Songwriting For Dummies

Chapter 7

Using Rhymes in Your Songs

In This Chapter

Looking at the basic types of rhyming schemes

Exploring the other rhyming techniques

Deciding whether to rhyme at all

Dissecting rhyming schemes

Nothing puts the final coat of shellac on a song better than a well-constructed rhyme scheme. The careful and often clever use of exact or similar sounding words is the spice behind the meaning of the words that helps market the emotions of a song. Without rhymes (unless purposely not used to create a specific unschooled effect), songs tend to sound unfinished and amateurish in nature.

Although finding these clever rhymes can be a challenge, many writers consider this to be the fun part of the songwriting process — think of the art of rhyming as similar to solving a brainteaser or putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

In this chapter, we fill you in on some rhyming techniques and show you how to use a few helpful tools to find and create rhymes for your own songs. As we’ve said before, there really is no right or wrong way to write a song — if it sounds good to your ear and expresses what you want to say, lyrically and musically, then it’s “right.”

Identifying the Rhyme

In some songwriting tutorials (and even in the previous edition of this book) rhyming schemes are meticulously detailed, giving names to the types of rhymes, like masculine, feminine, and so on. This analysis technique was derived from classical poetry, and it still has its definite place there. But trying to learn all ...