We’ve all heard tens of thousands of songs. If a song is extremely predictable, most listeners, even the most musically disinterested or uneducated among us, can feel instinctively what’s going to happen next. If a song follows the same exact pattern that’s been heard thousands of times before, unless it’s unusually well done the listener will find it dull. The song will lack any sense of surprise.
From what I’ve observed the biggest Songwriting culprit leading to predictability is what I call ‘boxiness‘ (thanks to ace NYC keyboardist/songwriter John Deley for this descriptive word).
Boxiness: Most songs are and have been, for a long time, written in phrases of 2, 4, 8 bars. This is something so familiar that a lot of times we don’t think about it or realize it.
The first melody phrase often comes in and takes up the first two bars, more or less. Then we wait 2 bars to get around to the end of the 4 bar phrase… and begin the next one. And on it goes. You hear the first line or two of a song and you know what’s coming. Why? Largely because you’ve heard those same phrases – and the waits between them – so many times before.
Think about how movies used to be. If a character said “Let’s go to the restaurant”, the film showed them – going to their car, getting in, driving on the road, pulling into the restaurant parking lot, parking the car, getting out of the car, going into the restaurant. These days most of the time we don’t see any of that anymore. Why? It’s boring! (Unless it has a specific purpose for narrative or pacing.) We’ve seen it before. We get it – you don’t have to show us… again.
They got to the restaurant! Some way!! Unless there’s a need to know, or a need to wait, who cares how? Skip the boring stuff!
Similarly, when a song is just ‘going through the paces’ in a way we’ve heard a million times before… we enter the doldrums. Unless it helps with narrative or pacing, we may not need all that connective stuff, all that driving and waiting around, as much as we used to – any more than it’s needed by movies (or TV shows) in 2014.
I think the most interesting songwriting of this era breaks out of lot of these boxy conventions. Simply to keep my own interest, not to mention the listener’s, I explore this in my own writing. But this post is not about working on melodies to make them less predictable (I’ve got other posts for that!). This is about the spaces in between the melody phrases.
I’ve found that one approach to breaking out of the ‘box’ is to try dropping bars and/or beats. Let’s say I’ve set up a 4 bar chord pattern in a certain section of the song. The first melody phrase often happens in the first 2 bars. Then the chords will continue for another 2 bars until the next melody phrase rolls around. The 2 bars of waiting around – are they really necessary? Do they build drama or tension? Is the pause that’s created necessary?
If not, I experiment with dropping that 4th bar… or maybe just the last 2 beats of it (making the 4th bar a bar of 2/4)… or I combine the chords of bars 3 and 4 into a single bar; thereby dropping a bar… Making the phrases less predictable
These are just possible examples. What will work – if anything – varies depending on the song – the lyric and the melody. The main idea is that phrases of a song don’t have to always roll out in 2, 4, or 8 bar increments. They can jump to the next phrase sooner, dictated by the words and melodies themselves – not by convention. We don’t always need all that open space anymore. If it’s just filler, it can go.