Your Songwriting Journey: Contrast on Every Level

Contrast makes songs (and lives) interesting. It’s a great tool for renewing listener attention, adding complexity, and taking your audience on an ultimately satisfying musical journey.

Choose any aspect of music at random, and you’ll find lots of contrasting concepts within each:

Dynamics (soft, loud)

Timbre (clean, distorted; brass, strings)

Melody (high, low; smooth, jagged)

Tempo (slow, fast)

Modes (major, minor)

Arrangement (full, sparse)

And that’s just the beginning, of course.

Lyric contrast: meaning, mood, and structure

Any dimension of a lyric can also be used to introduce contrast.

• The story told in a lyric may change over time.
• The verses may morph the meaning of the chorus as they progress.
• Lines of lyric can grow shorter or longer from section to section.
• The mood may change: placid verses, seething chorus. Grieving verses, resigned chorus.
• Imagery can mix to create strange juxtapositions.
• Metaphors can reveal connections between seemingly opposite things.
• Verses may all share one rhyme scheme, yet the chorus uses a totally different one.
• You can employ contrast in absolutely any other dimension of the lyric that you can think of.

Simultaneous contrast vs. sequential contrast

Contrasting elements can appear simultaneously or sequentially. A grungy guitar accompanying a pure-sounding flute would be simultaneous contrast; if the guitar stopped and then the flute appeared, that’d be sequential contrast.

Contrast can be abrupt, or it can happen gradually over time; i.e., a composer may choose to suddenly leap upward in volume, or to ramp it up slowly. The speed of a transition definitely changes its effect; experiment with this in your own songs!

Contrasting sound and meaning

If you haven’t been overwhelmed by the number of possibilities yet, consider also that you could use a melody that contrasts its lyric. You could arrange thunderous drums in the background while a calm, controlled voice soars over it all. You could use bright major chords in the accompaniment while singing a minor key melody.

Like chess pieces, all the elements of music can work together or clash in myriad ways.

Contrast is your friend

Contrast is a very general concept; you can apply it to anything—it will follow you as you grow. Contrast can occur between sections of a song, then between songs, then between albums as you change stylistically, then your lyrics will mature as you age and your interests change…

You may want to keep some constant landmarks, just to help define yourself. Then again, maybe not. Everything you make bears your distinct mark; the more you create over time, the more your unique strengths and talents will become clear to listeners even when your output is wildly diverse.

All of the known universe, viewed from afar, has one color—and in the same way, all those different approaches and sounds and ideas add up to one career over time. Yours. Don’t be afraid to change it up!