Our songwriting classes take place at Alex Von Soos’ studio in Fulham, West London as it’s more geared towards songwriting lessons than our usual setup of individual workstations.

Writing a song is one of the most rewarding things a musician can do; it makes you feel happy, confident, attractive and can earn you a pile of cash too! Writing a song can be for simple personal pleasure, for a gig you are playing later that night, for an advert you’ve been asked to contribute to, a theme tune for a film, even a ringtone for a mobile phone. The opportunities are endless.

In most acts, you tend to find that there is one or maybe two songwriters, sometimes more. These people often write their song alone, and bring it along to the band in a rehearsal room or a studio for the rest of the guys to play. The songwriter does not necessarily tell the bass player what to play, or the drummer what to drum, but if the melody, chords and lyric were written by her, then generally we consider it to be her song.

Alternatively, some acts write together. This tends to occur in rehearsals, where the band jam together, eventually leading to a completed song. In these cases, each player has usually not only composed what she plays on her own instrument, but has made a contribution to the writing of the song as a whole.

And then, there are hit writers who are not members of any band. These people write songs for other artists to perform. Burt Bacharach (Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick etc), Cathy Dennis (Kylie Minogue, Rachel Stevens etc) are good examples of these kinds of writers.

Whatever king of hit writer you intend to be, there are some important principles that apply to you and your forthcoming career. These form the basis of the way the music industry works with compositions.

You have a great song, it’s a potential number one, and by some unlikely twist of fate it’s about to be recorded and released by the biggest star of the year. Everyone is patting you on the back and reminding you how much they’ve helped you through the years. Then it dawns on you: this is too good to be true, surely I have to give away loads of my future earnings to someone, this is the music industry after all?

Well, on most occasions you won’t have share the money you earn with the artist at all, certainly, there is no legal imperative for you to do that. This is one of the beauties of writing for a third party. They need your hit song far more than you need that particular artist to record your song. You can always take it along to someone else; you’re in the driving seat so to speak. Congratulations!

There is one major thing to be aware of though: Quite often, the artist you are writing for will object to a line you have written and change it for the recording specifically so they can take a chunk of your earnings (and credit). There are countless examples of this through the decades, there is very little we can do about it. We used to call this ‘add a word, get a third’. Much more on the business side of things in your songwriting lessons with Alex. Check out our songwriting classes in full, and let us know if you’d like to book. Don’t forget, they’re based in Alex’s West London studio!

Here’s a little taster video:

Our unique Hit Songwriting course is proving to be a bit of a hit course, so we thought we’d share with you 10 free songwriting tips from our very own Alex Von Soos. There are many ways to write a song; some prefer starting from scratch with an instrument and vocal, some like to have a ‘vibey’ backing track almost finished before finalising the melody. The reason for this is that it’s easier to get inspiration from a backing track with plenty of ‘bells and whistles’ on it than the bare bones of a track or just the chords. The drawback is that you can spend ages working on a backing track but not know what the melody is going to do, so you may have to rewrite the backing track again after you write the melody. That’s a real pain!

With a UK No. 1 and 5 million record sales to his name, Alex Von Soos is our songwriting instructor here on the Hit Songwriting Course

Here are his top 10 hit songwriting tips:

1. The backing track, no matter how innovative, sounds like it belongs to a/the genre
2. The chorus/main hook has a feeling of inevitability
3. The overall feel of the track is not too pretty/cheesy/trite
4. All the melody parts are fun to sing and have the right weight
5. The backing track feels vibey even without the singing and the sounds are tastefully chosen
6. The lyrics are original and contain some memorable lines and no cringeworthy lines
7. There is contrast between the sections and build within them
8. The total combination of melody, lyrics and track paints a coherent emotional picture that is neither too bright nor too dark
9. The chords by themselves convey a strong feeling of tension and release
10. The song contains many highlights like hooks and riffs

Have you ever wondered how to write a song with good lyrics and a good melody? Are you a budding songwriter? Have you wondered whether you should write the lyrics or music first? Writing a song is easy but writing a great song isn’t. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most successful songwriters in the world including Cathy Dennis, Wayne Hector, Alex Von Soos and (as an engineer) Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this article I am going to tell you about my experiences writing songs during my time signed to Universal Music as a songwriter. My name is Dave and I run the school and write this blog. Songwriting was never my forte and I am certainly not the songwriting instructor here at GSS, but I am going to give you a little insight into my experience and the course.

No two songs are written exactly the same way but most of the time they are written in a similar way. We now have a hit songwriting course at GSS which is designed to show you how hit songs are really written, from basic music theory to melody and lyric writing, idea generation and quality control, all delivered by a Number 1 hit songwriter with records sales topping 5 million. At the end of the course, you even get to co-write a song which will be pitched to major labels and publishers around the world.

In pop music, most of the time a song is written with two writers – a backing track writer who would normally start with the chords, put in a bass and build the track up around that. The other writer is a top-line writer. Their job is to take care of the melody and lyrics. A lot of the time the track writer would cross over into top line territory and contribute lyrical and melodic ideas and the top line writer would sometimes have a say on how the chords went. It’s not often the top line writer would worry about the reverb on the snare drum or how fast the leslie is spinning! I was predominately a backing track writer, the person who wrote all the music and programmed the beats. I did often cross over into top line territory as I progressed and got more confident. I’ve delivered songwriting courses at degree level but don’t think it’s my forte really. I’d love to be a brilliant songwriter but i’m better at other things i’m not so fussed about! Alex Von Soos is the main songwriting instructor and songwriting is definitely his forte!! The feeling of finishing a song that you believe to be brilliant is just so much better than smashing it behind the decks at a top London club or hearing a song you’ve mixed or recorded on the radio. One issue that probably held me back is that whenever I try and sing anything, it sounds more like a fire in a pet shop than anything anyone would want to listen to. It was always a bit of a struggle trying to sing a backing vocal part down the talkback mic to the artist who was in the vocal booth. I was better off using my guitar to get across when I was hearing in my head! I certainly don’t think i’m qualified to deliver the course at GSS, so we have Alex Von Soos on board who wrote All Saints’ ‘Black Coffee’ amongst others contributing to his amazing 5 million record sales.

A lot of the time the track writer would write a backing track or instrumental, sometimes it may have been already written like a big dance record which has already done well on the club circuit. The record that springs to mind now is Spiller – Groovejet ‘If this Ain’t Love’. The backing track did the rounds in the clubs and was very popular. A talented publishing A&R woman Ruth Rothwell at Universal Publishing asked Rob Davis to write a top-line to this backing track. He did and they ended up using the chorus. ”Spiller was a backing track that was sent to me, and I wrote a whole top line to it, and they ended up using my chorus,” explains Rob. “I think Sophie (Ellis-Bextor) wrote the verses herself.” I’d imagine the splits were 33%, 33% and 33%. I don;t know this for sure and am not going to find out because it’s not important for this article. It’s pretty industry standard that the backing track writer gets 50% and whoever writes the top-line gets the other 50%. When i’ve written with an artist, usually it’ll be with a top-line writer so we’d just split the publishing three ways – track (me) – 33.3%, top-line – 33.3% and artist – 33.3%. So if i’ve written the track and the top-line writer has written the… top-line, what is left for the artist to write? Well, not much! Cue the phrase – ‘Add a word, get a third’! That happened a lot, it never bothered me because a third of something is much better than half of nothing!

So, on with how to write a song. Most of the time, once we have some nice chords together, the top-line writer tries out some melodies and sings along some ‘dummy’ lyrics until we have something. If this jamming process has gone brilliantly, you have your chorus chords, melody and lyrics nailed, but that is seldom the case. You may have your chords and something ‘hooky’ in the melody and the top-line writer is wondering why she’s singing ‘can’t sit down’! So, you have a great chorus melody, leave the chords alone now in the chorus and stick with the melody as it’s good and the most important element in the song. Now it time to have a think about the lyrical hook. What’s the story? We’ll have known who we’re writing for days before we got together. We’ll kind of subconsciously analyse the metering of the melody, sussing out the syllables and for how long they need to be, until out of the blue, out pops the lyrical hook! Great title, it fits perfectly with the metering of the melody and it’s perfect for the artist! The whole process so far can take anything from a few minutes to a few hours. The difference between B-side and first single is not dictated by how long it took to come up with the idea. Occasionally, you may have the title of the song before you have your melody. I always found it extremely difficult to fit a melody to lyrics. Elton John works like this. Maybe he finds it difficult coming up with melodies if he doesn’t have lyrics to inspire him. I’d like to ask him that but unfortunately I only ever worked with him as an assistant engineer at Air, many years before the thought of writing a song entered my head.

The most important thing is that we have our chorus, everything else now is just filling in the gaps, accommodating, justifying and making sense of the chorus. The next job is verse one. The chords are usually similar, if not identical to the chorus but there’s no need to agonise over the melody over the top even half as much as the chorus. In fact, you don’t want the verse melody to be anywhere near as hooky in a similar way as the chorus or you’ll be in danger of taking away the impact of the chorus. It can be hooky as long as it’s doing something different – if the chorus is long and floaty (a few long lush sustained notes) then perhaps the verse should be choppier (short staccato notes but more of them) to give the two sections some light and shade. Once you have your verse melody, you should be singing away some dummy lyrics. If you’re lucky, some of the dummy lyrics you’ve been singing will actually end up on the record. The lyrics in the first verse should be setting up the story for the whole song, they should be the first stepping stones leading the way to the chorus. Again, most find it easier to fit the words to the melody than the other way round.

Next up, the bridge (or pre chorus if you’re in America). In pop music a big musical change is usually in order. Usually, you’d want to alter chords as well as the melody. It’s tough to stick with the same chords and really change the song just with the melody. Perhaps start to think about backing vocal parts (or background vocals if you’re in America) to beef things up a bit, but not too much as again, you don’t want to take anything away from the chorus which is about to hit in a matter of seconds! How to get into the chorus, how to set it up so the chorus hits the listener on the head when it arrives, make sure the change on the downbeat of the chorus works with the last chord of the bridge. All things to consider when you’re writing your bridge!

Now you have your V1, B1 and C1. The audience now know what the the song is about and it’s now time to write the second verse. Melodically, it’s the same as V1 so we now just have to write the lyrics. Ideally you’d want a progression of the storyline but sometimes the lyrics aren’t suited to writing in a linear fashion and you just expand on the general vibe of what you’ve already written. Next up, the second bridge (B2) the melody has already been written, it may be nice to twist it up a bit, but if we feel the melody worked particularly well first time round, then it’s probably silly to try and fix something that’s not broken. There should be something different lyrically, it all depends on the story of course. Sometimes there’s an element of contradiction or twist in the second bridge. 

Now the meat and potatoes of the song is written, let’s have a tinker with the arrangement, let’s see what we can do for the intro and outro, let’s tinker around, listen again and again patting ourselves on the back and procrastinate for as long as possible, but in the back of our minds we know that sooner rather than later we’ll need to write another section to set up the final chorus and provide relief from what’s gone on before: the middle 8 (or bridge in America). We need to figure out a musical change out of the chorus, a whole new melody and lyrics. We’ve said everything but now we need to think of something else to say. Who invented middle eights for crying out loud? Is there a rapper in the band? Does anyone fancy doing a talky bit? That’s always a good get out! All joking aside, they can really lift a song if the writer does a good job. Also, it’s worth knowing that middle eights don’t have to be eight bars long and they usually appear towards the end of the song and not the middle! 

Verse (USA = Verse)

Bridge (USA = Pre-chorus)

Chorus (USA = Chorus)

Middle 8 (USA = Bridge)

I think the Americans got the terminology right on this occasion, their way makes much more sense.

What I have written is a rough guide on the formula on how to write a song, although there are only 12 notes, no two songs are the same and if all songs were similar, we’d live in a boring world! I’d say 95% of the writers i’ve worked with write songs this way.

If you ‘d like to know more, we have a six week hit songwriting course and we’re honoured to have No. 1 hit song writer Alex Von Soos at the helm!

If your song ticks all of the above boxes, you will have written a tune that stands out from the crowd. But songwriting is one of the most demanding areas in the music business, and you will find that, as simple as these rules sound, they are almost impossible to master without the right training and, most importantly, hands-on guidance from an experienced professional writer who will pinpoint all the small flaws in your first drafts and show you how to get to the next level! Alex also owns the song critiquing website SongProofing, where, he will analyse your song(s) and send you back a list of immensely useful tips to improve the particular song in question and your songwriting in general.

Major, minor and extended chords on the keyboard and piano:

Music Theory Practice part 2 – Extended chords:

Just some more music theory rules. You will need to have some music theory knowledge or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course. These notes are for recap purposes.

7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED

9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED and the 9th ADDED

11 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9th ADDED and the 11 ADDED

13 chords have the 7^th note in the scale FLATTENED, the 9, 11 and 13 ADDED

Major 7 chords have the 7^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 9 chords have the 7^th note in the scale and 9^t note in the scale ^h ADDED

Major 11 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale and 11^th note in the scale ADDED

Major 13 chords have the 7^th, note in the scale 9^th note in the scale,11^th, note in the scale and 13^th note in the scale ADDED

Suspended 2 = add the 2^nd note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Suspended 4 = add the 4^th note in the scale and suspend (lose) the 3^rd (mediant)

Always count the root.

You can add notes to chords:

C add 11 you would add the 11^th NOTE only

C add 13 you would add the 13^th NOTE only.

Augmented is when you sharpen the 5^th (dominant)

Diminished is when you flatten the 3^rd (mediant) and the 5^th (dominant)

Root is always the tonic. If it’s the first note it is called the major root. We will mainly be working like this in this course. Don’t worry about “tonic”, “mediant” and “dominant” now. The chances are that you will never need to know and most hit song writers haven’t heard of them either! I just mentioned them in case some of you were interested and wanted to look them up one day.

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/

A ‘+’ sign means sharpen and ‘-‘ means flatten the note.

Using the piano chord URL to see your major scales, work out the following chords:

Am, Gb7, E11, F sharp M-9, BbM9-5, CM maj7

To work out your major scales you can use the following rule starting on the root and working your way up in these steps:

Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Tone, and semitone.

Now, work out the following chords WITHOUT using the piano chord URL.

Cm b9, Eb7, Fsharp M11, Db major7 add13, EbM7-13

Some of you may want to talk about voicing and inversions and we can later in the course. For now, here’s a brief summery below:

The terms “voicing” and “inversions” are often used interchangeably. However, the term inversions refers to the lowest note sounding in the chord (whether it’s the root or not). A chord with the root as the lowest note is said to be in root position; with the 3^rd as the lowest note it’s called first inversion; with the 5^th as the lowest note it’s called the second inversion; and with the 7^th as the lowest note it’s called the third inversion.

To play in a different key the easy way on the keyboard, you have a transpose button. So, to play your chord you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in D, you press your transpose button UP twice to go UP two semitones. To play your chord sequence you’ve written in C and you want it to be played in A flat, you press you transpose DOWN button four times so you go DOWN four semitones and so on.

Chords in  the key of:

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/chords/chordchart.htm

Relative minor is the minor chord which uses most of the same notes as the major scale. It has a lot in common with it’s relative. The same rule applies in reverse so C major is the relative major of the Am and Am is the relative minor of the C major. The reason it sounds ‘minor’ is because of the starting position (or root note) is different and is in a different place so in perspective it sounds ‘minor’

Look at the chords chorus of hotel California while I play it:

Chorus :

G                        D

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Em                   Bm7

Such a lovely place, such a lovely face

G                               D

Plenty of room at the Hotel California

Em                                      F#

Any time of year (any time of year) you can find it here

Listen to how the G and Em ‘relate’ to each other and the D and Bm7 ‘relate’ to each other too.

To work out a chord sequence by ear, I firstly figure out what the root note is for each chord and write it down. You can usually tell which note is the root note because the root note sounds the most like the whole chord! Then you have to figure out if it is a major or minor chord by listening and experimenting. Most of you should be able to do this with some practice and a bit of patience!

Music theory practice, chord progressions, keys and scales:

A music production college I worked at in London a while back asked me to teach a Music Theory and Music Composition course with chord progressions, keys & scales. I know my way around a fretboard of a guitar and used to play in jazz bands before I discovered turntables, so I thought I give it a whirl!

I looked on the internet for ages for good simple rules for chords, scales and extended chords but couldn’t find anything that I thought would be easy for the students to understand, so I wrote my own. These are recap notes written so students can refer to them after my lecture so you probably need to have some knowledge to begin with or you could always book workshop 4 of my Logic 9 Music Production course.

Working out basic chords quickly using semitones:

Major:             Root + 4 (3^rd) + 3 ( 5^th)

Minor:             Root + 3 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

Dim:                Root + 3 (3^rd) + 3 (5^th)

Augmented            Root + 4 (3^rd) + 4 (5^th)

To flatten a note you go down one semitone and to sharpen you go up a semitone.

Important:-

-                  Semitones are always the next key up or down on the keyboard; black notes AND white notes included. COUNT THEM ALL! We use semitones in the example above.

-                  Tones are two semitones (really?!) or two steps on the keys so a tone up from the note of C is D. A tone up from an E is an F sharp.

-                  When I say notes, I am referring to notes in a scale so you only count those. You will need to skip notes that are not in the scale. You will probably need to refer to a major scale chart or the first url in this work sheet to figure out which notes to count while working out more complex (extended) chords explained in the example below.

-                  Start off working out extended chords which are C. ie C11 or Cmaj7 etc.

A brief rule which you can use without the need for a chart is:

Root, +tone, +tone, +semitone, +tone, +tone, +tone (and +semitone to resolve back to the root up one octave)

For ‘Sound of Music’ fans, the notes should sound like:

Doh, ray, me, far, so, la, ti, doh!

Note that the “Doh” and the “doh” are the same note but one octave apart.

Okay, that’s enough of Music Theory for now. I will do extended chords next time…

Logic pro 9 Environment Chord Memorizer: Musical tips:

One object I have in my music production environment click and ports layer is the Chord Memorizer, which can be a great music trick for DJ’s with limited musical skills.

The Chord Memorizer can be a useful music production music theory fix for DJ’s if you just want to quickly put some chords together which will have a good chance of going well with each other. I usually set it up so C plays chord one, D plays chord two, E plays chord three right up to B which will play chord seven. See this if you are unfamiliar with the chord number system. The Roman numerals are along the top.

In a nutshell, you can trigger all the chords in the key of C by using one finger on any white key on the keyboard from C to B which correspond to chord 1 (C) to Chord seven (B dim). All the chords in the same key have a great chance of sounding right with each other.

Chord Memorizer: Musical tips and tricks for DJs

So, first you crack open Chord Memorizer (windows – environment – click and ports – new – chord memorizer) Double click on it to bring up the double keyboard, Choose the note C on the upper keyboard. On the lower keyboard choose the triad of C major by selecting C, E and G like the pic on the left. Double click on the picture to make it bigger.

Next choose D on the upper keyboard and then select notes D, F and A. This will make a D minor triad. Next, choose E on the top and the notes E, G and B on the bottom, this makes an E minor triad. Notice that all the notes are white notes and equal distance in width apart. This applies right up to the B which will be a B dim so repeat until you get there. Now set the key limit on the left to the full range from C-2 to G8. This just tells the environment to use the entire keyboard.

Okay, now you can play all the chords in the key of C. If you up one in the transposition box (under the Key Limit), you’re now playing all the chords in the key of C sharp! If you go up ANOTHER 2 then you’re playing all the chords in the key of Eb. Eb is a hard key to play in – you’re a musical genius!

Here is a handy chart for commonly used chords in the relevant key. And here is a very useful tool you can use to see what notes go into chords and scales in all keys on the keyboard. I used both when I taught Song Writing and Music Theory.

Don’t forget to turn it off by bypassing it using a cable switcher when you have finished; you don’t want to be triggering a kick drum, open hat and snare when you’re trying to find a shaker in your drum kit! See here for more on that. Please don’t think now you know this trick, there’s no need to bother learning an instrument; Chord Memorizer is just a trick for people who quickly need to string a few chords together.

Before I get letters, I am aware that some Dj’s (like myself before I wound down) can play an instrument or two, but if I took a percentage of the DJ’s who have come to me for help, there’s no way we’d be reaching double figures. I would’ve thought we’d get similar stats for musicians who can DJ!

Songwriting, Music Composition writing chords and bass lines:

Yesterday was my last day with my Song Writing and Music Composition students before leaving to set up my own music production school. In the course we covered chord sequences, melody, structure and rhythm, lyrics, arrangement, extended chords, bass lines, rhythmic parts, vocals and harmony.

It was a great course to teach but tricky in that they all didn’t want to learn all of the course. For example, most DJs wanted to learn about chord progressions and basic music theory for their productions, but were not interested in lyrics or any of the basic song writing production tips. Some of the out and out songwriters would’ve been happy to talk about lyrics for 12 weeks! I balanced it by splitting the group up and did as much one to one tuition as I could. I have broken up my own Song Writing and Music Composition Music Production Course into two shorter courses so no-one will feel like they are wasting time and money learning things which they feel is irrelevant to them.

Being a guitarist and not a keyboard player works out rather well, I am able to demonstrate the pros and cons playing in different keys with both instruments. With a guitar, it’s all about the shapes, and the same shapes up and down the fret board is the same song in a different key. With a keyboard, it’s all laid out in front of you from the left to the right. When I first took on a Songwriting and Music Composition course I was mildly concerned that piano not being my first instrument may be a hinderance, but in fact, it’s benefit!