Writing metal

[Metalmessiah]

I'm a improvised self taught lead metal guitarust,being self taught and not understanding written music and limited tab knawlage it's easy for me to feel lost.I've been playing for 15 yeatrs now and am excelent in blinding fast solo's,and deacent in improvising power chords into melodies.How do I go about writing lyrics and formulating a melody and lead parts to make a compleate song?

[cyberfret]

One exercise that I have my private students do that are trying to learn how to write songs is this. Pick a song by an artist that you like. Then analyze it. What is the structure of the song? Is there an into? What happens in the into. Is it just strumming chords, or is there a riff, or just drums, or just bass. Then look at the rest of the form. Is there a 2 verses, and chorus, a verse and bridge, a solo, and then the chorus again (repeated 20 times and fades out) Is the verse strumming chords a riff etc. How does the song end.

Write all of this down on a piece of paper, because you are now going to write a song that duplicates the structure of this song. You do not want your song to sound anything like the one that you are "borrowing" the structure from. If the song starts with a drum intro, then start your song with a drum intro......but do your own thing and don't copy the song you are using for your template. It is only the structure and form of the song that you are using.

There are a lot of resources for songwriting on the web. Do a search at http://www.google.com for "song writing" and or "songwriting" and you will find many hits.

--Shawn

[[PaRliNG]]

Originally posted by cyberfret
One exercise that I have my private students do that are trying to learn how to write songs is this. Pick a song by an artist that you like. Then analyze it. What is the structure of the song? Is there an into? What happens in the into. Is it just strumming chords, or is there a riff, or just drums, or just bass. Then look at the rest of the form. Is there a 2 verses, and chorus, a verse and bridge, a solo, and then the chorus again (repeated 20 times and fades out) Is the verse strumming chords a riff etc. How does the song end.

Write all of this down on a piece of paper, because you are now going to write a song that duplicates the structure of this song. You do not want your song to sound anything like the one that you are "borrowing" the structure from. If the song starts with a drum intro, then start your song with a drum intro......but do your own thing and don't copy the song you are using for your template. It is only the structure and form of the song that you are using.


There are a lot of resources for songwriting on the web. Do a search at http://www.google.com for "song writing" and or "songwriting" and you will find many hits.

--Shawn

That's Quality advice ;)