Phrasing & Space

In writing a lyric, one mistake many beginners make is not following a recognizable meter or pattern of stressed beats. (Think back to ninth-grade English class, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, etc). No matter the style of music, if you want your lyric to be understandable when set to music it needs to be musical to start with…..and like most poetry low and high, from limericks to sonnets, nearly all music follows some kind of meter. The meter of a lyric can strongly suggest the feel and tempo of the music that goes with it, just as the words you choose determine the attitude and tone of the song.

Inherent in the idea of meter and its stressed syllables is the opposite idea: unstressed beats and open space. Think of rhythm as operating on several levels at once: the steady pulse at the foundation, the stressed beats that define the meter, the unstressed beats that make the accents “pop” and complete the line, and the spaces between the lines that define the form.

This is the essence of phrasing, in both the lyrical and musical senses. Phrasing is the organizing principle in speech, poetry, and music, and makes your message easier to deliver by giving the brain a pattern to connect to. That’s not to say that phrasing is repetitive by nature, it doesn’t have to be…but the complexity of your phrasing is going to be determined by what’s appropriate to the style. Country music as a rule uses simple, short phrases:

Hey, (beat)(beat) good lookin’ (beat)(beat)(beat)
wha- (beat) (beat) -tcha got cookin’ (beat)(beat)(beat)
hows about cookin’ (beat) something up with me? (2-3-4-5-6-7-8)

Notice how the held notes and spaces complete each eight-beat line….in other words, how the phrasing comes from a combination of the natural stresses of the words (good LOOKin’) and the added beats (the spaces between) to complete a coherent, symmetrical 4-line form of 8 beats per line.

Now, if you have a strong innate sense of rhythm (and many songwriters do) you might work these things out without any effort or conscious thought at all. But looking at phrasing and stress patterns in a lyric can open up new possibilities in a song, taking it in a musical direction you might not have thought of initially. Here’s an example, from Travis Tritt’s “Great Day To Be Alive”, written by Darrell Scott:

It’s a great (beat) DAY to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin’ when I close my eyes
There’s some (beat) hard times in the neighborhood
but why can’t every day be just this good?

Notice how the added beat before the word “day” not only emphasizes the word but also makes it into a memorable part of the hook. The pause before “hard times” not only does the same thing, it adds a two-count “knock-knock” motif that is established by “there’s some” (pause) followed by the words “hard times” in the same rhythm. The contrast of the breaks in lines 1 and 3 with the unbroken lines 2 and 4 also gives the lyric added balance and musicality.

It’s worth mentioning as well that Darrell Scott is an instrumentalist of the highest order, and as strong a case as you could make for the added dimension instrumental ability brings to songwriting. But just as in lyric writing, strong phrasing is essential to great music, as any great musician will tell you: just ask Darrell, or B.B. King, Miles Davis, or Floyd Cramer. Too often we try to separate writing ability from musical ability, but the two go hand in hand….after all, we’re talking about SONGwriting.

Are You In The Groove?

Duke Ellingon famously wrote “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”. Swing is not a term we hear a lot in modern music, but we do hear proof of what the Duke meant every day.

If you listen to musicians talk to each other, you might hear them use words like “groove” and “pocket” to describe how they play. Those terms are the modern equivalent of Duke’s swing. Country music certainly does swing when it’s played well, and sometimes it grooves or even rocks. What does all this mean, and especially what does it mean to songwriters?

Of course, we’re talking about rhythm, and how music is played to make it feel good. We’ve all had the experience of being caught by the feeling of a song before we’re even clear what the words are. “Groove”, “swing”, and “pocket” are terms musicians use to describe what happens when the music feels the way it should....when all the parts are in balance and each element plays its appropriate role without overshadowing the others.

Understanding this concept is important to any songwriter whether you are a performer or not. To many that do perform, it’s second nature and part of what makes being onstage so gratifying....the visceral sense of making and being moved by music on a physical, gut level. But even if you never set foot on a stage or in a recording studio, as a songwriter you want to know what your song FEELS like.....how it grooves.....and the more you know about how those sounds are produced the easier it is to play them or to communicate them to someone else who might play for you.

At the heart of this is quite literally what we might call the heartbeat of the song, the pulse. Is it fast or slow? How does it feel in your body? A hard-hitting uptempo tune might quicken the pulse, while a ballad might feel spacious and relaxed. The pulse is a constant presence through the song, and whether it’s being actually played or not it is meant to be felt.

That pulse becomes the foundation of the rest of the rhythm of the song when it is divided up, generally into pairs in which one pulse is stressed and one isn’t. A drummer alternating between the bass (kick) drum and snare drum would illustrate this nicely: two different sounds, one low and one high, with one accented more strongly than the other. Many if not most different rhythmic “feels” can be ultimately broken down to this simple alternation of stressed and unstressed, low pitched and high pitched sounds. When those two parts sound balanced and “feel” natural, we’re in the groove.

Now think of a piano player playing those alternating sounds with the left and right hands producing the lows and highs. Or imagine a guitar strummed back and forth, and hear the difference in tone and stress between the down and upstrokes of the arm. These are the essential elements of groove. Different kinds of grooves are created by changing the pattern of accents, shifting beats around, or simply adding or subtracting beats or subdivisions of the pulse.

This is of course a very general overview, but you will find that the concept applies to virtually any style of music or any kind of feel you might want your song to have. Listen for these elements when you hear music, and listen to how different instruments and instrumentalists use them to bring a song to life. Then see how this knowledge might inform and impact your songwriting.....and get you into the groove.

Strum-a strum-a strum....a rhythm primer for songwriters

A lot of songwriters learning to play the guitar have it backwards, and in all fairness it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the paradox. You want to play the guitar to accompany your songs, but your songs end up getting limited by your ability of the guitar. So you might call a teacher and ask if you can learn some new strums to spice up your vocabulary. But a strum pattern is exactly that, just a series of motions....what you really want are new ideas and new sounds. So the idea is to get PAST the strumming to the sound....in other words, to be guided by your ears and not your hands. Your ideas can lead your fingers, rather than your fingers limiting your ideas.

Yes, this requires practice, but it doesn’t require as much skill as you might think. What we want is to allow the lyric or even the idea of the song to suggest the rhythmic feel, and then figure out how to produce that sound on the guitar. For example, you can find the natural rhythm of a lyric by just speaking it, and see where you feel the stresses. Then try to tap out the beats where you feel them. Don’t be afraid to be simple! And if you can tap or sing a rhythm, you can play it by asking the hands to follow the beat you’ve just established. The following exercise will help start you along the way.

Remember that your strumming hand is your rhythm generator. Hold a chord, hit the strings and feel a single beat. Hit the strings four times in succession and feel a measure. Then hit the strings repeatedly, counting to four each time and accenting the first count of each group. Now you felt a meter, four-four time (or just 4). Do it faster, and the song is uptempo. Do it slower, and now it’s a ballad.

Subdivide the beat by swinging the right arm back and forth. We’re still counting, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and as we alternate down and up strums. Notice that strumming down accentuates the bass strings, while strumming up brings out the trebles.....so don’t try to hit all the strings on every stroke. Let your arm swing like a pendulum from the elbow, steadily back and forth, two parts of the same cycle. The down strums are downbeats, the up strums upbeats.

So now we have eight different beats, some of which could be accented (or played more strongly) and some might be skipped (counted, but not played....the hand just misses the strings on that pass). Experimenting with different combinations of accented, less strongly accented, and skipped beats will reveal MANY different rhythmic feels, and as long as the back-and-forth of the right hand is consistent your hand will always be moving in the right direction at the right time.

This might all seem very mechanical right now, and really it is....but through mechanics we develop control and possibility, which together add up to freedom. Great musicians know how to make music FEEL good because they have mastered the mechanics and therefore are free to conceive and execute ideas. And if you let your exploration of mechanics be guided by the pursuit of sounds you hear in your head, then your practicing is never abstract but just another aspect of your songwriting process. Above all, remember to be patient with yourself....mastery of large tasks takes a long time, but mastery of a single, small idea doesn’t seem so daunting.