How to Make a Beat Loop or Musical Phrase into a Song: A Guide on Song Construction

How to Make a Beat Loop or Musical Phrase into a Song: A Guide on Song Construction

Have you started to lose inspiration for your music making hobby because you can’t find a way for your chords to sound more exciting? You want to write music that inspires your audience in a spontaneous and somehow resolute way.

Are you looking for a way that your songs can branch out on ear-piercing guitar riffs, improvisational scatting, and an ending that brings everything back together? 

If you said yes to any of these questions or are curious about their subject matter, you are looking for a guide on song construction and musical form. Well, you’ve come to the right place. 

How can you turn a looping beat track into a song?

None of us should be ashamed to like to listen to lo-fi beat tracks while they are working, but it seems far too often to come across songs that are comprised of only two chords, many times just a rip-off of some jazz lick from a recording in the 60’s, and some artists just putting a drum track over it and looping it until the fade out.

Don’t get me wrong, you can write a hit with just two chords (try Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton or Moves Like Jagger by Maroon 5), but if your audience can guess what the whole song will probably sound like within the first 10 seconds of your track, you may be in trouble. 

What makes a song, well, a song?

Songs are made up of a sequence of chords called a chord progression. A chord is any group of three or more harmonic pitches that are played simultaneously, arpeggiated or in a closely related pattern. If your head is spinning from the music theory mumbo jumbo, I’ll break it down for you. 

A chord is a commonly related group of pitches (notes) that can be notated by musicians. A chord progression is a commonly accepted harmony sequence or repeated pattern of chords.

Many Billboard Chart list songs come from similar chord progressions. You have surely searched for songs written with the same 4 chords on YouTube by now, and surely you have seen the video 4 Chords by The Axis of Awesome. If you haven’t, it is a great YouTube video hole to be sucked into the next time you have an hour to kill. 

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Songs are written in a key, which means that one pitch is the tonal center of the piece, or that home feeling you get when you begin or arrive to the end of a song. Sometimes home is happy if it is in a major key, and sometimes the home is sad if it is in a minor key.

A key is a commonly accepted sequence of pitches that give you your building blocks to chord construction. If you are curious about chord construction, and want to know how to make unique chords, check out this article about jazz chord construction by Dirk Laukins.

Learning jazz chords will be greatly beneficial to your musicianship, as all American music has been influenced by jazz, from the blues, to R&B, to Rap, and even popular music today.

A true songwriting master will be able to make an effective chorus and verse structure for a song that is different enough melodically to disguise the lack of compositional material, but that is where the song form can come into play. 

Mastering creative chord progressions and a balanced form in your songwriting

Once you’ve mastered making unique and beautiful sonic chords, it’s time for you to think about making a progression of chords that fit your song’s mood or tone. As we learned earlier, many songs just recycle the same 4 chords, but they disguise it with interesting lyrical content and gnarly guitar solos.

Here are a few common chord progressions for popular songs, and some unique chord progressions I like to use when creating a song. The lower-case numerals and letters indicate tense chords, and the upper-case ones indicate happy chords. The chords will be written under the roman numeral form of the chord progression, all set in the key of C Major as listed below:

Popular chord progressions with jazz harmonies include the following:

I^Maj7  –  ii⁷  – V⁷  – I^Maj7

I^Maj7 – ii⁷ – vi⁷ – IV⁶

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I^Maj7 – V⁶ – IV⁷ – I^Maj7

I^Maj7 – iii⁷ – vi⁷ – V⁶

I^Maj7 – vi⁷ – ii⁷ – V⁷

Now that you have a few tools in your music shop, we can get to work to figure out the form of your new song. Think of creating a form of music, or a chart for your chords as some jazz musicians call it, like writing poetry.

Poetry is made of stanzas, and stanzas are made of smaller individual idea structures. Writing a stanza in the form of AABA would mean that all of your A’s rhyme and your B stands out from the rest of it. Understanding this is the key to song construction. 

Name one of the chord progressions above A, for example (I^Maj7  –  ii⁷  – V⁷  – I^Maj7) will be A. Now choose another random chord progression from above and call it B. Let us say that (I^Maj7 – vi⁷ – ii⁷ – V⁷) is B. Now, keeping true to the poetic form of AABA, your chord chart is as follows:

Play each chord for 4 beats and you are ready to start writing lyrics to your song! The slightly sadder B section will surprise listeners when it feels darker than what they have already heard twice, so pair that section with a somber lyric when you choose to write words for it.

When you get to the chorus, you can repeat the same form with different rhyming words, or you can switch to a different form for the chorus. Here are a few different sample forms for you to try on your own. 

ABAB

AAB

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ABABCB

ABCD

ABACABA

Conclusion

Now that you have a few forms to check out and a few chord progressions to pull from, nothing can stop you from writing your next great hit. What are you waiting for? Believe me, there is no magic answers to unlimited creativity and songwriting that can please everyone.

However, I will let you in on a little golden rule of jazz that will help any brave songwriter determined to write their next hit, and it is this: if you ever hit a note that doesn’t sound right, just repeat it until you can find a way to resolve it.

The only true way to master songwriting is to try time and time again until you are happy with the results.

Good luck and go create some awesome music.