Make people move with your song 💃🏻

SONG 3 of the 10 Songs In 10 Weeks Challenge is gonna be a rhythmically interesting one🙌🏻

Today’s exercise is called…

Dance Hijack

This exercise is great to:

• Be more rhythmically dynamic
• Spark your puzzle-solving brain
• Level up your creativity
• Build rhythmically catchy songs

In the video, I walk you through the exercise step by step, so you can follow along. But here are the individual steps, if you prefer to read:

1. Choose a Dance Video: Select a dance video that inspires you. Find one that is dance-focused all the way through. You can grab one from YouTube, or you can choose one from here (videos for educational purposes only).
2. Match the Tempo in your DAW: Sync your song’s tempo with the dance video by importing the video into your DAW and adjusting your project’s tempo to macht the dancer’s rhythm. Once you’ve done this, make sure to mute the original song audio that came with the video. You don’t want to be influenced by it.
3. Mark Dancer’s Accents: Identify key accents that the dancers hit. Use an instrument (e.g. snare drum) in your DAW to mark these moments musically.
4. Map the Song Structure: Analyse the dance to guide your song’s horizontal structure e.g. verse, pre-chorus, chorus, etc. Use the energy, rhythm, repetition, and dynamics of the dance to inform the structure.
5. Add Harmonic Elements, Melodies, and Lyrics to Craft your Song: The accents that the dancers hit are likely to be accents in the original song they were dancing to. It’s possible they also interpreted the vocal melody into their routine. It’s now your decision on how to interpret their moves. You can start with any musical element you like e.g. drums, bass, guitar, vocals. Warning: If you make the groove first and mark all the accents as musical hits, you may find you’ve left no room for a vocal melody.

That’s it! I hope you enjoy this exercise 🤗

The foundation for this challenge

The book I’m basing this challenge on is Ra Wilson’s book, Write 47 Songs. If you haven’t heard of it yet, I highly recommend you get it. As the name says, the book gives you 47 exercises that serve as a practical roadmap for your artist development through implementation and self-exploration. So it’s a highly practical guide for artists who are just starting out in their songwriting journey, and it’s packed with exercises that are designed to help you put in the practice and level up in all the ways I mentioned before – from your lyric writing to your musical understanding, to developing yourself as an artist in terms of your sound and your artistic voice. All of that through implementation. Because it’s what you DO that counts. When you learn to play an instrument for example, you go to lessons and you spend most of the time DOING. Songwriting should be no different.

Are you new to this challenge? Watch the intro video here!

Wanna join alongside a group of artists?

If you’ve ever made a purchase with us (like joined any of our bootcamps, or got Ra’s book) you also get access to our free WhatsApp community where our artists hang out and support each other. There you can share what you make within a safe space and listen to what others share as well. This will make it way more fun and really help you with accountability.

If you decide to get the book (or you’ve already joined a bootcamp with us), be sure to send me an email so I can give you access to the community! My email address is sonj@artistspringboard.com

I hope you enjoy writing your SONG 3! I’m here if you have any questions 🤗❤️

Happy songwriting,

Sonj