Hi,

"Jimmy Buffet, reggae, Hawaiian, & Southern"

If you ask me to write a song on demand using the above ideas, I would need a better idea of what those four things mean to you.

As I play in the Florida Keys I am all to familiar with Jimmy Buffet...lol Margaritaville gets requested about a zillion times a night...lol Having said that Jimmy has a very wide range of styles.

If you are intent on writing a reggae song, that simplifies the process a good bit. At least we know what the rhythmic style will be.

I have no clear idea of what "Hawaiian, & Southern" means.

What ever chords you use are going to wind up in some sort of progression and perhaps a very simple progression if the style is reggae.

The melody will be dictated by the harmonic structure or the harmonic structure will be dictated by the melody.

Popular songs tend to be pretty simple. There are not as many good choices about things as one might think.

Both the harmonic structure and the melody will need to relate to the context of the lyrics.

An example of what I mean is, if we have a vocal line of "I hate this weather" going from C major 7 to F major 7 will not fit with the emotional context of the line.

The BPM needs to make sense with the words. If we are describing a slow moving trip down a river then a frenetic 240 BPM makes no sense.

If you have a developed idea of a certain sound defined by the use of the instruments you described, and a subject matter, that will automatically limit what chords and melody line you can generally use.

There are sounds that better relate to certain events. French Horn would not likely work as a sound to support war for example.

To me, the idea of a song being a three minuet movie is a very good way to think about song writing. In fact, paying attention to the sound tracks of movies will provide good guidance to chords and melodies that relate well to the word you will want to use.

Cheers,

Billy

Last edited by Planobilly; 03/09/17 05:48 PM.
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