Let’s say you’ve written a riff, a chord progression, or a few lines of lyric. Great!
What now?
This is where too many songwriters get stuck. They play that fragment over and over for days, weeks, even years. They know the song needs something else; they know it’s missing parts, but they’re not sure what—so the process drags on.
There’s no need to suffer in Limbo like that. Learning about the basic parts of a song will allow you to:
- Determine which section(s) you’ve written, and which you still need
- Analyze favorite songs and learn from their structures
- Break the songwriting process into manageable pieces
- Round out your songs so they sound professional and well-crafted
- Keep your listeners captivated from intro to outro
Let’s get started.
Intro
The intro—you might want to sit down for this one—introduces a song. Shocking, no?
Intros are usually quite short, often instrumental, and may give a taste of things to come: an intro might introduce a hook, play the chorus melody instrumentally, blast a monolithic guitar riff, set a mood with sound effects… intros offer lots of creative freedom.
Not all songs use intros, though; many jump into a verse or chorus section immediately. Read on.
Verses
Verses are the most essential part of any song. Think of verses as your bread and water. Here are some of their characteristics:
- Songs have multiple verses.
- The verses in a song all share the same melody.
- Each new verse has different lyrics.
That last point is crucial: each new verse has different lyrics from the verses that came before. That means every verse is an opportunity for the songwriter to describe a scene, escalate a conflict, or move a story forward. Well-written verses are essential for keeping your listener engaged.
Chorus
- The chorus is repeated several times throughout a song.
- Each time the chorus appears, it has the same melody and lyric as before.
Choruses are written to be repeatable and emotive. Usually it contains what songwriters call a payoff—something so cathartic, insightful, passionate, clever, or otherwise compelling that it ties the song together. If you want to know what a song’s all about—if you want to know what its central theme is—the chorus will usually tell you.
The chorus answers the unspoken question “What’s this song about? Why are we listening; why should we care?”
Because of all that repetition, a chorus stands out in the listener’s memory more than the other sections. If you’ve ever heard the song “You Are My Sunshine”, I bet you can remember that chorus right away. But can you easily remember the third verse?
Since the chorus is such a memorable section, listeners usually expect that the song’s title will appear somewhere in the chorus section. The title might even be written into the chorus more than once—so it’s possible to hear a song’s title a few dozen times even after you hear the song just once.
Choruses are sometimes called refrains. Technically, though, the term “refrain” refers to any repeated line or series of lines in a song, not just a chorus section.
Pre-Chorus
A pre-chorus is a short section at the end of a verse, usually just a few measures long. As the name suggests, the job of a pre-chorus is to prime listeners for the chorus. A good pre-chorus creates expectation and builds tension, which is why you might also hear a pre-chorus called a build or climb.
Anticipation is sweet—it’s why we wrap gifts before giving them, and it’s why we spend all day Friday daydreaming about the hot date we’ve got planned for Saturday night. A pre-chorus is a great way to make your listeners anticipate and crave your chorus.
Bridge
A bridge surprises your audience by giving them something new and unexpected. It’s a curve ball. It’s a jack-in-the-box. It’s the songwriter’s way of saying “So you think you know what I’m going to do next, huh?”
A bridge usually appears later in a song, just when the audience might otherwise be growing bored with a Verse – Chorus – Verse – Chorus pattern. Your listener expects to hear another verse, or to hear the chorus again—but instead, she gets a bridge. Just when she started thinking she could predict where you were going to go next, you took her someplace altogether new. She’s intrigued.
If there are any lyrics in the bridge, these lyrics usually reflect some kind of pivotal moment in the song’s topic or its dramatic situation.
As the bridge ends, it transitions back into the verse or chorus. These more familiar sections sound fresh and new after that scenic adventure the songwriter just took us on.
Bridges are among the most challenging song sections to compose — knowing music theory and chord theory is essential here, as you’re faced with needing to construct a section that goes someplace new, yet leads logically back into a previous section.
You might also hear bridges called the middle eight, since a bridge usually appears somewhere in the middle of a song, and is usually about eight bars long, give or take.
Outro
The lightshow flashes, the drummer rumbles, the guitarist wails, and everyone finally comes down hard on one final, decisive chord.
An outro signals to the audience that the song is drawing to a close. There are many ways to do this: sometimes just repeating the chorus twice in a row is enough. On recordings, often the volume fades while the band repeats the chorus or jams out.
Whether your song comes to an abrupt stop or spirals into a twenty-minute psychedelic freakout is entirely up to you. As with all these other sections, be creative—and listen to your favorite music to see how other artists end their songs.
The outro may also be called the coda or tag.
Convention & Invention
Keep in mind that the above definitions aren’t rules, just patterns that appear often in songs. Study these conventions, and you’ll be in a good position to appreciate—and learn from—the many variations you’ll encounter in the field.
If you find yourself stuck in the middle of a song, check out the list above. What sections have you written? What sections do you still need?
Keep filling in those gaps–and return to this page anytime you need a quick review.