Rhythm II

As promised, this chapter focuses on specific tips you can immediately apply to your songwriting. They will prove true for any part (also pitches and lyrics). But let’s do rhythm first, as that’s where everything starts.

Principle 1: breathe

In all my previous audio examples … the music filled the whole bar. There were no pauses, no rest.

This is probably the most common beginner mistake. I did this as well for a long time.

You think your melody has to be exciting at all times! It needs to do more! So you fill every millisecond of music with melody and lyrics.

In reality, a melody is perhaps more defined by the space between the notes.

Space can mean total silence or just a long (held) note. Our ears quickly get used to sound, no matter how surprising or grating. So the most important moment is when a note starts. If it goes on for many seconds, it basically becomes “background noise” and has the same function as silence.

Adding breath to a melody is especially essential when it’s supposed to be sung, of course.

How to use this? Instead of writing a continuous stream of notes, break it into pieces. Even if it’s for an instrument (e.g. piano), think about the melody like phrases. Like vocal lines. After a certain number of beats, a breath must be taken.

When you find yourself adding “filler notes”—just don’t. Allow a silence to create the transition between two musical ideas.

Principle 2: contrast

We touched on this with the last principle. Music is emotion and works better when it is more powerful. How do you make something more powerful?

• You grow the thing itself (louder, higher pitch, longer, …)
• You lower the surroundings (softer, lower pitch, shorter, …) to achieve contrast

The first solution is the fastest. Most people will use that by default, without thinking. The problem is that there’s a limit to how much something can grow. If you already have many long notes in your rhythm, adding one that’s even longer will quickly reach the limit to what a singer can do. (Same for singing higher pitches.)

That’s why I personally prefer starting with quite long notes for the rhythm. Then, when I need variety and contrast, I break some of them into quicker notes.

Another reason for this principle is the fact that humans simply like contrast. Compare it to visual contrast. If you printed gray letters on a white paper, it’d be really hard to read. Because there’s not enough contrast between the colors. Sure, you can read it with some effort. And it might look very nice at first glance.

But contrast helps people immediately understand and perceive something correctly. It helps prevent misunderstandings or question marks inside our head. (“What did I hear? Are we still on the same note or not? Is this still the verse?”)

How do I use this? When in doubt, add strong contrast between parts of your rhythm. After a few quick notes, add a very long one. Write a completely new rhythm for the bridge of your song, instead of subtly changing the rhythm of what came before.

See the example below. After a long note, we get a range of short notes. After a few medium notes, we get one very short note. Such simple tricks, but they already create nice rhythms.

Principle 3: Strong and weak beats

This crosses into the area of music theory. But it’s both simple and crucial knowledge, so I included it here.

Remember that “feeling” humans have for rhythm? It tells us some things:

• God Beat: the first beat of a new measure is the strongest and gets the most attention
• Strong Beat: the third (or “middle”) beat is the second strongest
• Weak Beat: any other beat has less emphasis and gets less attention

How to use this?

• Let notes fall on the stronger beats.
• Weaker beats can be skipped or contain silence.
• If you have an odd surprising note (high contrast, out of key, …), place it on a strong beat. On a weak beat, it will often sound like a mistake.

As always, you can break these rules. But that will take experience with applying them first. In most cases, following these principles is all you need.

Principle 4: Start too early or too late

Beginner songwriters often start their melodies exactly at the start of a measure, always on that “god beat”. If their melody ends early, they’ll wait until the next measure starts before adding new notes.

This often sounds static and too rigid. Instead, try moving this start (and end) around:

• Add a few notes before the “god beat”.
• Or shift the start to a later point, maybe halfway the measure.

Easy changes like this will immediately make a melody more … organic. More natural, less rigid.

You might be wondering now: but wait, if we don’t start at the strongest beat, isn’t that just a weaker start?

No, it’s not. Because the first note of a melodic phrase doesn’t necessarily need to be the most “attention grabbing”. The “god beat” simply makes any note more powerful that lands on it. But that doesn’t need to also be the first note of a melodic line.

Check the example below. The phrases start / end halfway the measure. But the high point, literally the highest pitch, falls on the god beat of the next measure.

Principle 5: Rhyming

At the start of this guide, I mentioned that rhyming showcases all the good principles of songwriting. It follows a pattern (two words that are mostly the same), but also breaks it in a surprising way (the change that makes the rhyme).

This isn’t restricted to lyrics (or language). You can rhyme anything by applying this idea:

• Repeat the same structure
• But change the ending slightly

Rhythm is no exception. Let’s say you’ve found a nice rhythm, but it’s only a few measures long. Not long enough to fill a verse or a chorus.

What to do? Copy it. Use it a second time. But this time, change the ending to something slightly different.

Taken even further, you get rhyming schemes. You’ve probably learned these in elementary school.

Take “ABBA” for example. The first sentence rhymes with the fourth, the second with the third. This is a great structure to use when writing music.

• Write a nice first phrase
• Write a nice second phrase
• Copy it as the third phrase, maybe with a slight change
• Copy the first phrase here, maybe with another slight change

Boom! There’s your verse / chorus. It will sound very coherent and fitting, because each line rhymes with another. At the same time, there’s enough variety and surprise to stay interesting.

Research some rhyming schemes. Or invent one yourself. Then use that idea to chain rhythmic ideas together.

The example below shows a more complex case. It uses “AAAB”. The first and third part are identical (A). The second part is the same as A, but with a different ending. The fourth part rhymes with the second by ending on the same note, but is otherwise different.

Principle 6: Use what you have

Last example saw us copying an idea we already used. This isn’t lazy: this is 99% of your work as a songwriter.

Listen to songs you like. Most likely, they only have one or a handful of unique rhythms. They fill the song by repeating the ideas they already had.

A lazy artist will, indeed, just copy it. That’s how you get songs that simply repeat the same lyrics thirty times in exactly the same way.

A good artist will re-use ideas in interesting ways. Like, as I said,

• Reverse the rhythm.
• Make it slower or faster
• Combine two different rhythmic ideas, switching halfway
• Find some memorable section of notes and repeat that wherever you can
• Your verse starts with a long, held note? Use that same note at the end of your chorus.

Adding such “restrictions” often leads to more creativity and a better end result. You might have to change an idea to make space for copying another idea into it. This is fine. It’s a compromise. In my experience, it’s a compromise you should be willing to make more often than not.

Again, view it as a puzzle to solve. Hmm, which pieces can I move around to create a pattern? How can I make these notes longer/shorter so they are similar to the rhythm of my verse? Maybe I need to add an extra measure of silence?

Keep playing around, trying to solve the puzzle. Eventually, the answer will come.

Here’s an example of reversing a rhythm. I literally took the note lengths and swapped them. (Often, you might want to do some extra editing to make sure the reversed version has the same length. Here, it’s one measure longer.)