11 August 2007

Song Basics - Song Structure

You already learned in my first song basics post that songs are made up of a series of chords. This post introduces a few more simple ideas about song structure that will help you to learn and remember songs.

The chords in a song are arranged into groups whose names are familiar to you I'm sure. The basic song structure is:

  1. Introduction
  2. Verse
  3. Chorus
  4. Ending
There are usually a number of verses, and the chorus is repeated several times. The verse and chorus usually have a different series of chords to play. So you need to learn and remember these different series to play a song.

Each verse or chorus is divided into equal length parts called bars, or measures. In popular music the verses and choruses are often based on patterns of 8 bars. These patterns are repeated which makes the job of learning and memorizing a song easier.

That's really all you need to know about song structure to get started. I'm sure you found that you already knew quite a lot of this music theory.

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