In the next few lessons we’re going to be talking about strumming. And one of the best ways to learn a song that you want to play is to break that song down into smaller parts, and then you work on the parts separately, and then you put it all together.

 

Now a term that we use a lot in music to describe how the different parts of the song are organized is called the form. So a form of a song probably includes a verse, a chorus, and maybe a bridge. Those three things are the most common recipe that songwriters use to write a good song that’s got some variations and different stuff that keep it interesting. And so let’s kind of talk about what those things mean and what they are.

 

So a verse is basically the part of a song where you tell the story. The strumming tends to kind of stay out of the way of the words because we want to listen to what the song is about. Now, when you get to the chorus, you usually have a change in the strumming and it tends to sounds kind of a little bit bigger; kind of catchier. The title of the song is often found in the chorus. And another term that people use to describe a chorus is the hook. The idea is like you get hooked; it’s very catchy. It’s the part of the song that everybody remembers.

 

So you usually have this verse, then you go to a chorus, and often you return to another verse, and then you have maybe another chorus. And after that oftentimes you have something called the bridge. The bridge frequently uses chords that you really haven’t seen in the earlier parts of the song, and it’s definitely a different feel change. It could be a little bit mellower, it could be just sort of like a breakdown, it could be many different things, but the important thing here is to think of it as yet another part of the song.

 

Let’s kind of give an example here on how you might sort of approach learning a song that’s got these three different parts. Every style of music is different. Let’s use an example based on like a hard rock tune.

 

So maybe my verse is kind of like a simple chugging, kind of, this kind of a thing. Now, for example, my right hand, I did all down-strokes for that. So if you were practicing that, that might be one of the technical parts that you would work on.

 

Now when I get to the chorus of the song, maybe the strumming is more alternate strumming, and instead of small little power chords, we’re going to have full open sounding chords like [MUSIC]. So different sound; different technique.

 

And maybe the bridge has a third technique, and a different set of chords. So maybe the bridge goes [MUSIC], something like that.

 

So I’m going to put these three parts together in an example that would kind of be typical for a song. All three are going to be kind of short, a real song would probably have longer parts, but in order to just kind of play through them quickly I’m going to call them out as I change, and it’s going to kind of go part to part.

 

So I’m going to start out with my verse, and the verse we’re going to do [MUSIC]. Here comes the chorus [MUSIC]. And then we’ll go back to the verse [MUSIC]. The chorus again, it’s chorus number two [MUSIC]. Maybe I go into the bridge here [MUSIC]. Back to the chorus [MUSIC]. And so on and so forth. A lot of songs get to the chorus towards the end and then they just kind of repeat the chorus and fade out.

 

So these are sort of different parts of the song that are important to know. And another thing is different styles of music use these in different ways, and some styles of music don’t use, for example, all of them.

 

Blues, for example, might just have one kind of repeating part because it’s a very sort of verse oriented music. It’s kind of like storytelling. So maybe you just have a simple thing that you play over and over again, that’s kind of like only the verse. You know, this kind of a thing, like a blue’s shuffle we call this. And so this is going on and on and the singer pretty much tells a story over that kind of a sound.

 

So understanding these different parts of a song and being really specific when you practice them is a great way of sort of making your way through the parts of the song, and it also sort of breaks it down to these digestible chunks that sort of makes it easier to kind of understand what you need to do for each one.

So in the next few lessons we’re going to be talking about different techniques for the right hand and the left hand that relate to what you might need to do for a verse or a chorus. And we’re also just going to kind of approach different song styles by these different parts, and this is going to make our understanding of the songs really solid, and that’s going to make you a great chord player.