“Ten Turds” II | Arranging Parts

In this video I develop one of my "turds" from the previous "Songwriting Challenge | Ten Turds."

Essentially, if you like one of your "turds," it must not be a turd! It may actually be a nice song seed thing! But now what?

In fact, if you chose one to work on, you should probably stop calling it a turd. It is now a "song seed," though I didn't mention that in the video. Remember, calling it a "turd" in the first place was just a sneaky way to not put too much pressure on yourself to "write something amazing."

This lesson is about developing a (somewhat) organized system to get your "song seed" to a place where you can start taking it a little more seriously.

We're not finishing the song yet, we're developing it. Seeing what it needs. Seeing what it wants to say.

You could think of this as a mystical thing where you get to know the song and figure out what it wants to say, but you could also see it as a practical way to quickly shape the song into an organized arrangement without thinking too much about how many millions of options there are in the world. How many millions of things you COULD write about. Narrowing in and organizing is the idea here. Don't overwhelm yourself with the possibilities. Keep it simple.  In this video I help you

a) understand the meter of your B.S. lyrics and learn how to use that to your advantage

b) use the meter to tinker with writing new lyrics to replace your B.S. lyrics

c) write some cohesive starter lyrics to get a sense of the content of your song before committing to the "real" lyrics

d) arrange your basic Verse-Chorus sections into VCVC, then into IVCVCBC or whatever arrangement makes sense to you, based on how the song feels so far

e) how to approach writing a bridge with either a "lean in" bridge or a "somewhere new" bridge

I hope you enjoy this exercise!