For Revising:    
Take an existing song you're currently revising or one that you're not satisfied with yet and consider chord voicings in relation to your melody. What happens when you voice accented notes of your vocal melody in your chords...
- as you sing the notes
- a beat or more ahead of when you sing the notes, ideally in quarter or half-note moves (as a call)
- a beat or more behind (as a response)
What happens if you create a two-part harmony in a section between your vocal melody and individually voiced notes in the chords?
- Don't do this for the whole song, or even a whole section, but rather use this device to underscore an important line or lines of lyric or melody.

After doing this, are you finding that your melodies are living too heavily in certain scale degrees? In other words, if you mainly play chords without tensions or extensions (C F Am instead of Cmaj11, Fmaj7, Am7, etc.), are you finding that your melodies rely more upon the root, 3rd, or 5th for significant moments than other scale degrees? What happens if you choose a different note, or at least hang on that less stable note before resolving to more firm ground? Then add that tension to your chord?

In general, when you're writing these days, are your chords informing your melodies or are your melodies informing your chords? Whichever way you have been leaning lately, lean the other for a while and see what comes of that shift.

For Creating:
We often speak in metaphors to communicate, as the metaphor fashions a comparison between something we know well (with which we have familiarity) and something about which we hope to learn (surprise). But consider for a moment the unvarnished power of an image to communicate an emotional experience on a literal level (implied or stated ).
- For instance: I want to sing about missing someone, but instead of describing my emotional condition or comparing it to something that might suggest that emotion, I instead point to the empty chair beside me (as a Roots student recently wrote). When we create a compelling image, we allow the audience to participate in the act of discovery. They engage their imagination and, soon after, their empathic capacities in order to understand the image. They bring their emotional experience to our story.
- Craft an image (using language to recreate sensory experience). Entrust that image with all the emotional heavy lifting in the song. Remove any "feeling" words from the lyric. What happens to the emotional content of the song?
- Typically imagery lives in the verses and big ideas stand proudly and loudly in the chorus. Try a version of this song where your chorus uses the image itself as its focus. Sometimes what we don't say resounds loudest in the hearts of the listeners.

Exercises like these arise from the class The Songwriter's Workshop at The Songwriting School of Los Angeles.  Every Wednesday night, songwriters gather to play songs or songs-in-progress for feedback and constructive input from their peers, the faculty moderators, and regular industry guests.  To discuss your own candidacy for this audition-only class, call 818-848-7664. 

© Rob Seals, 2010, for The Songwriting School of Los Angeles.  All rights reserved.