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SIX WEEKS TO SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SONGWRITING with John Chisum

MODULE #5 - MAKING YOUR SONGS SING!

INTRODUCTION

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting, an online coaching experience aiming to empower you to write the best songs you’ve ever written and to transform your life as you dig deeper into Jesus for your writing inspiration!

This is John Chisum for Nashville Christian Songwriters. I don’t know about you, but I have enjoyed every minute of this and my hope is that you’ve come alive in your songwriting!

Everything I’ve shared with you has come straight out of my heart and out of my 30+ years of writing and publishing. I’ve had such an amazing life of working with some of the best Christian artists and songwriters—I’m loving sharing those insights with you!

What I hope you’ll keep in mind is that this six week’s coaching is about equipping you, giving you the tools you can use the rest of your life to write great songs. It all doesn’t come to a crashing halt when the six weeks is over and you’ve listened through each module.

In fact, that’s just where it all STARTS!

These modules are broken up into 20- 30-minute segments in hopes they’ll be more digestible for you and that you’ll want to come back to them again and again, or at least print out the transcripts, put them in a song notebook and review them anytime you’re feeling stuck and needing a little boost to get going again.

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Inspiration can be elusive UNLESS you keep yourself in the songwriting flow. It’s easy to get lazy, let a few days or weeks or months or even YEARS go by and not be writing… but writing is a discipline just like anything else—the more you do it, the better you get.

So write every day, even if it’s just one paragraph in your journal to keep words flowing out of your fingers and then it’s not so awfully hard to prime the pump and get some great songs going. Believe me, I didn’t write for almost a decade and I cringe at all the great songs that could have been written during that time.

Don’t let another day go by—get busy and trust God with the outcome!

Alright, well, this is Module #5 called Making Your Songs Sing. It’s all about pulling together many of the facets we’ve been talking about—prosody, reciprocity, Word Clusters, song blueprints, and so much more—only now it’s time to dig deeper into melody and combining the lyrics you’ve been learning about and writing to actually compose a full-on song.

We’re going to walk through the process of making a song sing and uncover even more practical ways you can write your best songs yet.

In Section 1 of this module we’re going to be talking about choosing a musical style for your song and how to “cast” it by modeling it from an existing song or artist you like.

In sections 2 and 3 we’ll talk about what makes music and melodies compelling, interesting, fresh, memorable, and singable. We’ll hit on basic chord progressions, melodic phrasing and movement, repetition, and a few other important concepts.

Somewhere in all that we’ll talk about cowriting and how to benefit from it no matter what skill level you’re currently at.



Now, I can’t possibly teach an entire course on music theory in these short modules, but that information is out there in a lot of great places, especially the Berklee School of Music materials. I owe a lot of the inspiration and a good bit of the information I’ve included here to Pat Pattison, Jummy Kachulis, Mark Simos, and Jack Perricone, all of Berklee.

I’ve already credited Rob Sterling and his book The Craft of Christian Songwriting for bringing together in one place so many of the concepts I’ve used and coached with through the years, even though I may have called them slightly different things. I recommend you get that book and all the Berklee books, at least until we here at Nashville Christian Songwriters get ours written and published for you!

I’ve called this module “Making Your Songs Sing” for several reasons.

The first is that anyone, and I do mean anyone, can make up a song. Whether it’s a non-sensical little ditty or a poorly written piece of poetry that sounds like a Hallmark Card® set to a tune, people are musical, in general, and most people could improvise something if they were forced to.

Writing songs is protracted, informed improvisation.

The better writers learn to improvise speedily and with great precision. The principles and patterns of song have become so ingrained that they don’t have to think about them anymore, kind of like driving a car or riding a bike—you just get to where you only have to think about the rules and principles if you get stuck.

Jack Perricone wrote,” There are many ways to compose a song, such as beginning with a lyric, a melody, a chord progression, a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum pattern and so on… [but] … it is important for anyone trying to find his or her own personal voice to seek out the bases of sounds and their organization—sounds such as the major scale or rhythmic patterns…”



It’s true.

To write great music and melodies, one must be at least somewhat able to identify what scales are, the twelve notes Rob Sterling was talking about in our last module, and how to piece together the notes and rhythms that turn a lyric into a song.

Without a lyric we have an instrumental.

Without the melody, we have only words.

Put the two together in a dynamic combination, a communion and commingling of sorts, and we have something that can change the world.

There is power in music alone—it can certainly move us to tears, as in Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Just go listen all the way through it with no interruptions and see what I mean. We can be moved by words alone, too. Go listen to Martin Luther King’s historic I Have a Dream speech and see if you aren’t moved in your soul to make a difference in the world.

But the powerful fusion of Spirit-birthed words with Spirit-born music is something that surpasses both of them alone and that has the power to transcend race, religion, politics, and all human bias to go straight to the heart and ignite miracles and even change nations and the course of history.

It is arguable that the work of Integrity Music and the Hosanna! Music series alone changed the course of praise and worship music in the entire world. No kidding.

But, let’s bring it all back to you as an aspiring Christian songwriter.



Few of us set out to change the world. We just want to write what we’re feeling in our hearts and maybe get our congregations to sing one of our worship songs. If we’re really industrious and have more vision for ourselves, we would love to have a CCM artist like Casting Crowns or a Southern Gospel/Bluegrass group like The Isaacs sing one of our songs. It can happen, believe me.

It all comes back to the song.

My “A-ha” moment about what it takes to really write a great song happened years ago when I spent about six weeks writing ONE lyric that was assigned to me by the late Bill George. He had a title and the ENTIRE melody written. He handed it to me and asked me to write it. I was challenged to the core and worked on it for hours every day for all those weeks. Seriously—it was the first time that I rose from those moon-June “Mary had a little lamb” rhymes I was stuck in to real lyric writing.

It was a quantum leap for me.

I’ll never forget the effort I put in on that lyric. It was “on hold” for several of the big artists at the time and eventually became a CCM hit for Larnelle Harris and it put me on the map as a serious songwriter.

Working through that process taught me that, to really compete, I would have to step up my writing game and stand out from the pack to be heard. That is still true of me and of you today. There are no shortcuts to great, lasting, impacting, world-changing songwriting.

Are you in? Are you willing to dig deeper, go farther, dream of being heard as a songwriter? It can happen. I can’t promise it WILL, but I know that it CAN. But only if you’re willing to pursue something higher than you’ve ever gone for and let these principles and practical approaches sink in to your fingers and heart and mind and GO for it.



SO - on with Module #5/Section 1 where we talk about making your songs sing. It’s going to be fun and I know you’ll get a lot out of it! See you in a few!

SECTION 1 - CRAFTING GREAT MELODIES

Hi, again - John Chisum here for Nashville Christian Songwriters! This is Section 1 of Module #5 - - can you believe we’re already here at Module #5? If you’re like me at all, the course is flying by and there’s still so much more to learn.

I think that’s been a real key to my success over the years, just deciding that I was going to be a life-long learner, a student of life, and never stop trying to learn new things all the time. Actually, because I went into ministry early in a context that didn’t require a degree and then became a success in the music business early on, I didn’t finish my undergraduate degree until I was 48-years old and my masters until I was 50—so it’s NEVER too late to learn!

I’m learning all the time as I put together these modules and work on building our company… learning how to do webinars and market and do social media and keep all the plates spinning in the air at the same time. I couldn’t imagine stopping learning, so I’m excited for YOU as you continue to grow in your understanding of great Christian songwriting!

The Song Diamond

I can’t go back and reteach all we went over in Module #2 with The Songbuilder’s Blueprint, but that one tool should be your constant go-to as you write.

It is the most concise and descriptive blueprint I’ve seen of how lines should reciprocally serve each other and how each section should flow,



building the complete prosody of your song. It would be a great idea for you to review that module often and get that blueprint settled in your mind so you can pull up those principles every time you write, even unconsciously.

But let’s remind ourselves here of the very basic, rudimentary elements of song in a graphic called The Song Diamond. You see here that a song is comprised of four basic elements: hook (title or catch phrase), lyric (logical, poetic sections supporting one big idea), melody (notes in rhythmic succession), and harmony (vocally and instrumentally).

This is a helpful place to start because it’s easy to get lost in one element or the other instead of seeing the song in its entirety. A great song is the combination of each element excellently crafted. If one or more of the elements is weak, the entire song suffers.

That’s why I insist that great songs start with great hooks, or at least a great hook MUST be developed from however the song starts.

Technically, the hook IS a part of the lyric, but it is so critical to the success of the song that I draw it out separately and continue to hail it as our “North



Star” as we write. Setting the compass on delivering the ONE BIG IDEA that the North Star hook is leading us to is still the greatest challenge ALL writers face, regardless of level of skill. Training yourself to spot and develop great hooks will set you apart from the rest, I absolutely guarantee.

If the hook is at the top of The Song Diamond, the lyric flows naturally out of it at what we’ll call “first base”, then second base is a great melody that leads to third base, the interesting and engaging harmonization of the melody that we could say includes more than the chord structure, though it certainly does. Harmonization technically is the supporting notes under and over the melody, but for our purposes here, we can extend that to the overall feel and vibe, the tracking and underscoring of the entire song.

Choosing a Musical Style

Once you’ve landed a great hook and have even a tiny scrap of lyric, you can begin thinking about what style you would like to draft or “cast” the song in. We’ve covered those in earlier modules, but we know we’re probably going to be writing in a hymn style, a worship song style (which is a broad category, really), or a CCM artist/radio style. There are fairly broad ranges in each category, of course, but we’ll probably fall in one of those for starters, then hone the style as we go.

Remember, we have a “North Star” hook guiding us and it will help us get closer and closer to the lyric AND melodic destination.

As I just said, worship music has a broad range of styles including folksy three-chord songs like Vineyard Worship made famous all the way to highly-developed worship artists like the incredible Israel Houghton. There’s a lot of room in-between those extremes we can write in, for sure.



Most of the time my hooks and lyric snippets suggest to me what style they want to be. Here’s a list of song hooks—see if you can imagine the style they would suggest for themselves.

Praise Him Up That’s Where Faith Comes From Good Old Way (Hasten On) Maker of the Miracles Sweet Baby, Peace Exalted One (In Light Above)

The character of each phrase speaks for itself. Here’s how I would cast each phrase.

Praise Him Up - This suggests an uptempo “Brooklyn Tab” black Gospel feel with an extended vamp section at the end that goes off all ecstatic and Pentecostal. Think Kirk Franklin.

That’s Where Faith Comes From - Suggests a medium-tempo inspirational ballad CCM lyric. Think Casting Crowns or Natalie Grant.

Good Old Way (Hasten On) - If you were listening in the last module, you already know this is a bluegrass lyric I’ve written. But, if you didn’t know it, this phrase would suggest a hymn that is in a classic southern style like Old Rugged Cross or Have a Little Talk With Jesus.

Maker of the Miracles - This one might be a little tricky and could go a couple of ways. One would be a Southern Gospel style like Gold City Quartet would record, or it could go singer/songwriter and more folksy like Laura Story’s Blessings.



Sweet Baby, Peace - This suggests a lullaby that could be a nice album cut for a female artist (or a male artist vulnerable enough to sing it), or it could be fashioned into one of those “Mary cradle songs” for a Christmas musical.

Exalted One (In Light Above) - When I look at these words I think “high church hymns” like Lead On, O King Eternal or Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. The words themselves exude their nature and speak to me what they should be.

Okay, bear with me, but that reminds me of a sonnet called “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins that ties in here. Some of you are going to love this and some of you are going to hate it, but listen and read along with these delicious phrases.

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 5 Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; 10 Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Now THAT, my friends, is some amazing word-smithing. It’s a little tough at first, but the brilliant turns of phrases and the powerful images of birds and dragonflies leaving fire trails as they pitch and spin through the air, the sound



of rocks being thrown in a well, the sound of plucked strings, and every thing BEING what it was made to BE—I geek out at this stuff every time I read it!

What made me think of this sonnet is the fact that each song title wants to BE something, if we’ll listen to it. That’s why God gives them—HE wants them to be something and HE will help us birth the vision HE has for them, if we’ll tune in and let the Holy Spirit transform the way we write. Wow—I’m really over the edge now!

What if we REALLY listened to the Holy Spirit for our writing instead of slapping God’s name on the things we write, trying to justify them when they’re clearly half-baked songs and cannot stand the scrutiny of our peers, much less the test of time? There’s a reason people still love poetry like this and classic hymns from one-hundred years ago—they exude excellence and power.

Alright—I’m going to stop preaching now and get back on topic.

Titles and hooks suggest styles, at least generally. Then we hone their direction and lock in the coordinates for safe harbor. North Star and all that, right?!

So pick a style for your song and the format follows. If it’s a CCM radio song, you’d better grab the listener’s attention fast and get to the chorus in about 25 seconds. It’d better be commercial, hooky, catchy, engaging, memorable, and singable. It might have a little twist and turn of phrase in the third line of the chorus to make it hit home, but it definitely appeals to females 18-45 years old because they’re the primary users and buyers of CCM radio music.

If it’s a praise and worship song, the format shifts, at least a little, to become congregational. It has to minimize the vocal range, be very singable, and capture one of the great truths of the character, nature, and attributes of



God. It can’t just talk about worshiping, but actually lead us into worship right then and there. Think How Great Is Our God (Tomlin, et al) or 10,000 Reasons (Myrin, Redman).

Since most of us live in the praise and worship world, let’s choose that style for our song and move forward. We just discussed the format, though we could add that it will probably be a verse/chorus form with only one verse before the chorus, unless they turn out to be very short line phrases. If that happens, we can certainly do a second verse.

We also may or may NOT have a pre-chorus—that depends on the verse development and whether or not we can come to some resolution at the end of our verse that is satisfactory enough to move directly into the chorus.

Since we’ve got a start on a decent praise and worship style song from the last module, let’s go back and develop a real melody around it and see what happens.

If you recall, we were working with this hook and a little bit of lyric I wrote in church a few weeks ago out of something someone said from the platform.

Perfect in the heavens over all thingsMighty King of nations, all creation sings Righteous in Your power over the earthSaints and angels bow-ing, ev’ry nation bring-ing

Praise, praise, praise to You, God of Heaven/glory/wonders Praise, praise to You

There are several things I like about this start, but a few things I don’t.

For review, let’s look at a couple of things that feel right and see if we can strengthen it somehow.



Inner rhyme - There’s a lot of inner rhyme happening, even in the first line with “PER-fect” rhyming somewhat with “o-VER” even though the “VER” is a feminine syllable and not emphasized above the “O.” The words “in” and “heav-ENS” play off of each other nicely, too.

The nearly perfect AABA is cool, especially since the fourth line extends the rhyme with a DOUBLE rhyming “BRING-ING” and that nice inner rhyme in the fourth line with the word “bow-ing.” Just a lot of nice rhyming going on throughout.

Rhythmic hook - All four lines have a fast-paced rhythmic hook in “Perfect in the heavens/Mighty King of nations/Righteous in your power” and “Saints and angels bowing.” It’s staccato-like, rapid-fire succession of syllables scans well and makes for a good uptempo praise song kind of start. The second halves of the first and third lines AND the second and fourth lines match up rhythmically, as well, which brings rhythmic repetition and familiarity.

What I Don’t Like - Some of the phrases are a little dull from use and the perspective is distant. We’re talking about God and it all feels a little far away instead of imminent to me. It’s not bad, but with some hard work could be better—maybe.

The language is also more dated than what is popular now.

It sounds like songs we were singing in the 1990’s when I was at Integrity or even earlier. These kinds of songs can still work in certain print and choral settings, but what if we took the basic thought, the essence of the hook, and tried to modernize it? We will probably lose some of the lofty language and maybe sacrifice some of the inner rhymes and maybe even ending rhymes, but those things aren’t as important these days.

Let’s work with this a little.



What if we “model” it after something from the duo All Sons and Daughters? We’ll have to listen to what they do and get that vibe in our heads, then start playing around with the lines we already have. They do a nice blend of Americana, folk, acoustic, and praise and worship, so I’ll get out my guitar I'm a while and strum a little to see what happens.

Modeling after their style gives me permission to be a little more folksy and moody, as well as choosing a phrase to possibly repeat as a hook, even something kind of quirky like, “Praise, praise, praise I’m gonna bring You/With the saints and angels gathering ‘round/Praise, praise, praise I’m gonna give you/Till the blah blah blah blah down (or rhyme with ‘round).”

The essence is that God is still perfect and in control of the world and that we join with saints and angels to praise Him. How else can we say that without being trite? What if we improvise a little with that first line, like

Perfect in the heavens, mighty King of nations Still so close to me Righteous in Your power, God in every hour Still You choose to be

Not bad, really.

It exalts the character, nature, and attributes of God while making Him present, imminent, with the second line, “Still so close to me.”

The rhythmic/rhyming patterns of the first and third lines and the repetition of the word still to begin the second and fourth lines keeps your interest and moves it along. The contrasting rhythms of the phrases in the first and second lines and the third and fourth lines also break it up and change the character of the verse.



But this verse is “open-ended”—there’s no “stop” or closure to the thought in the fourth line, leading us logically and by necessity directly into a pre-chorus or chorus. We have to resolve the thought, “Still You choose to be…” what? What’s He choosing? We need to move into that answer, or at least start pointing to it and get there quickly.

We could write a pre-chorus, like this line repeated once.

Here in my heart Here in my heart

It makes sense, it finishes the thought, but could lead well into a RESPONSE that would be the actual praising and worshiping we’re wanting to go into.

Remember—in a worship song, never just talk ABOUT worshiping. Always worship. Always take your song into that place that ushers people into actually worshiping instead of leaving them thinking, “Oh, yeah—it’d be nice to worship like that.” Think Revelation Song (Riddle). It describes the Holy of Holies, but doesn’t just describe it. Jennie Lee took us all into the throne room and led us into highest praises.

How can we do that with this little idea we’re working on?

Let’s read it from the top, adding our pre-chorus and see what we feel about it.

Perfect in the heavens, mighty King of nations Still so close to me Righteous in Your power, God in every hour Still You choose to be

Here in my heart



Here in my heart

As I read it through, I’m hearing a tender melody that is hanging around the 5th tone in the scale in a thoughtful, reflective manner, with the rhythms similar to what we started with WAY back in the other module, but the character of the lyric has now shifted once we chose our model.

I’m hearing it in my head like this, not alternating the note in the line until the first syllable of “NA-tions.”

[Singing] Perfect in the heavens, mighty King of na-tions

Then, I hear the phrase connecting straight into the word still in the second line, like

[Singing] Perfect in the heavens, mighty King of na-tions Still… so close to me

After the short, staccato phrases in the first line, landing on the lower interval on the word still gives the phrasing a moment to breathe and to open up a little. The rest of the second line adds melodic interest we didn’t have before and sets us up for the now-familiar motif from the first line we’ll hear repeated in the third, as

[Singing] Righteous in Your power, God in every hour Still You choose to be

Although these couplets are identical, they breeze by quickly and your ears don’t get tired of them before they’re done. They’re light, reflective, intimate, and enjoyable.



This treatment is a far cry from the original and proves again that it is possible to write from the essence of an idea and move in a number of directions with it.

So let’s keep going.

We have a decent first verse sketched out lyrically and melodically. We’ve decided on a style, we’re modeling after All Sons and Daughters, and we’ve moved from a distant point-of-view to a first-person, intimate and imminent, point of view that pulls the listener into the song. Well done!

Now we need a pre-chorus melody, something like

[Singing] Here in my heart Here in my heart

If we’re happy with that, and I am, now it’s time to sketch some kind of chorus lyric, possibly using our original snippet of, “Praise, praise…” etc.

The other way we could proceed is to plunk out a working melody we hear flowing out of what we have so far. It should contrast rhythmically and be different enough from the verse and pre-chorus to make it distinctive.

But, I don’t really want to do that. I’m thinking lyrics in my head right now instead of roughing out the melody yet without words.

(And I will) praise, praise Praise with the saints and the angels Glory and honor and power forever! Amen! (And I will) praise, praise Raising my hands in Your graces Glorious God of the heavens as close as my breath I will praise



And BAM! That’s how it happens! You start working with lines and phrases, kind of teasing out what the song wants to be. What I’m seeing here is that we’ve juxtaposed the ideas of God as surrounded by saints and angels in the heavens, but still being right here with us, as close as a breath. It’s the old imminence/transcendence theological conundrum—how can He be everywhere in the heavens and still live inside of me?

So now we have the entire first verse, pre-chorus, and chorus, as follows

V1 Perfect in the heavens, mighty King of nations Still so close to me Righteous in Your power, God in every hour Still You choose to be

Pre-Chorus Here in my heart Here in my heart

CHORUS And I will praise, praise Praise with the saints and the angels “Glory and honor and power forever! Amen!” I will praise, praise Raising my hands in Your graces Glorious God of the heavens as close as my breath I will praise

Even just scanning those lines it hangs together as a nice, tidy lyric. I can “hear” the scansion, the stresses, and how they would naturally fall. I can feel the rhythm and then start working with my melody to match the words perfectly, creating unity and strong prosody.

Also, as we wrote this whole chorus, the hook I will praise emerged naturally. Arguably, it is familiar and borderline trite, but maybe the supporting



material and the musical system is strong enough to make it unique. Usually, though, these kinds of songs have the oft-heard phrases I will worship You instead of the somewhat different phrase I will praise without tacking You on the end to make matters worse. So maybe that helps strengthen it as a fresh hook.

Song Modeling and Casting

What I’ve just demonstrated is the combination of modeling a song after an established style and artist, as well as casting the song in that style. They’re really very close, though sometimes songs are written in one style, but are then cast in another and it works just fine. Think of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You covered by the late Whitney Houston. Same song cast in two genres that made millions in each style.

The song we just crafted here could work in several genres, too, if we tried. We don’t want to force a song into a genre it doesn’t fit well into, but many accessible songs can transcend genre and be hits.

What Happens Next

From here, we would craft a second verse and a bridge to complete the composition and balance it out. I’m not going to take the time to do that here, but I think you can go back to The Songbuilder’s Blueprint to see, in theory, that we would need to extend the ONE BIG IDEA of God’s imminence and transcendence, not introducing any other concepts, but wrapping it all back around to the chorus.

Now, this song I Will Praise is mine. I wrote it. You’ll need to write your own now, but I hope this section demonstrated many of the same principles we’ve been discussing all along—things like prosody and reciprocity and a lot of other great concepts you need to keep working on. Now it’s your turn!



EXERCISE - Song Casting/Modeling

Your exercise for this section is to choose an existing song or song start you already have and model it after an existing artist and song style. Here’s what to do:

1) Look back through your songs and song starts. Pick one to work with. It could be just the hook or essence of a song idea, as I demonstrated, or it could be an existing song you’re not entirely happy with and that you don’t mind experimenting with.

2) Spend time with the lyric. Let it start suggesting a style to you. Once you’ve heard it telling you what it wants to be, scroll through your music library and find an artist that is in that style.

3) Pick one or two of the songs by this model artist and just spend some time listening for nuances, chord structures, phrase turns, and try to absorb some of the vibe from this artist.

4) Start working line by line, as I demonstrated, through your lyric phrases, improvising work melodies. Let the words suggest the rise and fall of the line. Let the melody be different from what you’d imagined before—set it free to wander and come to where it wants to rest.

5) Review the process I went through in this section a few times until you can emulate it and think about it without thinking about it.

6) Stay with it until you’ve reworked your song, or written it from scratch, and it is modeled in the style you’ve chosen.

That’s it for Section 1, so I’ll see you in a few in section two! Happy writing!



SECTION 2 - More About Crafting Great Melodies

Hi and welcome to Section 2 in Module #5 called Making Your Songs Sing. I’m John Chisum for Nashville Christian Songwriters and it’s my privilege to coach you through this six-week experience geared to give you the essential tools and understanding of how to write great Christian songs.

As I’ve stated throughout the course, much of great songwriting is learning how to think like a great songwriter; to have the undergirding principles of great songwriting embedded in your mind to the point that you self-edit and automatically understand what great words look like on a page and feel like as you write them. That certainly takes time and practice, but you’ll have the basics more in hand by the end of this course.

In Section 1, I began talking about Crafting Great Melodies and I need to continue that discussion here in Section 2. Just like in lyric writing, melodies carry emotion and other sentiments. Whether you like her work or not, Sheryl Crow is a master of musical emotion.

Try a quick iTunes Sweep of her work and you’ll experience a wide range of vibe and feeling from the music alone, everything from summertime feel-good songs like Soak Up the Sun and All I Wanna Do to the gut-wrenching rock of If It Makes You Happy and so much more.

Her ability to take cliches and turn them into something amazing is unparalleled, in my opinion. Studying her lyrics, even though they’re often dark and not Christ-centered, is a study in metaphor and the excellent use of poetic device. The prosody of her songs is phenomenal, too, and there are reasons her songs have been so popular over decades.

She’s someone I would suggest you study on the secular side of music in order to learn how to bring those elements into your own songwriting. Crow



and others have mastered crafting great melodies and marrying lyrics to create the prosody we strive for.

Chris Tomlin is also a master at it and his work is among what I believe will be long-lasting, which is our goal in the course—to learn the tools that will help us write songs people will want to hear for years to come.

Every now and then a truly compelling song surfaces like 10,000 Reasons (Myrin/Redman), In Christ Alone (Townend/Getty), and Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone (Newton/Tomlin/Giglio). But what makes them compelling? Are there common elements they share that we can identify and then utilize in our own songwriting?

The answer is, “Yes—absolutely.”

This entire course has been all about identifying those elements, those secrets and tools, that professional songwriters rely on to write great songs week after week, month after month, year after year. Writers like Tomlin with dozens of memorable, singable, powerful songs to his credit in conjunction with other great writers like Ed Cash, Louie Giglio, and Jesse Reeves. Tomlin has developed a bevy of co-writers that he works well with and we’ll talk about co-writing in the last module.

My great friend, Paul Baloche, is another truly great songwriter who has excelled for over two decades and continues to write and release some of the best worship music in the world. It was my pleasure to be Paul’s publisher at Integrity for a number of years and we’re still dear friends. Paul has a keen sense of what connects with people in worship and has written many lasting songs such as Above All (Baloche/LeBlanc) and Open the Eyes of My Heart. These and many more will be used by churches for decades to come.

Let’s see if we can unpack in theory and example what makes melodies compelling, singable, and memorable. I’ll try to keep this as concrete and



practical as possible, but I have to warn you that there IS an “X factor” in art that can’t be completely nailed down. While we can identify common elements across the best songs like the ones we’re discussing here, there are other intangibles that we cannot.

There’s a little word you may or may not have heard called zeitgeist. It means “the spirit of the times” and can be applied to the world, to a nation, and even to the Church universal. It refers to the defining mood, or spirit, of a particular time period in history as shown by the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of that time. Zeitgeist is one of those intangible forces that affects us, our songs, and those that hear them.

For instance, our world, our nation, and the Church is polarized, divided, and in great conflict. While we would hope the Church would be unified and reflecting a powerful message of the love and hope we have in Jesus, that is simply untrue.

The Church disagrees on just about everything. From speaking in tongues to sexual preferences and everything in-between, we are a body in conflict, constantly dividing and weakening in our witness. It’s no wonder millions and millions are turning AWAY from Jesus—we’re not doing a very good job of showing the world who He is. Like in our songs, we’re doing a lot of TELLING and very little SHOWING.

But my point is that this current zeitgeist affects us as songwriters, too, and we have to factor that into the equation. If you notice, one of the first things that makes the three songs we’re discussing so compelling is their simplicity, but let’s look at the musical scale, intervals, and basic chord progressions before we talk about it.



The Musical Scale, Intervals, and Basic Chord Progressions

Let’s first identify the scale we use, what intervals are, and look quickly at chord progressions and the numbers assigned to them and how they’re used as a shorthand for chord progressions. Bear with us if you’re not a player.

It’s still important for you to know about them, even if you never play a note. We’ll move through it quickly, so hang in with me, okay? It will become clear how simplicity functions as we discover common chord patterns and melodic phrases that are naturally compelling to the largest number of people.

Let’s start with the musical scale, technically twelve notes, but we think of them as eight. Listen to it in the key of C:

[Plays notes of C scale]

These notes and the chords that go with them are numbered, as in:

[Plays notes and sings the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4… etc]

When we combine different notes in a melodic pattern in intervals, such as 1,2,3,5 it sounds like:

[Plays intervals 1,2,3,5 and repeats]

Melodies are rhythmic patterns of intervals from the scale put together with words to make a song. Every song from Mary Had a Little Lamb to The Hallelujah Chorus is made from rhythmic patterns of intervals.

To demonstrate, let’s compose a simple melody with the C scale and the phrase “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me.” We know what it’s always sounded like, but let’s experiment with intervals to



demonstrate how to use the scale and intervals to compose with its natural scansion, the rhythm of the words as they’re naturally stressed.

[Experiments with intervals to Amazing Grace]

Now that we have a little more knowledge of the scale and intervals, let’s identify chord numbers and what they sound like. Just like each note in the scale is numbered, chords are numbered and correlate to each note on the scale upon which they’re based.

Staying in the simple key of C, the first chord is the “I” chord, or C Major, and is written as the Roman numeral “I.”

[Play C chord]

The second note in the scale is D and is usually played and called a “two minor” and is written as the Roman numeral “ii.”

[Play ii chord]

The third note, E, is also usually rendered as a “three minor” and written as the Roman numeral “iii.”

[Play iii chord]

The fourth note, F, becomes the “four chord” and is written with the Roman numeral “IV. “

[Play IV chord]

As you’ll see, the I-IV-V chords are the most commonly used chords in popular music.



The fifth note is G and it becomes the “five chord” and is written with the Roman numeral “V.”

[Play V chord]

The sixth note, A, is known as the “minor six” and is written with the Roman numeral “Vi.” It’s relationship with the “I” chord is widely known from the song Heart and Soul that so many of us learned on the piano as children.

[Play Vi chord and a little of Heart and Soul]

The seventh note, B, is generally a “minor seventh” as a chord, though certainly not always. It’s written as the Roman numeral “Vii.”

[Play Vii chord]

That brings us back to the “I chord.”

Let’s demonstrate some common chord progressions and identify songs they’re used in. The most common is the “I-IV-V” progression that sounds like

[Play I-IV-V progression several times]

The next chord progression commonly used is the I-Vi-IV-V like in the song Heart and Soul I just mentioned.

[Play I-Vi-IV-V progression, mentioning this is the chord progression for How Great Is Our God (Tomlin, et al)]

The next one is the I - ii - IV - V, used in…

[Play I - ii - IV - V progression]



There are many combinations of these chord progressions and identifying them in popular songs is helpful.

EXERCISE - CHORD-IALLY YOURS

For this exercise, all I want you to do is get as familiar as YOU want to be with chords. It will help your songwriting to be at least a LITTLE familiar with them, especially if you cowrite and you want to be able to suggest chords along the way to your cowriter sitting at the keyboard.

There’ve been hundreds of times I was hearing something a little different in my head than my cowriter may have been hearing, so it was helpful to suggest a particular substitution or even a whole different direction because I know about chords.

There are MANY excellent resources on the internet to educate you about chords and chord progressions, so this exercise is more of a SUGGESTION than a real EXERCISE. Only you can decide how much about this area of music you want to know.

Well, that’s all for this section. I realize that it might have been a little weird for some of you who have ZERO interest in playing an instrument and you may have even tuned me out by now… oh, well! I thought it was necessary to at least mention this in the area of crafting great melodies.

So, in the last section of Module #5, we’re going to actually craft a melody together and see how to take a lyric in a new direction. Hope you’ll stay tuned—I’ll see you soon!



SECTION 3 - Crafting Compelling, Singable, and Memorable Melodies

Hey, it’s John Chisum here for Nashville Christian Songwriters!

We are blazing through Module #5 and this is Section 3 called Crafting Compelling, Singable, and Memorable Melodies. If you remember from the last section, we started talking about what makes melodies great and identified that there are some common elements in our best songs that we can discuss.

I want to start this section with one of them—simplicity—and then move on from there.

Now that we’ve identified the notes of the scale, intervals, and basic chord progressions, let’s talk about the first thing I believe makes melodies compelling for us.

Simplicity—The Key to Compelling Melody

Simplicity is central to the success of long-lasting songs like the ones we’re discussing and many, many more. If you break them down, even the CCM songs that are produced for radio are basically simple—they just SOUND complicated.

There’s a reason we all sing the same tune to Happy Birthday around the world. There’s a reason we have NO problem recalling the melodies to our most-loved Christmas songs. None of us have to work hard to sing How Great Thou Art or Great Is Thy Faithfulness, even with the high notes.

What In Christ Alone (Townend/Getty), 10,000 Reasons (Myrin/Redman), and Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone (Newton/Tomlin/Giglio) have in common is the simplicity of the early American hymn-like melodies derived from the European folk music of the early settlers. There’s a certain intervallic quality to those old songs that is part of the fabric of American music.



And these three aren’t the only ones to have that tonality in common. Cornerstone (Bradbury, et al) borrows its verses from the hymn Solid Rock, How Deep the Father’s Love For Us (Townend) is a stellar example, and Crowder’s Come As You Are even falls into a similar pattern of intervals.

Without over-extending the comparison, the point is that simplicity and the heritage of early American melodies still works and will continue to work for years to come. It’s not going away.

David Baroni and I had a song released this year with Brentwood-Benson Music that is in that vein and that was its appeal, along with a pretty cool lyric. It’s called Oh, the Wonder, and you can hear it here at this link.

http://brentwoodbenson.com/Choral/Non-Seasonal/Ready-To-Sing-New-Hymns-of-Faith/001NS051B0AF

I’m not suggesting you write early American melodies exclusively, but I would encourage you to become very familiar with it and with the songs that are styled in it. It can only help your melody writing. There are all kinds of styles, of course, and you should experiment with as many as you can. The point is that simple is more than acceptable—it’s a real key to compelling melodies.

Let’s break this down just a little more.

Melodies are built from a melodic hook, or motif, which is a recurring theme in your song. A motif is a recurring pattern or shape to your melody. Think of Strauss’ waltz Blue Danube, a very familiar motif.

[Sings Blue Danube motif]

This theme recurs throughout the waltz and its rhythm is echoed in other phrases, though with different notes.



[Sings later phrases to demonstrate]

This happens in our songs, too. We have a rhythmic and melodic theme, a motif, or what some have called motive, that gives the melody contour, shape, and consistency that is recognizable.

In Module #4 we started working the melody for what became I Will Praise. Here’s the lyric again to remind you



CHORUS And I will praise, praise Praise with the saints and the angels “Glory and honor and power forever! Forever! Amen!” I will praise, praise Raising my hands in Your graces Glorious God of the heavens as close as my breath I will praise

Modeling after the wonderful style of All Sons and Daughters we got this far in the lyric as we worked the rhythms of each line, but, as I think about it now the lyric is suggesting a contemplative-yet-worshipful 6/8 feel that I want to explore.

I’ve been thinking about this melody for the chorus:

[Sings working melody]




What that sounds like to me is that the interval jump could potentially be our motif, or recurring melodic theme, in what is now feeling waltzy to me (probably because I just referenced Strauss), though the production values would skew modern like All Sons and Daughters, preferably.

[Sings the interval a few times to demonstrate with “la-la”]

So a motif is definitely emerging. We should be careful with over-using it, but it’s identifying itself as a theme for us as we think through it. It’s the third note in the scale [plays scale up to 3], the A, and then it jumps down to the 6th note, the D, then makes a huge (but natural sounding) leap UP to the Bb, or the 4th note in the F scale (our writing key), before starting the motif again.

[Demonstrate the recurring theme/motif]

So, while we can call this repetition, it is most certainly theme or motif, as well. Its origin is in classical music as we demonstrated, though much simplified for the modern style of song.

This is what it sounds like as we play and sing it with the keys.

[Demonstrates] But check out what happens when we move over to the acoustic guitar and

frame it in as modern a style as we can a la Sons and Daughters. Now, keep in



mind that they are young, hip, and cool. I’m older, hip, and cool, but the artist delivering the song makes a tremendous amount of difference in how its received. That’s why publishers and songwriters go to lengths to make a demo sound like a potential artist—we will get into that in Module #6.

Check it out, though:

[Demonstrates chorus with acoustic]

If we go back and rework our verse and pre-chorus in our newly-adopted 6/8 meter, we see that the rhythms of the words have shifted some. We have moved away from the staccato-like bursts of Per-fect in the heavens to needing to elongate some of the syllables to suit the meter.

Let’s experiment with the verse melody and see what needs to happen.

[Improvises with melody]

I think it’s starting to take some real shape and gain contour. The meter is dictating the pace of the words in the verse and pre-chorus and that second line has really slowed WAY down. But that’s okay—that’s what makes the song sections unique and interesting.

Singing through the verse melody and into the pre-chorus, let’s see what happens.

[Sings verse/pre-chorus]

That’s nice, I think. I’m liking it a lot and can imagine actually using this song in worship or recording it, or making a song demo and pitching it around to see if anyone else likes it enough to consider recording it on their project. While it’s not groundbreaking and shatter-the-earth original, it’s still nice and engages the listener in worship in a sweet way.



Let’s sing all the way from the top and see what we think after that.

[Sings from the top]




Well? What do we think? Sweet? Worshipful? Cast in a modern vibe like Sons and Daughters but not so close to any one of their songs that anyone would accuse us of lifting too much from them, right?

So that’s how it’s done.

You get just a little familiar with the scale, chords, and intervals and start experimenting. The more you do it, the better you get. Just like in lyric writing, you can actually do many of the exercises with melody, like the Side by Side, for instance. You could actually do that same exercise for the melody and chord progressions and craft your own melody that way.

Obviously, if you play guitar or keys it helps. You could get any decent player to teach you chords in one key and begin to write songs in that key.



Find the key that works best in your vocal range and go for it! Since modern songs are simple and uncomplicated, generally, it doesn’t take a lot to learn the chords that writers use. You can do it!

EXERCISE - Interesting Intervals

For this exercise, I want you to pick a popular song and identify its intervallic theme. What that means is that you listen through the song enough times paying attention to the melody that you can identify the recurring theme/motif it uses.

Here’s what to do:

1) Pick a song you like. It can be any song, Christian or not, though classical and jazz pieces can become more complicated. I recommend keeping it simple for now. This isn’t Advanced Composition IV in college.

2) Listen to the song several times in a row and begin to listen for recurring notes, intervallic patterns, used throughout the song.

3) If you play an instrument, try to identify on it the exact notes used. What are they? How far apart are they? Do they go up or down? How is this motif used throughout? In just an intro and a chorus? How many times is it used?

4) Make a journal entry about your findings and add this knowledge to your own songwriting skill set.

SO - I hope that you’ve heard enough and learned enough to pique your interest about chord progressions, intervals, scales, and what goes into crafting great melodies that you’re either diving in deeper to learning how to do it on the hunt for a great cowriter! It’s okay either way!



That wraps up Module #5. Remember why you’re in this course and be encouraged. Jesus loves you like crazy and has great things ahead for you. Hang in there and take it all one step at a time, okay?

I’m John Chisum for Nashville Christian Songwriters and I’ll see you soon in Module #6 where we’ll be talking about Refining, Recording, and Releasing Your Songs - don’t miss it! Cya then!

SOURCES

Perricone, Jack. Melody in Songwriting: Tools and Techniques for Writing Hit

Songs. Boston: Berklee Press (2000).



six weeks module 5 - nashvillechristiansongwriters.com · this is john chisum for nashville...

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