Lyrics may be one thing, but many writers find themselves in a totally foreign land when it comes to putting music to those lyrics. This is often due to a little thing called Music Theory, a terrifyingly complex word that we are going to work together to avoid as much as possible for our first song.
Time
Your time, or your time signature, tells us where the “beat” of the song is. If you listen to any piece of music, you can usually get into a rhythm and tap your foot along to the song. The points at which you tap your foot are the beats of the song. As you read over your lyrics, try to start to come up with a tune and begin to sing them, and as you do, see how naturally you can tap your foot along to the melody you’ve created.
Make sure your tapping stays consistent. If you’re finding that you sometimes have a rogue tap sticking out somewhere, you may have a prosody issue you can reexamine.
For more on prosody, and help with your lyrics, check out our article on Writing Your First Song
Tempo
Your tempo is very closely aligned with your time. Each time you tapped your foot above, that was a beat. Your tempo is how many beats happen over one minute of your song, called beats per minute (bpm). You can set a metronome to any bpm you like to help you keep time if you’re distracted by foot-tapping, and you can also experiment with changing the tempo and seeing how that affects the feel of your song.
Chords
Here is where I am going to really simplify things for you. There is a nearly infinite amount of chords out there, for master musicians to pluck from the ether at will. Instead of focusing on chords, we are going to focus momentarily on a chord progression, which is a series of chords played repeatedly. Luckily, many musicians have come before you, and thanks to them we already know some chord progressions that ears like. The one we are going to use for your first song is called a I-IV-V (one-four-five) chord progression. However, I’m going to simplify even further and give you two options for a chord progression.
D G A -> D
C F G -> C
These chords are the foundation of hundreds of the world’s most popular songs, and from here you really just have a lot of experimenting to do, finding a way to fit your chords and your lyrics together in a way that you find suitable. It will take some work, but I believe in you and I can’t wait to hear your first song!