Songwriting: When and How to Speed Up (or Slow Down) the Melody of Your Song
Sometimes it may be appropriate for your melody and lyrics to sound up-tempo within your song. Maybe you want to do this to sprinkle a bit of contrast into your song, or maybe your lyrics deal with the idea of speed or quickness and you want to incorporate prosody into your work, so your music matches your lyrics. they’re saying. Whatever the case, what I’m going to show you here is an easy way to make your melody play faster, without having to alter your tempo at all.
The main thing to keep in mind when implementing what I’m going to show you is that some beats in a bar are louder than others. For example, in 4/4 time, the first and third beats of a measure happen to be the loudest and the second loudest, respectively, and tend to stand out as tea strong beats of the measure. The rest of the beats tend to act as unstressed beats.
So what does this have to do with speeding up your tune? It is simple. The more words or syllables you enter between the accented beats of a measure, the faster your melody will play.
There’s a great example of this happening in the song “The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani. The song opens with these two lines:
If I could get away I would but first of all let me tell youI must apologize for acting wrong and treating you this way.
Let’s study how these letters fit on the beats of the measure. I’ll bold the syllables that hit the first and third syllables of the beat. Remember, those are the strong syllables of the beat. So our letter will look like this now:
Yew I could it be-CAPI WOULD DO first goal of EVERYONElet me SAYI shall-POL-ogize for ACT-support & TRY-te this FORM
In the above letter, the syllable “-capa” of the word “escape” plays the first beat of the measure, and the word “would” plays the third beat of the measure. The rest of the words shown in bold also hit the first and third beats as the melody progresses.
At this point in the song, a pretty standard beat was established, based on how many syllables were interspersed between that strong first and third beat. When looking at the syllables in bold above, you will notice that there are typically between one and three syllables. Come in the strong beats of each measure. For example, the three-syllable phrase “but first of” appears between the words “would” and “all” on the first line (those two words fall on a strong third and first tense).
If you listen to the beginning of the song, you’ll notice that after those first two lines, the next set of lines sounds very sped up. The lyrics of those verses are:
Cause I’ve been acting like sour milk hit the floorIt’s your fault you didn’t close the fridge.
Maybe that’s the reason why I’ve been acting so cold?
There is no tempo change or anything that happens here to create this speed. Instead, there are simply more syllables interspersed between the strong beats. Check it out. Once again, I’ll highlight the words that hit the first and third strong syllables:
because i have been ACT-ing like sour milk IT FELL on the floorIt’s yours GUILT you did not close the re-FRIG-erator
Maybe THAT IS the reason i’ve been ACT-getting so cold?
When we write these letters with the strong syllables in bold, you can see that most of the time there are five syllables between each strong beat. If you remember the first couple of lines, there was only one, two, or three syllables between each downbeat. Five syllables is a lot more than three when it comes to what you can squeeze in between the strong beats. And it certainly is significantly more than one. As a result, we get a part of the song that sounds very fast compared to what we heard before.
A standard was established in the first pair of lines. By comparison, the next group of lines sounded much faster because it beat what was done on the first couple of lines.
You can also use this concept to slow down a melody in the same way. The only difference would be that you start with many syllables between each beat, and then it changes to less than what you started with. That would make the last set of lines sound slower.
For prosody, ideas like this often work best when the movement you make ties in with what the lyrics say. Speeding up your tune like this would be a great move if you were singing about speed, things going too fast, or anything else of the sort. Conversely, if you were singing about things that move too slowly, it would make sense to first establish a fast melody and then slow it down when you go to the part about things that move slowly. Have fun with this idea and use it where it best suits your music.
