60-Second Songwriting aims to offer quick, concise, song-craft tips, basics and blasts for the time-crunched and attention-challenged 21st-century musician.
Song structure is one of songwriting’s key...
60-Second Songwriting aims to offer quick, concise, song-craft tips, basics and blasts for the time-crunched and attention-challenged 21st-century musician.
Song structure is one of songwriting’s key elements or building blocks. As songwriters, we casually throw common structuring language around all the time—“Let’s double a chorus here. Why don’t we go to the bridge there?” But how often (if ever) do we really stop to think, beginner or advanced writer alike, about the nut-and-bolt concepts behind the everyday rudiments of our trade?
For example, take the “outro” section of a song. Sure, its purpose is to guide the listener to song’s end, but how does it actually do that?
The Outro
So what is an outro section?
- An outro (also sometimes referred to as the coda) of a song is, as one might think, the inverse of an intro section. It’s a structural element designed to wrap things up and ease the listener toward the song’s conclusion.
- While some intros recur at points throughout a song, the outro is not a recurring section and only appears at the end of a song’s timeline.
- Similar to the intro, the outro can take multiple forms. It can present itself as solely instrumental in nature, with a chord progression backing and a top-line melody played by an instrument or instruments. The outro can also present itself as a chord progression covered by a top-line melody that’s sung with a lyric or in nonsense syllables.
- An outro can run the gamut, from full-band arrangement to singular element (a solo instrument, an a cappella vocal, a string section, a drum beat, etc.)
- Like the intro, dynamics also come into play with the outro. For example, the outro can be used to gently back down the intensity built up over a song’s timeline, leading the listener