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Hip hop song bar length cpunter5/23/2023 To be accurate, the chorus is actually the section of the song where the audience joins in to sing along with the lead performer. Unfortunately, none of these assumptions are fully correct. What is a Chorus?Ī chorus is commonly thought of as the musical peak of a song, the ‘hook’ of a song or the most important part. For example 16 bars for verse 1 and 2 and 8 bars for verse 3. A relatively common practice is to have the first two verses longer than the last one. Verses are typically 8 or 16 bars long (although not a rule). In many songs, each verse brings the story forward, and the chorus is often the same words repeated. A good verse will convey the purpose and setting of the lyrics extremely well, examples include ‘Laura’ by The Scissor Sisters and ‘Common People’ by Pulp. Although the tune may stay the same, each verse usually has different words. This is usually where we are introduced to the characters in the song and the setting in which events or emotions are described. The principle function of a verse in a song is to tell a story or describe a situation. But what do we mean by these? What is a Verse? Many pop songs are formed from these different sections, Verse, Chorus, Middle 8, etc. Most song structures are often based around 8 bar sections being put together in a sequence. You could write that down as AAABAC, so you knew what you had to do next.Įventually, once melodies and/or words are established through the jamming process, these sections of the song may start to establish themselves as Verse, Bridge, Chorus, Middle 8, and Tag About Sections When a band gets together to jam, they would generally improvise and the band leader (this could be the singer, or maybe the guitarist, often just the player with the biggest ego) will say “ Let’s play the A section three times, go into the B section once, back to the A once then end with the C section once“. Naming similar sections makes the structure easy to see. These sections are generally labelled alphabetically or given names (like ‘verse 1′) for convenience. Most pop songs are around 80 bars long and are divided into various sections, each of which is usually 8 or multiples of 8 bars long. You will use a mixture of tools for this such as repetition, placement of hooks, dynamics and structure. Melodies, words, hooks are the main elements that the listener is likely to remember. Maintain a balance between predictability and surprise:Ī listener can get bored if your song is too predictable or too complex.A typical song that gets regular airplay on radio will: But in order to be able to break the rules successfully, it’s worth taking a look at the qualities that tend to make a successful song and the role that song structure has to play in it. I like to think of songwriting as an art where rules shouldn’t exist, and often successful songwriters tend to break them, sometimes accidentally. We in the audience are not aware of this manipulation, but every songwriter/arranger/producer is conscious of the construction of a song, and its structure should be apparent to anyone involved in making music on first hearing. We teach both Singing and Singing and Songwriting in LA and London. Plus, get 25% off LA courses by signing up before our latest offer ends on 15th June with code: LA25.Įach song begins with a short introduction, and then a verse quickly followed by a chorus and so on. If you’d like to learn more about singing and songwriting we can help. If you listen to ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ By Diana Ross & The Supremes followed by ‘Yeah’ by Usher, you’ll notice that although almost four decades separate the songs, they both use the same, familiar structure. In films, this is known as rising action, climax and denouement. Every romantic Hollywood movie you’ve seen follows a structure: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. Everything has structure, from a tree: roots, trunk branches, leaves, to a house: foundations, walls, roof. Structure is a way of describing how something is put together.
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