I don’t have one ‘handy’ gene in me, so I’ve always been amazed when I see colleagues and friends take apart a guitar, an amplifier, a radio…  They figure out what’s going on, what needs to be fixed… fix it… and then they put the whole thing back together again.  And usually it works!  Amazing.

Recently I’ve realized that, as un-handy as I am with material things, I do pretty much the same thing with my songs.  When the song is close to being done, or is done (so I think), I look at each component separately to see if it’s working.

This is not something I planned to do.  At some point I just realized I was doing it… and it seemed to be a pretty good idea.

What are some of the parts I put on the table to look at?

* Melody.  I play the single notes of the melody by itself, with no chords or words, on the guitar (or any instrument).  This allows me to hear the melody without harmonizations, words, or even vocal inflections that might cover up its weaknesses, such as lack of motion, too much repetition, etc.  Is the melody too rangy and hard to sing?  Or the opposite – is it in a too-narrow range that escaped my notice while I was  banging away, writing on the guitar?

(As I go through this process, I go back and forth between playing the melody solo and playing it with the rest of the tune, so I don’t make any changes that aren’t congruent with the wholeness of the song.  The same goes for all of the elements here.)

* Harmony.  Do the chords move smoothly from one to the next?  Are there too many or too few?  Have I chosen the best harmonization I can for the melody?  Do the rhythms of the chords flow and groove?  I try any options I can think of and sometimes find something better than what I have.

* Rhythm.  This extends into every part of the song.  Is the rhythm of the song itself right?  For example, if I’m writing it in a straight 8ths feel, might it be better as a shuffle, or vice versa?  (Believe it or not, sometimes this changes.)  Is the rhythm of the melody static – does each phrase or section tend to always start or end in the same place in the bar?  (In my book, this is usually a bad thing!)

* Lyrics.  This comprises two approaches.  One is looking at the lyric on the page, making sure it’s saying what I want to say in the best way I can.  Since I write mostly longhand, typing the words up really helps me with this.  The other is to sing the song over and over, without accompaniment, to really see how the words sing.  They may look good on paper, but that means nothing for a lyric.  Most importantly… they have to sing.

Overall, I search for signs of predictability, so the listener hopefully doesn’t know where the song is going before it gets there.  I search for areas of tedium, while trying to avoid cleverness for its own sake.  I try to keep all the elements moving and flowing, so the song maintains forward motion, momentum.

When your song is mostly written, do you have a final ‘quality control’ stage?  What do you do?

Please let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below: