Song Structure Tutorial with Lil Jazz And His String Orchestra
Understanding song structure by listening for it is somewhat difficult,
too many things are going on at once and one on top of the other.
But song structure, is extremely important,
as it marks beginnings and ends, helping you reason about buildup and release, and even manage your time during composition.
One day you may wish to focus on the strong parts of the song where all the action is going on,
and the next, on the slow parts like intro or closing.
A tidy and simple structure that I prefer,
has an opening, intro, action1, rest, action2, closing.
Action is allowed to repeat,
and in deed your listener may wish it.
Each part can have two halves, first half and second half, the second half allows us to create a tension build-up before we go into to the next part.
There is an exception to tension build-up,
the second part of the closing should actually probably slow down or fade.
Let us begin with a clean and simple opening,
you can see I divided it in two, slow and fast.
My closing, will use the same melody,
but I will play the fast part first, followed by slow.
INTRO PLAYS
Now, that the song is rolling,
we begin preparing for action with a two part intro.
The second part of the intro introduces drums,
and some extra complexity for easy transition into action.
INTRO PLAYS
The action is also divided in two halves,
this increases complexity and gives the ear a bit more to listen to.
It is important to note that duration of actions and upcoming rest,
is the same as both opening and warm-up added together.
Here I rely on strings to provide all the action:
ACTION1 PLAYS
And here is the center piece of the song,
often times it is the part where your listener rests from the action a little bit.
I chose to remove drums from here and empathize the flute,
to give the listener something delicate to focus on.
The rest has a strong build up,
as not to too abruptly leap into the second action part.
REST PLAYS.
The second action has little-more to offer than the first,
it may not be a good idea to switch too many things around especially if it is a dance song.
So it is basically a copy of the first action,
and in this case it is followed by the piano melody from the opening, but now arranged in such a way as to give the listener closure.
Here is the song we made, in full,
I hope you like it.