How to turn an old riff into a full song: Part 2 – Verses

Exploring different ways to write verse sections based off our main riff

 Quick jump links

• Part 1

Welcome back to our new series How to Turn a Riff Into a Full Song where we’re dusting down an old riff and, step-by-step, fleshing it out into a full song to inspire you to do the same.

In part 1, we explored the fundamentals of songwriting and structure, busting the age-old myth that more is more. The truth is that a good song doesn’t need an abundance of different sections; actually, you can do a lot with very little. Sorry, Ywngie. 

Part 2 will involve a deep dive into the mechanics of our main riff and exploring different ways to approach writing the verse. So, without further ado…

The riff

This is our riff, rescued from the darkest, dustiest depths of my hard drive of unfinished demos. It was serving Monuments vibes to me, so it felt like an ideal riff to resurrect.

In keeping with MMA tradition, the riff is in DADGAD, plain and simple. We’re in 4/4 at 140bpm.

Now we’ve heard the riff, let’s get to know it a little better. Taking a closer look, we can see that it’s anchored in the D Phrygian Dominant scale, meaning that the open, first, and fourth frets on the D strings are giving us our main flavour. There’s also a lot of open notes in this, played with lots of hammer ons and pulls offs for a legato-like feel and it really leans into the fact we have several D strings to jump between octaves, giving the riff a little more dynamism.  

If you’re terrible at music theory, but want to understand your riff better, check out All Chords’ scale identifier. Simply add in the frets the riff uses and it will present different scales that those note choices can relate to. Music theory isn’t necessarily a must for guitarists, but it’s important to have a little context behind the idea if we’re to build it out into a full song.  

Half-way through the riff, there’s an ambient pad layer on guitar, playing the notes A, A#, G, and F#. It’s quite minimal, but it gives us an extra little bit of movement and the intervals also add a little tension. This simple pad will prove important later. 

So, taking this core idea, what next steps could we take?

Verse idea 1 – Space for days

In songwriting, dynamics are everything. Whether your song starts gently or puts a rocket up your listener’s arse, riding out the whole song on that one dynamic will get very boring, very quickly. Songs need nuance; an ebb and flow. If you’re just stapling heavy riffs together, then the forcefulness of those riffs will wear off as the listener grows accustomed to their brute force.

Changing the dynamics throughout the course of a song gives tonal contrast, especially with the first two sections. Think about a jump scare in a horror movie. They work because of what came before it – often silence, or some relative calm or tension. That way, when the jump scare happens, it really hits hard.

One route we can take is to pull the song back to give the listener a chance to catch their breath and, importantly, leave plenty of space for the vocals. A great example of this is Monuments’ Origin of Escape, which creates a huge dip in volume and energy, breaking up the brute-force intro, and the skyscraping chorus.

Here, the drums take the role of lead instrument, but remain fairly held back to not step on the vocalist’s toes. And if this song is instrumental, the same concept would still benefit the listener; you’d maybe want to fill a little space in place of any vocals, though. 

The ambient guitars from the intro have also been brought across so that it continues throughout the verse. As Browne has underscored in his The Power of the Leitmotif course, stealing (or referencing) elements of different sections helps give a song a sense of continuity and flow. It gives the listener something familiar amongst a raft of new information.

 As I want to have the chorus sounding massive, I felt the song would benefit from building gradually up to the peak, rather than being thrown into it, so the second half of the verse idea sees guitar chugs syncopating with the kick drum.

Again, there are also snippets of the main riff sneaking into the fills of the riff to help tie the song together, as well as some new but similarly voiced fills so there is a freshness still coming through.   

Even when the chugs come in, I’m trying to utilise space as much as possible to not overfill the song, and I added in an extra two bars at the end of the loop to punctuate the section and allow the chorus to hit bigger when it drops.

 Verse idea 2 – Drop the dynamics, keep the momentum

If a drastic drop in dynamics doesn’t feel right, we can still bring space into the song, allowing the vocals to take over, without killing the momentum drummed up from the opening riff.

Using another Monuments song as an example, Cardinal Red is great for this. After a sledgehammer to the face for an intro, there is still a clear dip in the dynamics in the verse, but there’s still loads of energy from the drums, even if Mike Maylan isn’t beating the daylights out of them at this point.

This is the concept I’ve played with for our second verse idea. The kick drum is still pretty animated, but more muted cymbals skims a little punch from the section, while I’ve got the bass continuing the main riff for continuity.

Guitar-wise, I felt there needed to be something very different. Firstly, I changed the guitar tone for something more edge-of-breakup so it was fairly clean, but not without grit. The part I’ve gone for is all about adding lightness, but also tension. The aggression of the guitars has eased off, but there is still a sense of something coming around the corner.

I stumbled upon a nice chord that used all the open strings but with the second fret of the G, which just made this massive D5 chord. That note moves up a semitone for the second chord, echoing how the second note of the scale is one semitone from the root, and the first chord then repeats.

I felt a little more movement was needed for the last part of the loop, which is how I landed on a cascading chordal part, moving into a little lick that gave the flavour of the main riff, while foreshadowing the next part.  

As a bonus, I didn’t feel we were quite ready to hurtle into a chorus here, so I’ve built a simple pre-chorus that achieves three things: It acts as a bridge between the verse and chorus in terms of momentum, it establishes a short chord progression – D, G, D# - so that we’re moving away from being anchored solely on the root note, and we are also adding more tension with those D# notes, which the chorus will then release.

Pre-choruses are always more impactful when they are a lot shorter than the sections they transition between. Here, the verse is 16 bars, so the pre-chorus is half that length, providing two loops of the chord progression.

I have, however, put the very last bar, which plays a nice tension building D# note in 6/4 to heighten that sense that something big is about to happen.   

Verse idea 3 – The sub groove

John Browne often leans into a technique he calls a sub groove, where a verse riff sees only the lower notes of a complex riff played. The rest are simply replaced with rests. This is another great way for maintaining continuity from intro to verse and introducing more spaces. Listen to the Monuments tracks Denial and Atlas and hone in on the bass especially to hear this technique in action.

Then, listen to the middle sections of both songs. The pulse created by the sub groove is transferred over to these sections; on Denial it mutates into a slam-your-face-against-a-wall breakdown, and in Atlas it provides a bedrock for a little breathing space, and then some intricate riffwork. This is another great way of doing more with less.

So, buoyed by Browne’s concept (cheers lad) I’ve adopted this approach for our final verse idea. The riff re-introduces the main riff, but eliminates most of the higher notes as the drums hold down a simple but punchy groovy with lots of syncopated cymbal hits.

It’s a really simple idea, but it hits pretty hard and really, the riff had basically been written before I wrote it, we’re just manipulating the main riff and recycling motifs for fills and turnarounds.

Mind you, I did get a little carried away adding in some crunchy guitar layers, which I introduce at the halfway point, along with the ambient guitar layers. These crunchy guitars are playing the same progression, but as octaves and with some cheeky harmonies. This has created, partly by chance if I’m honest, a huge wall of sound that really crescendos and feels like a big chorus is about to hit you in the face.

I hope these three different verse ideas help inspire you, and also take some of the pressure of creation out of songwriting. With this last idea especially, the hard work was cut out completely by simply being clever with what was already there.

Songwriting can be really difficult, so don’t add extra pressure on yourself by thinking that you need to write a killer and wholly original new riff every 16 bars. Less is more. 

Next time, we’ll set the work on writing some choruses.