How to Improve your Songwriting with Templates -

Songwriting is a skill that takes time to master. It can be frustrating and difficult at times, but it’s worth the effort.

There are many different ways you can improve your songwriting skills, from learning new chords to listening to more music by other artists.

One way you can improve your songwriting abilities is by using templates as a guide for writing lyrics.

Templates provide an outline of a musical idea so that you have a starting point for coming up with something unique and original on your own.

In this article, we’ll talk about what templates are and how they work to help improve songwriter abilities in various areas of their craft!

How to create a songwriting template.

I’ll be showing you some ways you can use your favorite songs to come up with your own, and the best part is, if you do this right, you know your song will work before you even start writing it.

Let’s get to it,

So the song I’m going to use in this example is Wonderwall by Oasis, but this works for any song.

I’m going to start by showing you the structural elements of the song, These are things that can not be copyrighted and are present in every song in the world.

Then I’ll show you how to use these elements as a framework to hang your own original content on, I’m even going to show you some ways to find that original content.

So let’s start with an overview of the song

The theme of the song

The best songs are the ones that provoke a strong emotional response. They make us feel something- sadness, joy, anger.

But what is it about the songwriter’s skill that makes people connect with these emotions?

Universal themes!

The Universal theme…is “uncertainty”

Wanting a way out of a situation, hoping to be saved.

The song’s plot

All songs tell a story of some kind. It’s important to know what we want to say in our lyrics.

Let’s have a look at what Wonderwall is trying to say.

verse 1, you’re at a crossroads and I’ve got your back,

verse 2, you have lost the passion, but I’m here for you.

Pre-Chorus, life is confusing and I wish I had an answer for you.

Chorus, Can you save me from myself?

verse 3, a chance is missed but I’m here for you.

So now we know what we want to say, Let’s move onto ‘How’ we are going to say it.

Lyric structures

The structural elements of a song lyric can’t be copyrighted. So this gives us a lot we can take from songs we admire to practice our own writing skills.

A lot of lyric writing is technical. I know, no songwriter wants to hear that. But it’s true.

The good news is, these are great tools to use to improve our craft by creating templates from our favorite songs.

Let’s have a look at what these elements are…

The number of lines in a section
The length of those lines(meter)
Rhyme type
Rhyme scheme
The position of melodic phrases in the musical bar
How the content is organized. (internal emotions & external images)
repetition of melodic and lyrical parts.
Contrast within and between sections
Melodic contour(shape)
Dynamics

Let’s go over Wonderwall and see how these elements are used.

It’s template time…

Verse 1.

Verse 1 starts on a weak beat, it has 7 lines, short notes,

sawtooth melody shape, acoustic guitar, and vocals)

“Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you”

The first line has 8 stressed syllables. It has a perfect rhyme type.

Have a look at this video for a full explanation.

The first verse is one instrument and vocals.

Each phrase is made up of two lyrical lines with mostly eight-note motifs kind of bookmarked at the start and end with longer quarter notes and is spread over two bars each.

This is repeated twice and then we get a variation. Standard 3 to 1 repetition pattern.

I give a full explanation of that in this video….

So the second melodic pattern in the verse mixes longer and shorter notes a bit more and has more of a descending shape.

It starts on the downbeat and is spread out over two bars ending just after the bar.

With variation in the meter, rhyme scheme, and content organization giving it contrast.

So there is a whole bunch of structural elements we can use as a template.

Verse two follows these patterns again but the arrangement filling out lifting the energy of the song.

Putting it together

Breaking lyrics down like this we can get all the info we need to make our own song with the same structures.

when we use this technique, the more we change the less like the original song it will sound and any of these structural elements can be changed to suit what you want.

But the bare minimum we need to change is the lyrics, chords, and either pitch, rhythm, or intervals of the melody notes.

But slight changes to these things can be enough.

As I said, the more you change the less like the original it will sound. This is where your own creativity comes in.

But feel free to take the same Theme and Emotion and plug it into this formula I use to come up with new lyrical content, I go into that in this post if you want to take a look.

All this structural stuff exists in every song, with vocals, anyway, so it’s been used to bypass certain decision-making that sometimes interferes with just creating.

And that’s the point of this. Remember I said, if you use this technique properly, you know your new song will work even before you start writing it.

And I don’t know about you but for me, that takes a whole lot of pressure off the creative process. You can also rewrite until you have something unique.

If you’ve been struggling to come up with lyrics, don’t worry. You may not need a lyric writing cheat sheet after all.

All you need is a structural framework for your song and some creativity!

In this blog post, we gave you a way to make lyrical templates that can be used as the basis of any song idea.

Try them out or use one as inspiration to write something new today!