We’ve all heard thousands, maybe tens of thousands of songs. Most of us now know, even if we’ve never given it a thought, more or less what’s going to happen next in a song. And the rhythm and phrasing of the melody is often the biggest culprit in this predictability.
Here’s a comparison – When you watch studio movies from the mid-20th century, if Character A says they’re going over to B’s house, you almost always see them walking out their door (with their hat on), getting into their car, pulling out, driving on the road, parking at B’s, getting out of their car, walking up to B’s door, etc. The filmmakers felt at that time that the audiences needed to see those scenes for continuity and believability.
Sometimes there’s an aesthetic reason for this, but for a modern audience in many movies this slows the pace to a crawl. We’ve seen too many movies and TV shows to need what the audience needed decades ago! Post 1960s, post-Godard, it became understood (and still is) that the viewers could connect the dots themselves; they were’t going to get distracted worrying that Character A might have have been transported to B’s house by a space/time machine (if it’s not a sci-fi movie).
Similarly, and speaking very generally, I believe that our modern ears are overly familiar with the boxy, ‘2 bar melody phrase followed by 2 bar rest’ song… and its cousins. We know what’s going to happen; we’re ahead of the songwriter – not good. And even in a new song, when we like that more traditional style, the reason is often that the song in question is a great new version of something traditional, pleasing to us for its familiarity.
So, if you’re interested in writing something that seems a little different, more ‘modern’, take a look at your pacing; how your phrasing rolls out.
(Sidenote: Modern does not equal Good, nor does Traditional equal Bad. Far from it. But things always change, they need to change, they should change, they will change. And – with the occasional exception of genius – what we’re used to almost always becomes predictable. That’s life.)
Things to consider to avoid predictability in melodic phrasing:
* The most common approach/solution in contemporary songs is for a melodic phrase to go on longer than you’d expect or begin earlier than expected. Don’t start every phrase of the melody on the same beat (the downbeat, the pickup before, the 8th note after). When it comes to the beginnings and endings of phrases, mix it up! In a nutshell, Rap songs opened our ears by bringing a new level of (disciplined) freedom to phrasing and rhyming across bars and sections. And I don’t think it’s going back!
* If your section (verse, chorus) is, for example, 8 bars long, think of your melody as an 8 bar phrase, NOT as 4 repeats of the same 2 bars. Tell an 8 bar melodic story, not the same story 4 times.
* Follow the Words! Sometimes the lyric – the thing you want to say – doesn’t fit into the ‘box’. Change the box! Lengthen or shorten the melody line. Let the lyric lead you into unexpected melodic phrases.
* Drop A Bar – or a Beat or Two. If it seems boring waiting to get to the next line, try dropping a beat or two, or a full bar. Why always wait? Sometimes this creates angular phrases that really grab the ear (check out Hey Ya or All You Need Is Love or I Say A Little Prayer).
There’s no One Size Fits All solution. The most we can do is become a little more conscious of our choices… Listen to what seems not quite right yet in our songs and search until things fall into place… that place may be an unexpected one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43dE6fiTTSU