How To Go From A RIFF To A COMPLETE SONG
Do you have trouble turning your ideas into full songs?
Do you find yourself constantly recording 20 second guitar parts into your voice memos app, each time thinking “this riff is gonna be the one. This one really cooks”...
... just to forget about it, then it fades into the void of other voice memos, and before you know it...
..."Voice 267", the riff that you once thought was going to take the word by storm and you to the top, is finally and permanently faded into the ether, not to be heard again.
What I just described might very well be the most specific issue to have ever plagued every single guitar player in the history of the smartphone.
(Damn smartphones. Creating so many problems while making our life so easy!)
And hey, I get it. Sometimes you write a riff, and you think, “I like this riff, but also, I absolutely do not have the energy, nor the motivation to sit down just this moment and turn it into anything more than just a riff, so into the voice memos it goes”.
I’m gonna tell you immediately that voice memos are where great ideas die. You can probably delete all of them right now, at least you'll put your riffs out of their misery.
That's because if you let the inspiration that created the riff fade by putting it on the back burner... well, you are giving up the inspiration that will create the rest of the song.
Once you come up with an idea, it is paramount that you turn it into more than just an idea before you put the guitar down. Keep writing.
Now, you don’t have to make a full song in one sitting, but you need to have more than just a riff. This tip alone will give you a significantly easier time finishing your songs.
But what if voice memos aren’t your issue?
Or maybe you have other questions about how to turn a great part into a whole song?
In that case, look no further than the video linked below, and I’ll give you more pro tips on turning your ideas into songs:
If you want your songs to come out sounding more interesting and unique, you should check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course. The more you know about chords, the better your songs are going to sound!
Video Transcription
Tommaso Zillio 0:01
Hello internet, so nice to see you, let's say you just wrote, you just had a musical idea. And you just wrote four bars worth of music. Maybe you have a melody and maybe have a chord progression. But it's a good idea.
And you know, it's a good idea. And you stay there and you played and the more you played, the more you like it, and you play this idea to some of your friends. And they're like, that's, that's good music. Can you write a song out of that? And you're thinking, Ah, I have a musical idea. How do I go? From my four bars?
To a full complete song? That's a problem. Right? I mean, this is one of the most natural questions people can ask. And people asked this question a lot. And if you go on YouTube, you find next to nothing about about this problem.
It's like, nobody wants to explain to you how to go about that. There is a reason why nobody wants to explain that and you're gonna see in a moment, okay, but a student of mine asked me that I have a four bar idea. How do I go to a full song? And this is the answer I gave him.
Speaker 1 1:10
How do I unlock slash learn the ability to take a good idea? Like a good riff or a good hook, and develop that into a complete song? With efficiency? How I've been doing it is mostly trial and error, kind of just nose to the grindstone. And I was just wondering if there's a more effective way.
Tommaso Zillio 1:30
what is the problem? Exactly? Meaning, let's say you have an idea. What do you what are you doing? And when do you get stuck?
Speaker 1 1:37
So it's like four bars, most of my ideas, dozens of them and it's like, Okay, that's cool idea. Where do I go from there? Okay, like the creativity like stops.
Tommaso Zillio 1:47
Okay, fantastic. So, this is where knowing the song form helps you, okay? All the music written in the centuries, okay. has not been invented from scratch. Another musician starts on like, Why have an idea and then suddenly, they have an idea for 86 bars of music, okay, doesn't happen, they have no idea like you for a full bar of music.
But many musicians have studied how to how the forms in music so And for instance, the modern Formula One which is most most often is the song form, which is verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, with a few variation, you can may not have the bridge, you can have more choruses at the end, you can also get verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, you can have an intro and outro, interludes and stuff, but in general, that's the form, okay, which means you need to compose three sections.
Speaker 2 2:46
A verse, chorus, and the bridge. When I put it down this way, it looks easier than just let's go from four parts to a full song.
Tommaso Zillio 2:57
You have to remember to write a song, you need to compose three sections, and then join them together. So the first question to ask yourself is those four bars will fit better in a verse in a chorus, or in a bridge?
And you can give any answer you want, depending on the bowl, four bars? And then the second question is, how do I complete the section? Are those four bars, the first four bars of a verse? Or maybe the last four bars of a verse? How do I write the rest? What will work for the rest make sense? But now it's a smaller problem. You're not trying to write a whole song you're writing to write a verse, a verse could be one eight bars, 16 bars.
Speaker 2 3:36
Right? So you're like, maybe you have half of a verse there. The first idea you can have is just repeat the four bars.
Tommaso Zillio 3:44
Or repeat it and change the beginning or the ending of the second four bars. All right, for completely new bars, that seems to give a conclusion to the verse. But now it's a definite question and see what I'm in.
Okay, it's not like how do I go from here to a whole song? It's, I have this four bars with at the beginning of my verse and I need to write other four bars that the ending of my verse, that's a much easier question to answer. Okay, so when I'm in, right, you're good.
Speaker 1 4:12
But what if it's not a verse? It's like the intro, the musical intro.
Tommaso Zillio 4:17
But like, yes, but the intro is always another part of the song. Have you noticed that? Yeah. It's very rare to find a song that there's an intro like it's completely independent of the rest of the song. Maybe some Metallica song but even then they are taking a little part of the intro and reworking it in the chorus or the verse. Maybe it's just three notes.
Speaker 1 4:42
But if they're not like using part of it, yes?
Tommaso Zillio 4:45
Yes. Yes. Okay, maybe it wasn't a good progression. Maybe they're using three notes of the melody. Maybe they're using a specific interval that is displayed in the intro something like that. But there is always a connection somewhere. Okay, okay. And in many ways, Any other statement, I mean, that's for Metallica because they typically write their intro separately, but again, something creeps in anyway.
But many for most other bands in general, the intro contains part of the song. So it's either the melody of the verse in the intro or the melody of the chorus in the intro the chord progression with a different melody. But okay, so what you do is the opposite. You have an intro, great, you have an intro.
Speaker 2 5:23
How do you transform that intro into part of the chorus or part of the verse? Okay, okay.
Tommaso Zillio 5:30
Can you imagine trying to do the whole thing you just say okay, at the middle of the of the intro, but I mean, changing the chords. It works. Okay, and I have the intro, I think the chord progression of the intro and I write a new melody on top, and that's my verse, ordinary chorus, or my bridge occasionally. Okay, and then you start completing that, it's a completely different thing, thinking that thinking I have four bars, I need to go to a song.
That's the structure of my song that I can write down on a piece of paper, and I filled up this blank, this blank and this blank and I had to fill up the rest. It's a much easier problem to solve. Because now you can start thinking, what do I want my song to say? So this little thing I composed what part of the song
What is the is better suited to whatever, you got an idea, right? Okay. And then you can start right here again, after this do I want the tension to go up or to down? Do I want to put the climax after that or I'm coming down from the climax, okay? You're gonna do all these kinds of reasoning to give a good arc, the song ending because I fill up the blanks, one, and notice the shape of the song.
Most of the music, today's composing in song form, and that's the song for optional intro verse, chorus, verse chorus, optional bridge, optional verse, chorus, chorus, optional outro occasionally have connections like from the verse, the chorus, pre chorus, because the two things don't fit immediately. So just write that another four bars to make them join is mostly okay.
And the individual is at any point, when you join to two sections, when you listen to the song, you know if it's needed or not, okay? You take your ideas, and you start copy pasting them around, okay, you can take one Id anymore, I guess, you know, you're gonna it's gonna be the version take another idea that you compose, and maybe that's going to be the chorus and verse idea. That's gonna be the bridge, fill up the blanks and listen to the whole thing. It typically does unadorned again, you can just record this part, this part, this part, Copy, Paste until you fill up all the blanks, okay?
Listen to the whole thing. If it works, you're done. If it doesn't work, fix what doesn't work. So that's another problem. People think that they have to compose a piece of music entirely in their mind. And the moment they write it down has to be already good. The reality is that you start with writing a horrible, horrible thing, then you make it successively better. You just tweak it until it gets good.
So never did a song on the first on the first writing. They're always horrible and the rest of it, okay, but put down something, get the structure right, get them in the emotional arc writer. Output put notes like here, I need more instruments to push up the dynamic here. I need less Okay, and then start working on that and the song will come together.
Unknown Speaker 8:26
Okay. So thank you so much.