Songwriting Guidelines Are Your Friend

Songwriting guidelines are user friendly because they've been discovered over years to consistently work for the listener. Because they work you can't really go wrong using them.

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They're called this because you'll find songs that sometimes break one or two of them and yet still are strong songs. Use them as guides and don't follow them blindly like they are universal truths or song writing rules.

The only real songwriting rules boil down to you must connect emotionally with your listener in an honest way.

A good approach is to know and understand song writing guidelines before you break them. You need to have something going on in your song that replaces it.

I'll start with the ones that seen the most universal to me. Other people might give variations of these or have different views on each one.

The guideline of twos, some call it the rule of twos. This applies to everything you do in a song. Its important to repeat, repeat, but listeners get bored quickly. So only repeat anything twice before providing the listener variety of some kind.

It doesn't have to be much but it has to feel real to the listener or they'll get bored or worse still, change songs. Its the way people are hard wired. They can't help it, but you can by providing interesting variety in your song.

There are exceptions to this musical guideline. An example is a musical groove so strong it overrides the melody or lyrics. Another example is a choruses that uses a repeat refrain 3 or 5 times.

Another guideline is using melody structure blocks to make your melody memorable. Asking questions is another songwriting guideline in lyric writing. Combine this with powerful statements or quote what someone has said. This will make your songs much more interesting and will pull the listener into the song.

Coloring the chorus is a must in every song. All great songs color the chorus. Each verse must lead you to hear and feel something new about the chorus the next time you hear it.

Don't just repeat similar content in the second verse. The content of the chorus is usually repeated so changing the verse or bridge content before the chorus will give the chorus extra life and make your song more interesting.