Write your own blues lyrics

What you need:

• 1 blues scheme
• Time to improvise
• Having fun writing
• optional: accompanying instruments

The blues thrives on improvisation and spontaneous ideas. Especially when you're writing a birthday song, the lyrics should be fun and inventive, and that Improvising and playing hold much more creative potential than a blank sheet of paper in a quiet Little room. The best thing to do is to write your blues lyrics with a few friends.

A classic blues text emerges

• The typical blues comes from the time of the emerging electronic amplifiers and electric guitars. The texts at this time were strongly oriented towards the rhythm of speech, and the lines were sung quite freely over a basic rhythm. Between the lines there was often a bar or half a bar with a guitar riff or some other small melody transition.
• You can get a taste of this style in a more modern version by listening to Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe". The chord scheme, on the other hand, is different than in the original blues.
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• When you write your blues lyrics, use the 12-bar blues scheme as a guide, so the lyrics get three lines. The first line runs over the first four bars and represents the basic theme of the stanza. The second line repeats the theme over the second four bars, possibly with slight variations. The origins of improvisation can be clearly seen here. Finally, the third line runs over the last four bars. Here both the harmony sequence is led back to the beginning and a counterpoint to the first motif is set in the text.
• The blues scheme is in its simplest form: 4 x tonic, 2 x subdominant, 2 x tonic, dominant, subdominant, 2 x tonic. This means that when you write a blues in A major, you play one measure at a time A, A, A, A - D, D, A, A - E, D, A, A, or E.


Write cadences - this is how it works

Writing cadences is an often unpopular task in music lessons. With a …

• The third line usually rhymes with lines one and two, but can also play with breaking these expectations.

Ideas and motifs for the birthday song

• A blues lyrics should be simple. Like the instruments, the singer has traditionally improvised, whereby the text and melodies were often close to the spoken language.
• You can design the threefold structure between the leitmotif, the repetition and the counterpoint in very different ways. Your ideas appear classic and at the same time imaginative if they undermine the expectations of the listeners, for example like this: "You have today date of birth"(1 bar guitar riff)" It's your birthday today "(1 bar guitar riff)" It's your birthday today and I have no present for you. "
• A "call and response" structure is also conceivable, in which the text is distributed over two figures. You can hear that in "Hey Joe" too.
• It also looks very nice if you use the turnaround to build a connection to the next verse at the end. With a repeating structure, this can become an endless loop.