All right, so hey what is up guys, it is Walt Ribeiro and I would just like to say please rate, subscribe, comment. And all the support, all of the awesome letters that you guys send me is amazing and there is a bunch of video links in the description from my twitter, you tube, flicker, dig all that stuff. My space and let us definitely friend each other up.
So here, we have a question says, Walt, I write a lot of music with lyrics and I am having trouble writing the lyrics. So that my question is this, should I worry about the length of lines depending on the genre?
Okay, the answer is you should and you should not. I mean you write music because you care about it and you write the lyrics that come out for you naturally. Now after you are done writing those lyrics, by the way here is the link and here is the chat room, they are kind of talking to the you tube and so that the answer to that question is you should not worry so much about the thought and the emotion that goes into those lyrics right? But at the end of the day, you do want to fit into your music both melodically and lyrically. Okay, so yes when you are writing lyrics, there is an art form to writing the lyrics and there is also an art form to being able to fit those lyrics into a piece of music.
So you might be good at writing lyrics but you have to be good at also fitting them in and the way that you get good at that is that you just try new things. Go out, buy a dictionary, buy a thesaurus, and buy a rhyming dictionary. Okay, so if I have a word like right now, what word rhymes with you stream. Well, we can do scene, we can do seem, we can do stream, we can do team, you know, little things like that and so then we are going to rhythm to the – there are things like if you are writing a lyrics and you cannot fit the lyrics in, you have one of two options. Either change the lyrics or change the music.
So if I have eight syllables in a line but there is only seven melody notes, seven melody notes then I either have to add another melody note. Maybe break it in half and put the other four beats in the next measure or I can just change the syllable, change the word. Maybe you can still get the same thought process in the same word through one syllable than two. So instead of writing a word like lovely, if it does not fit, find a word that rhymes with lovely and it is only one word right? Like me, or you know anything that rhymes with that. So that is one thing that I would definitely check out and then your second question is you say here, do I need to have in mind the rhythm before I write?
Well it goes back to that famous question, which came first, the chicken or the egg? I highlighted it right here and it goes back to that question. What came first, the melody line or the lyrics? And the thing is that you just have to do both. I mean you write the lyrics if that is what you first think about, you write the lyric and you get it out there on paper and you make it mean a lot to you and then you write the music and then you just try to put the two together. Or there are times, many times when I write the music first and then I write the lyric over the top of it and there are times when I am writing the lyrics as I am writing the melody line too right? So it could be any variation in between but it comes down to two things, practice, edit, cross out, use references until you are vernacular and until you are patterned.
It kind of falls into place and you understand how this all works. Talk to people, write more songs, do it everyday and the end result is that you touch two people. Okay, because you can have all the lyrics in the world and all the melody lines in the world but it come down to one thing, but there are two parts to it. You have to touch two people, you have to touch yourself and you have to touch other people. When you do that, then it all just falls into place and the melody speak to everyone and that is it. So that is how you want to do it. Do it everyday, try it everyday and make it mean something and do not worry about it. It will just all fall place
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