Guitar Song Writing Homepage

Question: Guitar song writing and such...?

(Posted by: Nathan on 2009-01-30 23:17:00)

Alright so basically i worked through it got a song lyric written out... still have a bit of tweaking on it but basically i've got all the words... 3 verses... a chorus... a bridge... now the only problem i have is i can't seem to find the right music to go with it i'm doing acoustic guitar and i'm trying to figure out like what to do... its a ballad so like a story so it's obviously a little slower than a regular song but it's not a sad song so I just need some help on how to find your music that goes with your song and also i'm not super experienced in this so musical theory is still coming along i have the basics but also if you could explain what play in a key means that'd be awesome but yeah been playing for about 6 months now but i'm getting along nicely so i'm not guitar stupid anymore but just some of the theory i don't know yet so yeah :P don't talk to me like i know everything your about to say...

Posted by: randomlyinspired on 2009-01-31, 04:42:29

It helps if you pick a couple of different guitar chords and put them in a sequence that sounds nice to your ears. For example, D G Em Am sounds good. You won't put something like F G A Bm together because it clashes and you can hear your mistake. In my 'correct' example, the key can be in D major, because the opening chord is in D. You can use chords such as the fourth (G), fifth (Am) of that key that you choose. If you can't sing in it, you can always capo your guitar or transpose it lower/ higher. I recommend that you take up music theory to help in your songwriting, because it's way to hard to explain all these terms just like this. Good luck!

Posted by: abc123 on 2009-01-30, 23:27:23

First find what key you want to sing it in and then after you've got that then play the same or similar key on the guitar and then just play until you got something that flows with the lyrics.