little bit of my but if you could get enough TV shows using enough seconds of your songs, then you can get to the point where you're making a living. You're paying all of your bills from selling your music. Sprinkle the licensing Part of that means that they will have a song in a library that the television networks were going through, and they may use a little bit of that song. I will pay you a little bit of money for it in a different TV show, can use the exact same song of yours, and they'll pay you a little bit. And then 1/3 TV show can also take that exact same song and use a little bit of it in their show and pay you a little bit of money. That's licensing, which means that you're you are letting everyone have access to it. No one has exclusive rights to it. You're only letting your using your licensing for everyone to have access to the music, is there, Uh, when you get into music lessons ing. This is a huge, huge topic where you have lost forward to lots of books to read, to learn all of the different legal status of licensing deals. So it starts being sometimes a little bit, not as much fun as sitting around with your guitar playing music. But that's the music industry. If you want to get into the music industry on that level, you want to know what you're doing. So that is essentially what Q or edit. Writers are still a very cool job. Now you go what I would consider the big time. I would call these people staff writers on, but they are people who may have made a name for themselves or been lucky enough to make a connection to a performing a famous performing band or musician. Okay, so imagine famous performing musician, so on. We all know their name, okay? And that person knows that I'm a songwriter and they've heard some of my songs like My Selves And they say, I want you to come work for me when you start writing songs just for me Great look, too. So now I'm going to be on their staff. I work for them and my job is going to be to write songs just for them. And I'm writing songs with them in mind. I know what kind of musician what kind of performer they are. And I know their style of music. So writing songs specifically for them, everything I write can only be used by them. They basically own everything, all right for them. I can't sell it to anyone else. They have exclusive rights to it. How well, if they and they don't have to use any of the music that I write for them, they get through it all the trash. They still own it. It's theirs. They don't have to use it. But if they did use some of the songs I wrote for them. I would make a lot of big time, big time money. So even though, um, they would get the credit, everyone thinks that they wrote the song. My name might be buried in there somewhere. But everyone is going to think that the famous performing musician wrote that song. No one's going to know who I am. No one's gonna know my name. I'm not gonna be famous, but I will get paid a lot of money for that. So that is where I would consider a staff writer to be. Whoa, what a fun job. That would be such a fun job. Okay, so these are the two basic kinds of songwriters, and they're very different, and they're very fun. The Q and Headed writers, I would say, probably have a lot more freedom in the sense that they can write different kinds of music . They're not beholden to writing. For one artist, however, they have to churn out lots of music and has to be. It's very it's commercial, so it can't be, you know, song that means something to me. It's gotta be something that you can have a commercial or TV show or some kind of a reality show. It's gotta be something like that. Um, they have eternal love. Commercial music. Okay, two more points I wanted to make about if you ever wanted to take a stab at getting into the song writing business, trying to make some money selling yourselves. Um, we ah, wrote pro PR Oh, that stands for performing rights organization. This would be the first thing that you would do if you wanted to start looking into selling music professionally. Join a performing rights organization. There are really three main organizations. The two main organizations are ASCAP and B M I B M I. So these are the two main performing rights organizations. It's chief join, and once you join, they are basically working to protect you. So you are now under their umbrella. And if you ever sold some music, they are working to protect you and to make sure that you get paid and they have tons of resource is to help you out. So if you ever started getting any kind of a music deal selling any kind of music, they would be your organization that is going to help you through that process. Um, so. But just by joining one of the performing rights organizations, the pros, it's going to be a good resource for you to start learning how to navigate in the world of of music, licensing or selling songs. Um, And then the last thing I wrote down is copyright. OK, this is important. One. If you If you have a couple of songs that you are interested in selling, what's their pitching it to people to see if anyone's interested buying it? It is common sense that you want to copyright your music. So if you live in the United States than you would copyrighted with the Library of Congress , I am not sure exactly what you would do if you didn't live in the United States. But what I would do if you don't live in the U. S. Is I would join performing rights organization because they work internationally, and so they would be able to tell you how to copyright in your country, or they recommend that you actually get your music operated in us. It doesn't cost that much money. It costs a little bit of money to copyright, but you can actually upload your MP threes to the Library of Congress. You can upload along the Internet and pay a small fee, and then the library of U. S Library of Congress will send you these forms saying, OK, we've got you documented signal. You have legal proof that if anyone steals your music, you have legal proof that you own it and you can sue to get all the money that the other person got paid for. Your songs protects you, so someone steals your music and they sell it and they make money on it. The copyright says no. You have to pay me that money that you made because it's my song and I've got proof because I have the copyright to that song. So copyright protection on it is the is the best ways to protect your music. There are other methods when people email themselves the MP threes where they'll put the CD and you put it through the mail males themselves. That stuff doesn't really work. It's dangerous. I've heard that does not hold up in court, So actually, having the copyright is the safest way to go. So these air just a couple of things to get you started in the right direction if you wanted to consider. You know, don't quit your day job. Keep doing your regular work. But if you had some songs that are pretty good and you think you might be able to sell them , the first things I would dio is join up performing rights organization. It's pretty cheap. Consider copyrighting your songs. Andi, start considering if you will, kind of a writer you want to be. Do you want to try to get staff writer job? Big time job? Where do you want to start off? Smaller and b que writer? So some food for thought on If you said you know what? I just do this for fun. That's possible. I love that. Keep doing it. You have to write music. That's why we do it. We just have to. It's OK, Good. Good job being covered. Everything. So starting to rub up, of course, But I will see you in the next video 21. Closing Thoughts (page 25): you made it in the end of the course. Congratulations. That is great. I'm really proud of you Did good. We went through a lot of stuff. Talk about a lot of different things, and you got all the way through. So that's great. Really proud of you. Good job. I wanted to close the course with a few ideas on what to do next. Because we went through all of the basics that you need to know to write a song. I feel like you are in good hands, you know, to do now. And so the question is what to do next. Right? Okay. So I'm gonna tell you what to do next. So the first thing that you want to do is combine your arrangement. You have been writing everything down. You've got all your parts you've got your corns, your melodies, your lyrics You got all your parts. Put them all together. Okay. Combine them all so that your song makes sense from beginning to end from intro to Altro and everything in between Don't make sense. You could put the corns and abilities together with the lyrics and we're school in right place. You got the order of everything together. That is your arrangements. So the whole song is in one piece for beginnings and from intro to Altro. That is your arrangement. And then, of course, you're going to play your song. Play it for beginning to end. Put it together now play it, get your guitar and play it. Sing it, see if you can execute it. See if all your ideas were really coming through. When you're playing it, sometimes when you write the song, you start playing it. Not everything is translated through your playing like it was when you were reading it. So go through it and play it and kind of get used to it. So these things will seem unusual to you, but it's, you know, it's a brand new things, a brand new creation. So it's good and normal if it seems unusual because it's brand new. Eso play your song played over and over and over again. Get used to it. It is is a whole new thing that you created, so go through it. Get used to start getting in your head. Get your own song in your head so you're humming it. Thinking about it thinking about all the changes, the melodies, the lyrics and all the parts, and run through the arrangement in your head and just really get used to your song. Maybe you will want to record yourself. We talked about that. Um, you can either go piece by piece through the programs like we talked about using GarageBand or audacity so you could do a more surgical approach to recording it and try to get a nice and clean and tight. And everything is perfect where you could say, I'm just going to do a little basic reporting. Where would we live? Recording. So you don't want to go through the computer programs. If you ever quarter on your phone or your computer and you could just hit record and you grab your guitar and you start playing it, you sing it. Just go one complete pass all the way through recorded record your song so you can listen back to it again. That's important. Then, if you happen to record it, whether it's a live recording or you know all the pieces and you take the time going through the program, either what, you're going to have an MP three at the end of it, and then you can share it. Well, I say Sure, I really mean share with your friends. Share with your family share with your friends. Hey, I wrote this song. Check out this song that I wrote, and you can send it to him. We're playing for, um so your family and friends is a safe way to get some feedback on your soul. And, um, you will be surprised that they so then will be brutally honest with you, which is a good thing. So So you're gonna love it. Some people are not gonna love it. And thats normal. You're gonna get the whole mix, but it's good. It's great to get feedback. It's great. Have other people listening to your song the feedback. Listen to the feedback. It's good. Constructive criticism is good. It's hard. It's definitely harder here sometimes, but it's good. It helps us be better on the next one. And I wrote over here copyright in Prince sees when you're sharing your song with people. If you're thinking about this is a really, really, really good song, and you may want to try to sell it someday. Um if you're going, I plan on putting it on YouTube or out in the public. It's a really important idea that cooperated first. Don't put it anywhere where strangers have access to it unless you are going to copyright it first. So we kind of talked about that a little bit. Just protect yourself. Protect your music. It's yours. It's is your baby. It's important, OK? And you have to protect it. So if someone else could possibly take it and do something bad with it, you have to protect it and copyrighting it is how you protect it. Oh, but I wouldn't It would be too paranoid about that because there's so much music. Everyone is uploading stuff all the time. I wouldn't be too too paranoid about it, but if you think you want to make a career out of it calculated before you start sharing it with a bunch of strangers and then, of course, write another song, start working on your next one, you got the one and it's great. Start working on the next one, maybe write a different kind of song. So maybe if the first song that you wrote was like, uh, maybe if the 1st 1 was a rock song. Maybe the 2nd 1 I'm gonna make it Sounds like a country song or a folk song or a jazz song or a heavy metal songer. Who knows what, Maybe try a different kind. Um, one of the techniques that I have used for some people is you channel some band or musician and you say I'm going to write a song as if I was this band. Like if this band was gonna do their next album where their next song, that brand new song that they have written yet I'm going to write it like I was down. You can kind of write in the style of these different artists or bands. It's a cool technique to use so you could get a lot of different sounds and keep the creative juices flowing by saying, I'm going to write in the style of this person or that person. So write another song and, of course, uh, you go back, watch these videos again. Watch the videos as many times as you need. Teoh. So, um, absolutely, absolutely. You have this as much as you need it. So if there's anything that you feel like you need to go back and watch again. You didn't fully understand it or you wanted to get some more ideas because we went through a lot of different ideas, a lot of different permutations of going through the courts and the melodies. So go back and watch it again. Go back and watch as many times as you want. And finally, I wanted to thank you for watching all of the videos and being a part of the course with me . I have a water flow putting this course together and kind of sad to see it come to an end. But, you know, the world needs more good songwriters. And so I feel you're one of them now, so thanks a lot for being a part of this with me, and I'll see you next time.