Make It Fit
Now you're probably asking, " How do I make all that rhyming stuff (and everything else) fit with my song?" I'm glad you asked!
Remember when I talked about taking notes and writing down ideas for a song? (See the entries "An Example" and "Taking Notes" from the October archives.) Once you get a theme for a song, you write down several key words and/or phrases that you want in the lyrics. In our example we used the theme of "the name of Jesus." Our key words were "Jesus" and "authority." We could probably put "name" in there too. We also had one line for the song, "The name of Jesus is above every name." That sounds like a good line for the chorus, although it's a little long. We could modify it a little so that it looks like this: "The name of Jesus is above ev'ry name." We just took the word "every," which has 3 syllables (ev-er-y) and reduced it to two (ev-ry). This mechanism for shortening words is perfectly fine if you are careful not to over use it. Now our new line has 11 syllables, so the following lines ideally have 11 lines, or maybe 10.
For a rhyme scheme, lets use the old A-A-B-B setup. Remember that this means that the first 2 lines will rhyme, and the last two lines will rhyme. To keep things simple, we'll start out the second line with "The name of Jesus..." and we'll end with a word that rhymes with "name." A rhyming dictionary is very handy here, but if you don't have one yet, here's a little rhyming trick:
Start with the sound that you want to rhyme with, in this case "-ame." Now, starting with "A" add a letter of the alphabet to the begining of that sound. If you start with "A" you get "aame." Is that a word? No, but it reminds you of "aim." Write it down. Now, try "B"--"bame." That's not a word either--but blame is. Go through the entire alphabet like that and you'll have a pretty good base of rhymes. Oh, yeah, don't forget consonant vowels like "sh-", "th-" and "ch-." So our of the letters we've gone through so far we have "aim," "blame," and "shame." "Shame" strikes my fancy, so we'll use that as our rhyme. How about this:
The name of Jesus is above ev'ry name
The name of Jesus redeems me from shame
That's a pretty good start. Now see if you can come up with the last two lines. Then leave a comment to tell me what you got.
Tim Heider
Have you heard? We're starting a newsletter! Click the link near the bottom of the bar at right.
Remember when I talked about taking notes and writing down ideas for a song? (See the entries "An Example" and "Taking Notes" from the October archives.) Once you get a theme for a song, you write down several key words and/or phrases that you want in the lyrics. In our example we used the theme of "the name of Jesus." Our key words were "Jesus" and "authority." We could probably put "name" in there too. We also had one line for the song, "The name of Jesus is above every name." That sounds like a good line for the chorus, although it's a little long. We could modify it a little so that it looks like this: "The name of Jesus is above ev'ry name." We just took the word "every," which has 3 syllables (ev-er-y) and reduced it to two (ev-ry). This mechanism for shortening words is perfectly fine if you are careful not to over use it. Now our new line has 11 syllables, so the following lines ideally have 11 lines, or maybe 10.
For a rhyme scheme, lets use the old A-A-B-B setup. Remember that this means that the first 2 lines will rhyme, and the last two lines will rhyme. To keep things simple, we'll start out the second line with "The name of Jesus..." and we'll end with a word that rhymes with "name." A rhyming dictionary is very handy here, but if you don't have one yet, here's a little rhyming trick:
Start with the sound that you want to rhyme with, in this case "-ame." Now, starting with "A" add a letter of the alphabet to the begining of that sound. If you start with "A" you get "aame." Is that a word? No, but it reminds you of "aim." Write it down. Now, try "B"--"bame." That's not a word either--but blame is. Go through the entire alphabet like that and you'll have a pretty good base of rhymes. Oh, yeah, don't forget consonant vowels like "sh-", "th-" and "ch-." So our of the letters we've gone through so far we have "aim," "blame," and "shame." "Shame" strikes my fancy, so we'll use that as our rhyme. How about this:
The name of Jesus is above ev'ry name
The name of Jesus redeems me from shame
That's a pretty good start. Now see if you can come up with the last two lines. Then leave a comment to tell me what you got.
Tim Heider
Have you heard? We're starting a newsletter! Click the link near the bottom of the bar at right.
posted by Tim Heider at 7:40 PM
1 Comments:
Hmmm. Kinda sounds like the song we were working on Sunday . . . with my tentative chorus added to it. I'll show it to you later!
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