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Old 06-11-2004, 03:55 PM   #32
Juzzza
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Jersey
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I usually come up with guitar parts first, and scat sing over the chords to find the vocal melody. Much like design agencies who come up with visuals first and fill an advert with latin text just to illustrate where and how the text will look, they replace the latin with real (meaningful) words later.


Similar to John Lennon's three blind mice but with syllables rather than actual words to feel out the melodies.


I usually find the words for a verse over the chords then sit down and write the other verses, keeping to the same syllable structure but having a bit of play, it's easy to drop a word or stretch a word out to make an interesting melody.


For example, I had sung the following comfortably over a chord sequence:


'I've been away, I've seen the sun at dawn on the ocean'


So knowing I had 15 or so syllables to play with,I then wrote down


'I've seen the moon look like a plate so high, in a cloudless sky'


And sang the second line of the verse using the same melody as the first, easily over the same chords.


It doesn't matter how you do it, I challenge anyone to hear a finished song and 'know' how the artist wrote it.


Jeff Buckley used to write poems and then put them to music, I can't do that but I do write loads and loads of lyrics and then see if I can scat sing them over a chord structure.


So in some cases I can claim that I wrote the lyrics before the guitar, but melody ALWAYS comes after the guitar part is written... For me that is.





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