Why Contrast Is Your (Second) Greatest Songwriting Tool

0:00 Music Appreciation. Welcome back to Music 101. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite techniques.It's kind of like two sides of the same coin with repetition and then contrast.

0:25 Contrast is what breaks up the repetition, helps indicate the listener's ear where to focus on and then gives likeforward momentum and progress to an entire composition. So first, since we're speakingsongwriting wise, I want to talk about songwriting contrasts and then we can talk a little bit aboutyou know from the audio and the recording engineering mixing aside how you can amplify that contrast.

0:52 But first, you know, even if you're recording a acoustic guitar and a mic singer and that's itand you're not going to do any post processing, you can still create contrast and you can do thatcompositionally. So to do that, you can manipulate any of the main levers that we have as a songwriter.You can do that in the lyrics, you can do that in the melody, you can do that in the chords, all three.

1:14 Let's start with the chords. So there's something that's called consonants and dissonants.They're the opposites of each other. Consonants is what is commonly referred to as pleasant sounds,dissonants, unpleasant sounds. I think that's a little bit too reductive for my taste because I find

1:31 some things that are dissonant to be very pleasant, but you know broadly speaking, if you're playinga bunch of you know notes that are clashing with each other, most people would find it a bit abrasive.

1:44 However, if you play a song and you don't put any of those abrasive things into it,it gets boring so fast. It feels like a lullaby or a children song because you're like kind of not,there's no momentum, there's no movement, and there's the other way to say that there's no tensionand then release.

2:03 And so by adding in those tense notes, some of that stuff that in a vacuum, just on its own, you might go, oh, that doesn't sound good, but in context, it provides the engineto move the listener forward and to move the composition forward. So there's something called aleading tone, the leading tone leads you back home.

2:21 And you can even listen to classical music, there's a ton of moments that just kind of hang and then resolve. And it makes theresolutions so much more impactful. If you didn't have that and you just went straight to theresolution, there's nothing to resolve from.

2:38 So you just kind of playing the same boringchord progression over and over and over again, which you can do, especially if you bring in some dissonance, some tension, some contrast, and some other respects. So for example,

2:56 if you had a lyric on top of it, it was like saying something like really harsh, you know,something that's like really brutal, I don't know, like emo lyrics or something like that with

3:12 really happy, a consonant sounding chord progression behind it, that tension will naturally arisebetween the children's music-esque environment in which these non-children music lyrics aren'thappening. So that's one form of that. So you can take it from the harmony or you can take it fromthe way that the lyrics and the harmony are interacting. You can also do it with the melody.

3:36 In the melody, you can choose different notes than what the chords are actually playing.And that can create attention because the melody is almost indicating a different chord progressionthan the one that you're playing, which can be really cool. And sometimes one of the most

3:54 fulfilling moments in music can be playing a melody that is anticipating a chord progression change.So there's dissonance, it feels kind of strange, why is this melody over here? And then the chordsrush up to meet it, maybe on the repeat.

4:09 So if you had one melody doing, you know, it's like it's likeit's like if you're suddenly speaking a different language and everybody around you isn't speaking that language, but then at a drop of a hat, now everybody's speaking that same language that youwere.

4:24 That's a, you know, think about how eerie that would feel if you're in a crowd of people and you're the only one speaking English and everyone around you is speaking Japanese and thenall of a sudden snap everyone speaking English, that'd be very disorienting. But that's beautiful

4:39 you can't ignore it. That's what I'm trying to say. So the repetition kind of lulls you intoa musicality and then the contrast and the tension snap you out of that lull and then pay offthe recapitulation, the return to the expected.

4:54 And in the same way that like, you know, great stories,like you think of the hero's journey where you have, you've probably seen this like on a, it's like a circle where it's it's talking about a protagonist and the things that we kind of expectin a broad sense, like humans in general, we kind of expect that if you're telling a story,

5:17 the protagonist is going to go out and search of something, be unfulfilled, meet different challenges,obtain something through the use and and help of friends or guides and then eventually returnhaving changed.

5:30 And so that that's that return having changed a bit is when I'm trying to driveat is that if you introduce one melody and then all hell breaks loose and then you come back to that melody, it buttons the whole thing up. And it's like, oh, there was meaning behind it all. It giveslike a levity a a sense of weight and reason to the whole thing.

5:53 And so like you should listen to giant steps. This is this is like part of what I like so much about John Coltrane and kind ofjazz in general is that they have these these places to kind of stick the landing. And then fromthere you can fly off to outer space and then come back and stick the landing again. And the wholething feels like, oh, he meant to do that. And which would she did.

6:16 But like, you know, that it gives you that impression even if you're not listening to it like as somebody that's studyingmusic or something, you're just experiencing it that that tension that departure that contrastand then the return to the expected is some powerful good stuff. All right. So now let's also talkabout what we do because we already kind of covered melody lyrics and composition.

6:42 The thing that's missing is all the fun recording stuff. Like, what can we do for tension? And this is this goes backto what I was talking about early on several pods ago about controlling your highs, controlling yourlows in mixing and in production, recording engineering, all of this, all three can do all of this.And deciding, you know, how much high end information do you want it to solve like this?

7:04 And how much more information, you know, like that's what I'm talking about. So like, how muchof that do you want? And by manipulating just that, you can create immense

7:15 tension, release, and contrast from sections. This is something I do as Scoobert Doobert all the time is Ilike to take away the high end frequencies, the type kind of stuff, take that away in the verses.

7:28 So it feels like it's like an all, you know, do other stuff, do. But it gives you that impression thatit's like in a tape machine or recorded on a cassette. So it's like this home bedroom recording.

7:41 And it gives an intimacy to those lyrics. And it kind of I think, I don't know, for me, at least itgives me a freedom to be like, I'm not as sing songy here. I'm going to tell more of the story.It can be more experimental. I can be goofier because this is just like, you're just hanging on myroom right now.

7:57 And then launch into the chorus and allow all of that high end information, all that saturation, like going from black and white to oversaturated, you know, that kind of experience.Have that all launched in at the chorus. So when you arrive, boy, do you arrive? You've blownthe roof off of the bedroom and now you're flying. And so that's like one way.

8:16 There are a million ways to do this on the audio side, which I love because it, it's like you build a composition,you build a song. And then how do you sell it? How do you actualize it?

8:31 It's like there's, I don'tknow, one of my guitar teachers, my first like real guitar teacher, the one that like really taught me stuff. He was just a dude in local San Diego music shop and played in his Jimi Hendrix cover bandon the weekends. And like, that was it. That was his thing. Love that guy.

8:54 And he gave me some sage wisdom that changed my life forever because I started writing songs on acoustic guitar. And I thoughtof myself as just a guitar player. And I started to write stuff and I started to write vocals. AndI, so I played him a few of like my original songs.

9:10 And he indicated to me all the different things I was doing on guitar was essentially a, how would I put this like a, like a wrapped up orchestra.

9:23 That's a little bit too grandiose. But like, what I'm trying to say is that he was, he wasindicating, hey, the things that you're doing with your right hand, the strumming hand, you'reindicating a baseline and rhythm with the hi hat.

9:35 The things that you're doing with your left handwhere you're playing lead lines and chords, you're playing like different bass lines and stuff like that. You are showing what the keyboard is to play as well as what the lead guitar is to play,what the rhythm guitar is to play.

9:48 And that was the moment that kind of like stuck in my head like, oh, it's all already here. How do I strip it from an acoustic guitar and throw it into thesedifferent places to make it more impactful, to give it more weight. And that took me like 10 yearsto figure out. And I'm still figuring it out.

10:05 But that's, that's where my, that's where my arranging chops or whatever you hear in my music. Like, that's where it comes from. Is that sense of you havethat innate ability as you're writing these songs. You are picturing it whether or not you knowyou're picturing it in terms of arrangement. So then how do you learn to like, actualize that?

10:23 And that's through the brutal and rewarding task of recording, recording engineering, recordingproduction, mixing. I would hesitate for you to think of those as two disparate of subjects.

10:37 Fundamentally, there's only two. You're writing the song and then you're actualizing the song.

10:42 Get good at both and learn how to use repetition, tension and release, or in other words,repetition and contrast in both of those mediums. And if you can do that, you'll be a hell of a musician.

10:58 I mean, even if you don't like, don't do anything else. Seriously, if it's like the most basic chords,most basic melodies, most basic lyrics. But every time you hit a new section, you like blow theirheads off because it's like, wow, that's so different than the last one.

11:11 It's all context, right?And if you do that through both the, you know, actualizing and the writing, the composition, that's enough. You don't need any more. You're doing it. So go do it.I'm going to talk to me more. Go to scoobertdoobert.pizza. That's my website.scoobertdoobert.pizza. And let's let's talk a little bit. You can listen to my music too, you know,whatever. All right. See you. Bye.