Originally Posted by: armGETaTITonokay so my question is...

how do you exactly put chords in your song.. i mean i already got lyrics and the rhythm but how do i put guitars on it.. do it still have a scale to follow? or you'll just going to find the chords whats best on the song...


and SECOND
how do you WRITE the LEAD AND RHYTM parts?? i mean i know how to use powerchords, octaves and palm muting.. thx :)

ps. can you kindly explain it in a newbie way :)

As you may have read from others, song writing, lyrics and so forth can be done a thousand ways and thank god other wise we would have to listen to the same song, tune, melody etc over and over again. Fortuneately and because there are many ways to write songs, we now have rap, rock, country, folk, blues, jazz, and on it goes.
My thoughts about writing songs are simply to find a starting point. Do you get the tune first and write the words?, or write the words and then find the tune to go with it?, or do you simply make it instrumental.

I always start with basic lyrics and chase it from there. For instance, if you take any song that is considered a good one, you will find it has a theme. The theme can be anything such love, peace, war, happiness, loneliness, selfishness, sharing, waiting, wanting, dreaming, falling, losing, winning, living, losing, finding, searching, caring, giving, taking etc.
Ask yourself, what is the theme that runs through a song such as message in a bottle by the police. It's an everyday concept that the band pursued to it's final form though they could have taken it anywhere or written it in many different ways.

Start with an everyday word or phrase and play with it until you have a story and whether it rhyms or not doesn't matter though I think it helps if it has poetic structures in it that help the reader to visualise the story in their heads and or it connects to them in a way that they are familiar. One of our contributors to this forum recently wrote about the loss of his child which is really sad for him and his partner but I recall that Eric Clapton lost his son and turned his grief into a song, "tears in heaven". What he wrote was about a personal experince but at the same time, he wrote about loss which is an everyday happening and he wrote it in such a way that we all understood his pain. In his song he reflected on issues that we can understand. He could have written it a dozen different ways but chose to write it the way he did because that is how he perceived his world.
Take this poem for instance which I wrote some time ago and was published so there is copy right on it. See how you would write about the same thing in as many words or lines. You can see that this is a story about lost love and the painful way in which it was lost and though a short story it conveyes a lot of sentiment in its words. You can write the same story but your way.

Her goodbye was spiteful
yet a relief when it came
The pain of our empty home was more than I could bare
But lessened because she wasn't there.

Perhaps this would make a good song if put together with the right music which again will depend on how one wants to express such sentiment
Hard Rock, Folk, Rap, Jazz, who knows. All I'm saying is to take a thought, play with it and visualise what it means to you so that you can write about it and when that is done, how would you sing about it. When that is done, you can play with a few chords to get it moving and don't be affraid to ask someone for help until you get the knack of how it all goes together.
Best of luck
TC