These are your essentials when you’re writing songs,  the key,  otherwise known as the pitch tempo,  which BPM stands for beats per minute. And that’s the speed at which the songs are played.  The form, how you structure your form from intro to chorus, to to bridge, and then the lyrics, all the songwriters and how they write their lyrics, the duration, that’s how long your song plays for  the instrumentation.
That’s self-explanatory. What instruments were used to create this music. Â And then the credits, Â because a lot of people just kind of, you know, that’s what I like about Spotify, is that you can go to the credits and you can actually see who the songwriters are and who the producers are. ’cause nowadays there’s so many collaborations.
I want to know who these people are so that I can do some extra research to find out more information about them.  So  that being said, now,  if you are gonna pick a song  and you want to deconstruct it so that you can see what it’s made out of, let’s start, let’s take a look at,  This is  Bruno Mars, right?
And I picked this song Grenade because  it was released  as like a regular record. pop record did very, very well. But then after it did well,  they went and they performed it acoustically. And there was something that Martin had said when we were, back on one of these chats almost a year ago.  And he was telling me that it’s important to all the songwriters to understand that when you put a record together, when you put a song together, it’s great with all the production, but at its core, you should be able to perform this song with minimal music, like just a piano and a voice, or just a guitar and a voice.
So this way, you know that your songwriting skills are solid and that they’re, that they’re good. So  what I found interesting about this is we’re gonna do it backwards so that you guys can hear  and see the difference, right?
 So,  here we go.  Now when I say  you need to know the, the pitch and the key of the song,  this is a DJ app, right? I literally take a song from my desktop and I drop it in here. And when I drop it in, what does it tell me? Tells me that the tempo right here, it’s 98 beats per minute.  And it also tells me up here it says the key is F but I know the song is in minor.
So it’s, D minor. Â this is the record, Bruno Mars the Acoustic.
 So  a few, there’s a lot of things to point out.
 First of all, can we all just agree that this young kid, man, Peter Hernandez, AKA Bruno Mars, I’ve seen these guys live.
This guy’s vocal range is just, it’s an uncharted territory. His top end of his vocal is just so incredible. So listening as a listener, he inspires me. I listen to this stuff and I try to like, not like  analyze it. But  over the years, I’ve learned, you know, as I said earlier, to, to stop trying to analyze and listen as a, just a regular listener.
Now I’ve got this ability where I can kind of do it all at the same time. So  the first thing that you notice about this record  is  the pitch, right? So this is  D minor, right?  But the tempo for this version of this acoustic version is 98 beats per minute. Where the original, I think is, let’s see, I dropped the original in
it’s at one 10.5. So let’s just assume that everybody knows that record, that everybody’s heard it. So when you get to this acoustic version, which I think came afterwards, the beats per minute 98, the key  is D minor.
So  knowing this as the song is playing, I can, the first thing that jumps out, just like the rest of you, I’m reading the, the chat, the,  that cello and the piano are just so beautifully performed and they pull you into this song that you kind of forget that it’s, it’s duration is over four minutes. Most songs today are between three 15 and three 30, I think. But this one, it pushes four minutes because it’s a little slower.
But artistically, you don’t notice that because it’s just so incredible, right? So  you hear piano, you hear a string section, you definitely hear some background vocals, and I think this sounds like acoustic guitar or maybe a harp or something very lightly playing. So that’s the instrumentation. Now, this is what I was talking about when it comes to form, and this is the part where the song hacking section, of the title of this, this webinar comes in handy because when you’re constructing your own song, it could be daunting.
You’ve got your notebook out or however it is that you start writing and you’re looking at that blank page and it’s like, oh, where do I start? What do I do? Do I have an idea? I don’t know how, how can I do this? Well,  one way is you look at this song, there’s an eight bar intro. Now looking at my screen, I think you guys can see this here. That’s this section here.  It’s an eight bar intro, and it, it has a lot of swells and reverse pianos. But once we begin,  we’re here, we are into  an eight bar verse.
 Now  I think you can see I just have to move my little zoom stuff,  this whole section here, as the song is playing in my software, I’ll go through  and  if I turn this volume down so he can  kind of carry the conversation, So this is verse one. So right here, I’ll start labelling this song or writing down on a piece of paper zero eight.
That means eight bars, meaning that a bar is 1, 2, 3, 4,  that’s one bar.  So  that’s eight bars right there.  Now we’re into a different section of the song. I like to call this part of it the B section. it doesn’t matter what your terminology is, whatever works for you. some people would call this a pre-course, but sometimes I run into songs that have a b section and a pre-course.
So I’ll use a b section. The music changes, the melody changes a little bit. So, so here we have this section, and as it’s playing, I’m grabbing these little yellow markers and I’m just dropping in them  randomly. So I know that delineates a set eight bar section. So that’s the end of that. Now, I think there’s only really  a couple of chords here, right?
 There’s a little latency from when I hit these keys. I’m sorry,  there’s two chords, D minor and an A. and when you get to the end of this, there’s, I  think there’s a B flat chord.  Then I’d catch a grenade for you.
So the point is, is there’s not a lot of chords in this. And this song is really driven by the melody  and the performance of the singer. So  I go through, I start writing as this is going slow. I’ll write verse one B, section one, eight bar chorus one.
 And then they have what I call a turn where it’s just a little, you know, it’s just a little piano interlude for four bars before the form repeats again. So then you have the verse two, which is eight bars.
You have an eight bar B section, another eight bar chorus, Â another post chorus that comes in at six bars. Now after this six bar post chorus, instead of going to the little turn, he takes it to the bridge. Okay, something I want to point out here that’s so beautiful about this arrangement.
The other thing that I do is I’ll go online. I think I usually go to like az lyrics.com or something like that. and I’ll grab the lyrics to whatever song I’m using. And in my software here on the left side of the screen, I drop in the lyrics to the song so I can see it. And then as I figure out the chords, some people don’t know exactly what all the chord structures are in some of these songs, and that’s fine.
You know, you don’t need to know that I do it. So if I wanna pick something apart, you know, that’s the musicality side for, for my craft. If I wanna pick something apart, I can. And what I noticed about the bridge to this song in this acoustic version compared to the commercial release, the regular radio version, right here you can see this is the bridge. I just highlighted it. Â So they’re doing this.
 And, and on the albon the commercial radio one, it goes back  to  back to the A, right? But in this version, what they did that was beautiful is they started on the G minor, which is the four,  and went to that very colorful,  then they went to this  And e-flat major nine chord.
And  it’s just so nice how they took the same melody and re harmonized the chords around because the song is that beautiful. And you wouldn’t really catch this if you didn’t take a second to kind  of like deconstruct what they were doing.
So you can see the difference between  the two different versions. Just one has a different interpolation, but they’re both cool. They both serve a different purpose. However, at the core of it,  the basic melody and the song is a great song.
The structure is still the same, Â even though the bridge is eight bars. It’s how you approach the chord structure within that eight. Â And the melody’s still the same. That’s how they kind of change the whole emotion of it, because the tempo’s slower. So you really can grab onto what he’s doing vocally. That’s like, it’s really smart how they did this version. I’m a huge fan, I’m just saying it’s just really smart. Now the other thing you might notice in my session is …..
