I am a bit of a dilettante and have been writing guitar parts for some years now. I have no formal songsmith training and I like really off-kilter music (math rock, black metal, doom, sludge, post rock, etc).
I am looking for any advice on song structure. The main issue I have is I am great at writing tons of parts, and variations of said parts, but I am not sure how to structure the bits into a whole song. Years before I decided their wankery was too masturbatory to deal with, I talked to the guitarist from Between the Buried and Me about their song structure (first two albums) and he said it was basically just a collection of parts, with artificial bridges created to fill the weird gaps between disparate parts.
I had also heard that Radiohead’s Paranoid Android was a collection of bastard parts built piecemeal into a song.
So, do any of you have any websites, guides, tutorial, diagrams, or advice about unusual song structure, or examples of real songs broken down to their base elements?
ETA: I typically will start with an arpeggio that will be the base structure of the song. I use it as an intro and play variations of it as layers over chord progressions later. The intro builds into either a more complex or stupid “meatier” arpeggio, then that’ll probably build into a verse-kind of chord progression. This usually amps up and then dissolves where the “chorus” should be, but I don’t think I’ve ever written a chorus. Instead, the song breaks back down, and goes into some kind of…well. breakdown. some fast, repetitive staccato type thing (like the intro notes played over a chord crescendo). Then, whatever. The last song I fiddled with went into a pretty “normal” chord progression that was a variation of the “verse” stuff, and then ended.
This seems like it would only make sense to me, and listeners might find it offputting or just wrong. So…
I can upload the various parts of the last song so you can hear what I mean if that helps.
Hmm. My favorite analyst/explainer of song structure (and other musical elements) is Alan Pollack – his essays on every Beatles song are excellent, and easy to find online. But it’s the Beatles, so for your particular quest you’re restricted to only a few of his essays – “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” maybe the Abbey Road medley, and I guess “A Day on the Life.”
Hopefully you’ll find a similar musical expert’s writings for, say, Rush (“Xanadu” would be perfect) or maybe Jethro Tull (“Minstrel in the Gallery,” “No Lullaby,” maybe “Thick as a Brick”) or Frank Zappa (“Inca Roads”).
Classic Rock magazine occasionally does special editions on progressive rock. Likely one of their writers is the person you’re looking for.
There’s a UK magazine called Prog that is all about progressive rock. I don’t like all the music that fits under that label, but I do like enough of it that I find the magazine informative and fun a few times a year.
Between the Buried and Me definitely come across, like a lot of math/grind/etc. acts, as guys who just string cool riffs together. Some bands do this very well (Every Time I Die, Dillinger Escape Plan, Iwrestledabearonce, etc.) and some only do a passable job. Bands that are terrible at it, of course, eventually lay claim to founding yet another new genre in the metal underground.
I’ll share how I approach songwriting.
I start with a riff. A riff that not only sounds awesome but is fun to play. I play the shit outta that riff. Then I’ll start to think about another riff to go with it, so I’m not just playing the same awesome riff for 4 minutes. Once I have two riffs that I think go well together, I’ll start to figure out how many times to play each one before playing the other. So now I have ABABAB going. Then I’ll try and figure out if I need a bridge. Sometimes this just results in a song being ABCABCABCABC, sometimes it results in a genuine bridge part. And sometimes I have trouble going back into A so I have to write D and that can lead to E, etc. Sometimes I re-arange things a bit or write a small transitional part or something to help the groove; I tinker quite a bit with transitions. I stop when I decide the song is done.
Not exactly verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus, but sometimes I get that, and that’s fine. Some of my songs have only 2 parts, some have like 12. /Shrug