For this week’s composition blog I will be talking about my song “Give me”, this was my first song written in English, it was written and recorded 12 years ago!!!. The main idea came when I was trying to find a chord progression from E minor going up until I reached Em again, here is a link for the song:
The original song was written in E minor, later on for the recording I transposed it up to Gm, I will refer to the song like it was composed, in Em (if you play guitar you can use a capo on 3rd position to transpose it). The song was transposed to Gm because singer, Sangil Lee from Korea, is a tenor, and I’m a Baritone, he sings higher than me and by transposing the song to Gm his voice is allowed to be in his best register.
As I said before my goal was to go from Em to Em using as many chords from the key of E minor as possible, going up step by step (Diatonic movement). On the E minor Key (natural) you have the following notes and chords:
My first option, obviously, was to play all the chords in the natural order, Em – F#dim – G – Am – Bm – C – D – (Em), soon I realise that progression didn’t sound too interesting, at least for me, then, I began thinking how could I replace some chords keeping the same movement on the bass, which will have a similar result as I first wanted.
The first chord was Em, which was ok, the second, F#m, was not working for me, so I thought which other chord has F# on the bass?, I could use an inversion, an inversion is changing the order of the notes of a chord, not putting the tonic on the root but a different note of the chord.
First choice was Bm, this chord has the following notes: B – D – F#, by rearranging the order of the notes (in other words using an inversion of the chord) I could use Bm/F#, but, it didn’t sound good for me. Then I thought about D/F#, which is an inversion of the D chord, that one was perfect and it also acted as the dominant of G, which was the following chord, this is called a Secondary dominant or Auxiliary dominant. A dominant is the 5th grade of a scale, a dominant chord is the chord built on that note, and an Auxiliary dominant is when we create a dominant chord for a chord other than the tonic.
The third chord was G, no problem there, then I had Am, G – Am was not the sound I was looking for, then I thought about the dominant of Am, which is E and if it’s on first inversion is E/G#, I tried and it worked great again, another secondary dominant, even though G# is not in the Em Key, it was keeping my first goal of going up from E to E.
Next Chord was Bm, using the secondary dominants I could replace Bm for G/B, which is the dominant of the next chord, C, at this moment I just needed D chord and the progression was finished:
With this chord progression the amazing Nadav Oliel did an extraordinary bass line for this song.
This was just the beginning, now that I had the progression I needed a melody, so I thought would it be possible to do the opposite?, to go from E to E but this time going down?. After trying a few ways I found the line that I liked:
This was the start point for the melody, then with lyrics things changed a little but the base of the melody was there.
For me this part of the song was the chorus (for somebody else it could work as a verse), now I needed the verses. After all this long process I wanted something different and maybe simpler for the verse, so I thought, the chorus has many chords and is in a minor key and the lyrics are kind of dark, why don’t do the verses doing all the opposite: Major Key, not too many chords and happy lyrics?, and that was the beginning of the verse. I went to the Relative major which is G major and I did a really easy progression, just 3 chords, G, D and Am, (for the prechorus I used C too).
For the Lyrics I wanted them to be the opposite to the Chorus which was Dark and a little angry, I thought doing something lighter and even naive would be contrary enough.
Verse
Tell me something that you like
Tell me something that is right
Show me the way to make you smile
Show me what really is inside
Tell me that is gonna…
Tell me is not another
Chorus
Lie,
Like the kind you always know,
The kind that makes me feel I’m alive now
Alive, but really I’m just dead
The things I just to dream doesn’t matter now
The Verse begins in a light way but after each phrase you can realise that something is not working on the relationship, even you can see despair and helplessness on the “tell me that is gonna…” phrase that is left incomplete, (a friend of mine said that was his favorite part of the song, I like it too) and then the phrase “Tell me is not another…” ends the Major Verse and connect with the minor Chorus which completes the phrase with the word “lie”, changing completely the direction of the song. Now we are in Em and the whole feel of the song is shifted, now is dark and the way of singing also changed from naive and powerless to angry and powerful.
After the chorus ended the verse comes back to G major but this time the lyrics and feel couldn’t come back to naivety, even though we are in a Major key there was not way for me to bring it back to the same place as the beginning, now everything was different, the character had changed.
For the second chorus, I kept the same melody but with different lyrics, I thought there was more to be said, more to explore, usually choruses have the same lyrics but there is always places to break rules. The guitar solo is based on the main chorus melody doing different voices each time, voices that are going to be heard on the last 2 choruses.
I finished the song on an E major chord after a ritardando (going slower), to finish on the E major instead of Em gives a totally different feel, this is called a Picardy third or Picardy Cadence.
There are many other things to be said about this song and its arrangement, like putting more guitars on the choruses helped to make the goal of doing completely the opposite on the verses, or the way this song was arranged to have an 80’s feel, a reminiscence of my youth, listening bands like Def Leppard, Aerosmith, Van Halen etc. but for now I think is enough to give you more Ideas for your composing path, I hope you enjoyed this blog and it can help you on your growth as a composer, have a great rest of the week!!!
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