
If there’s one thing that every songwriter knows, it’s the importance of having a catchy melody and great lyrics. But that’s easier said than done. Here are 7 steps to put lyrics to a melody.
Making a tune for your own song
The easiest way to writing a melody is to create a bed for it. A musical bed! This can be a beat or a chord progression.
It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as it feels like a song.
That is to say, be it chords or a beat, when you hear it, it should feel like a song has started playing.
Playing random chords or rhythms is one thing. But we want something that feels like a song and will inspire us to sing along.
How to add lyrics to a melody
1. Let the music tell you it’s story.
Let the music start to tell you what it wants to be, the story it wants to tell. So now it’s time to start listening.
If you don’t play an instrument, check out this virtual chord player.
What is its feeling, its emotion? Do any pictures pop into your mind’s eye? Make a note of anything that fits.
Let pictures and feelings guide you here. This is a creative exploration and it might take some time.
Your subconscious is actually doing most of the work here, so give it space to do its thing.
2. Add melody to your chords.
After you have created a musical bed of some kind and felt the emotion and story it wants to tell, we need to start finding its melody.
So start singing over it. We want to establish a melody and a flow, this is where being fluent in gibberish comes in.
Words are a left-brain thing, melody is a right-brain creative emotional thing.
Gibberish gets you singing without thinking. This allows words to jump out without getting in the way of creativity.
Some of the gibberish will sound like words, words that fit the melody.
The trick here is to try out as many different melodic possibilities as you can.
Try to record yourself doing this. Then listen back to all the different choices you made and pick the best parts.
3. I have a melody but no lyrics, now what?
So you have come up with a melody and want to add lyrics to it. This can be tough.
The melody now dictates ‘how’ you can say ‘what you want to say. That’s a bit like trying to describe the sky without using words like ‘blue’, ‘clouds’, or ‘up’.
Try out some dummy lyrics!
Using Dummy lyrics is a great way to see how the melody flows with actual words.
It lets you see what kind of rhyme schemes suit the melody.
You can figure out what kind of vowel sounds match and what kind of rhythms and syllables the words should have.
And writing dummy lyrics is a great way to practice writing lyrics to a melody.
Try writing new lyrics to some of your favorite songs.
4. What is the song about?
Next, what is the song about? This is where we pay attention to those words that just fell out and ask them what they are trying to tell us.
Dig into those ideas to find ‘the thing’, that piece of the puzzle that the lyric will revolve around.
Start asking questions like, who is this about? What is the situation? When is this happening? Where is this happening? How is this happening?
5. Fleshing out the idea.
Then we need to flesh out the lyrical idea while making it match the melodic idea.
Don’t be afraid to make adjustments to the melody.
Explore some different options here, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Make lists of words and phrases that support the main idea.
Have you found a metaphor you can build on?
Sia’s chandelier is a metaphor for letting go of addiction.
Have you found a situation or character that expresses the emotion?
Paul McCartney’s Elinor Rigby is about loneliness. He uses the characters and their situations to express it.
Sting’s Message in a bottle is about the difficulty of trying to find a genuine connection in modern society, he uses a castaway to symbolize the feeling of isolation.
All the gibberish, dummy lyrics, and words that just pop out need to be explored to see what they could become.
6. The right words in the right place.
This is the more technical part of the process but we should keep that sense of creative exploration.
We want to match the important moments in the melody with important words in the lyrics.
Each note in our melody will become a word in our lyric.
We can look at our melody and figure out its rhythm and what that rhythm will look like when it has a lyric attached.
The notes of our melody that land on the strong beats of our music will become the stressed syllables of the words that carry the most meaning.
7. Make sure it feels good to sing.
Probably the most important aspect of a vocal melody is that it feels good to sing.
The wrong lyrics can ruin a melody and the visa versa.
Make sure your lyrics are bringing out the emotion in the melody and not interfering with it.
If it feels good for you to sing it will feel good to listen to and for others to sing along to it.
Writing lyrics is a daunting task for many, but it doesn’t have to be.
The more you practice creating melodies and adding lyrics to them, the better you’ll get at it. So keep practicing and remember that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback.
Learn from your mistakes and have fun along the way.
If you need more ideas about creating lyrics, download your free cheat sheet that can help you go from no idea to a finished song.
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