Ideas on how to write a song

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Hi,

Sometime I can got good ideas for 3 songs in a week but I cannot finished it.

I have a lots of riff, but I don't know how to mix them together to do songs.

I can take one riff and I can fit it in many of my songs, it's like that every riff can fit in a long song.

So I'm trying to do 2 or 3 versions for each song and/or 2 songs who own the same riff so it could be like part 1 and part 2.

In the past I brought my ideas to my friends and we done something cool but alone It's not easy.

When you write a song, how do you do ?

I don't do melodies. I do lyrics. It's weird to see what I come up with sometimes. I write a lot of lyrics that sound like they were written by R.E.M.

First, go to www.ibreathemusic.com for all your questions related to the creative side of music. I hang out there myself and learn something new every time I pay them a visit.

What works for me is "going with the flow". When I have inspiration I can write a whole song on the fly. Then, when inspiration leaves me I won't write anything for a week up to two months.
I found that forcing myself to write songs produce crap-music, so being in "music-space" is the optimal condition for me when I want to write music.

I have the same problem as you sometimes. I come up with a killer riff or melody, but can't evolve it without repeating myself. Often, my inner-voice tells me "You have already said that! Don't repeat yourself! Move on!". I feel that a song is a story, and good stories needs to be structured and varied to captivate the target individual(s).

When I started writing songs, I actually learned a lot about song construction by doing cover versions. You can learn other people's songs that are in a similar style to yours, paying close attention to what the melody, chords, riff, lyrics etc do in each section and how the different sections fit together. Do this in between writing your own songs, and after a while, you get a general sense for how songs work.

What I used to do was, if I got an idea in my head, either a piece of melody or a line of lyrics, I got into a zone where I just let that one snippet go around in my head, repeating itself; I kind of allowed myself to just stay with that one fragment even though it was all I had.

I usually found that eventually if I let it fly around in my head, something else joined the party. The next bit would start evolving out of it, like a root growing a stem, and then the stem grows a leaf, etc.

If I was not at home, I made sure to record it -- before cell phones, I carried a microcassette recorder, and before those, I phoned my home answering machine and hummed the melody or spoke the words into it.

When I got back home to my instruments and recording stuff, I would get my guitar, or keyboard, and start finding a chord that goes with my fragment. Then I would just repeat and repeat, playing and singing, and again more stuff would start coming.

I don't know if this would work all the time for someone else, all I know is it seemed to be how things happened with me. I would wind up with a whole first verse, or a chorus, and then I'd just keep playing over and over what I had so far. I nearly always found that things would just start "growing" out of repeating whatever fragment I had so far.

I think I would also try out other chords to see if the next segment suggested itself out of the random chords I tried. I'm not really sure what would happen -- when I composed a song and it was flowing, I got into a zone where I didn't really know what I was trying or doing, it just kind of emerged.