Sam,

Once I have written lyrics, one thing that I find useful is to start BIAB playing a solo drum pattern (I mute everything else) and to speak the lyrics out loud with the same timing that I hear them being sung in mind. I then vary the drum pattern's tempo, try different patterns and try starting the lyrics at different places in the bar. When I start doing this, it's inevitable that I will change words to sit better with the rhythm. Eventually, the lyrics settle into place. (At this point in time, I have not used any accompaniment other than drums.)

When the lyrics are done, I go through them and put a bar line before each word or syllable that occurs on beat one. The drum rhythm makes it very easy to identify the first beat of the bar. Now I use Excel. I simply paste the words or parts of words that correspond to a whole bar into a cell. Since most songs are based on 8-bar sections, I follow the BIAB layout and have four cells (i.e. 4 bars) across before moving down to another line.

Now the fun starts.

Since each cell in Excel now represents a bar of lyrics, and given that most chord changes occur on beat 1, I play around with adding chords at the beginning of each "Bar". It's at this point of the process that BIAB really shines. Because I have my lyrics lined up in the way that I hear them in Excel and I've laid out Excel's cells so that they match BIAB's bars, it's now simply a matter of putting the chords into BIAB and talking my way through the lyrics. Once again, a chord progression evolves bit by bit and eventually settles into place. As the chord progression develops, I find that I start adding melody to some of the words as I say them. Eventually these snippets of melody begin to develop into a tune. (As a rule of thumb, I don't change a chord until I hear in my mind that change is needed because it's starting to get boring!)

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Regards,
Noel

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Audiophile BIAB 2025