Okay? The song intros, Â what do I mean by a song intro. Â I’m talking about, the kind of intro, the, the minute you hear it, you recognize the song. Â Okay, so how many, how many of us, if I asked you to, to talk me through a song arrangement of, of a particular song, A song you’ve heard on the radio, or a song you’ve written yourself, Â most people, come back with?
Yeah, it’s a first pre chorus, chorus, possibly verse pre chorus, chorus again, and we have a bridge  and then two choruses out. Great. The standard pop, arrangement’s, fantastic.  But, what you’re missing is no introduction.  And this was pointed out to me by, a guy called Rob Dickens, who’s actually been knighted for his services to the music industry. He’s used to be, head of Warner Records, chairman of Warner Records for, for 30 years.
He signed everyone from Madonna to Prince to blah, blah, blah. But he also teaches, and he said, unbelievably, Paul, he said, Â I did a quiz on intros and nobody understood what I was talking about. The power of a song introduction, Â it’s one of the most important elements of a piece of music. It can raise a good track to a great one and a great one to a sublime one. Â Think about different places. When you hear that first 15 seconds of a song, it’s not the vocal. It’s not just the tune.
A proper, a  proper, worked out introduction is worth its weight in gold.  Wherever you are, whenever you hear it, it takes you back to your first girlfriend, boyfriend wedding, a great film being young. Whatever they, they, it’s what grabs you. It, it’s what pulls you into a song. It makes you stop what you’re doing and engage.  Okay?  So how do we write these intros? What are they? so, so let’s, let’s work out what they’re not.
So, coming straight in with the vocal sometimes works, Â but if you wanna come straight in with the vocal, it has to have a real sense of urgency or an incredibly strong hook line.
If you’re gonna come banging straight in, you’ve gotta have energy, you’ve gotta have a message, you’ve gotta have a beautiful vocal tone. You gotta have a great story, a  great first line, something like that. Most of us, when we write songs, like to ease our way into the songs. So what I’m talking about in an intro is not simply what a lot of us do.
We’ve got a song. If you can hear this guitar possibly, you can, I hope you can. But if it’s a four call, we just kind of,  Okay. So a lot of us treat that as an intro. And I do  obviously as a lot of, you know, give a lot of song feedback to some of your great songs. And I, I think on, on the whole, the, the, the, songwriting academy, writers, that is you.
When I hear these songs that are, are submitted, they are getting better and better. some of them are excellent,  some of them have work to do, but on the whole,  they’re all getting there. But the point is, a lot of you start songs like this. You just go round a few  rounds of your verse chords,  nothing, no hook, line, nothing, and bang, you come in with your vocal.
Now, to me, that’s a waste of 15 seconds.  Okay? A good intro takes away that dead space,  rather than just repeating the verse chords,  it takes also repeating the verse. Chords takes away the element of the surprise  when the intro riff or lead line drops, and you drop into your verse, okay? The intro can also take the listener on a journey.  It prepares you for takeoff,  it leads you think of rebel, rebel David be, which will play in a music when that intro kicks in,  that riff continues.
So that’s one of the, one of the type of intro riffs that doesn’t drop away, but that continues through the song, okay? A lot of intro riffs start, and then they stop. The effectiveness of this is it creates a beautiful drop for the vocals to come in. So, a good, a good intro, you know, something that’s up and, you know, It’s  one of my own, which we’ll look at. It’s a big, a big song, big piano intro, but when it drops away, it creates a beautiful hole for the first line of the vocal to come in, rather than just vamping on a c chord and then coming in with the vocal.
So, what I want you to try and, and glean from the videos we’ll show, and things that I’ll talk about, is to deliberately work at that first eight or 16 bars of your song. Now, I know this goes against a lot of the things we’ve, we’ve, we’ve talked about the Songwriter Academy, especially with Spotify, being such an important medium  is to get straight in quickly.
But I want you to forget that for this week, I want you to really  take eight or 16 bars of your song,  copy it back to the start,  and work on a genuinely proper introduction. Okay? This space allows a massive hook that can sit outside of your Chorus hook, and you can introduce it immediately. It grabs people right from the off.
Interestingly, doing the, the kind of research for this, I’ve realized how much I absolutely enjoy writing introductions. To me, it’s the,  probably is a track writer  a little more than a lyric writer, although I do both, obviously. But the more fun I can have, texture and layering, bringing in instruments before the vocal arrives, it’s a challenge, okay? It’s all about creating familiarity through a hook line that is not the chorus, that is not the vocal  familiarity, both for the song and also for the riff itself.
How many Rolling Stones riffs  for, you know, do you recognize, which starts with those?  They’re called Keith Riches, the Master of the Riff, and basically every Rolling Stones song started with that kind of riff.  Another great thing it can do, if you use this correctly, it can foreshadow the vocal melody. So by this, if you’re writing a lead line riff or a, or a, a short  stabby riff, something like that, well, I’ll come to the, the, the differences between the two in a little while.
 You can take your verse melody  and rework it.  You can take the timing of your verse, melody,  the,  which is a song of mine, B movie, which we’ll also look at in a little bit.  But take the vocal lead line of your verse, the one,  not the notes, but use the timing, put them to different notes. Write a new motif  that’s called foreshadowing.
 It kind of  suggests to the listener  what may come next.  A good idea as well with this is also to, to use your, your chorus melody  as the, as as a, a launch pad for the lead line in your introduction. I mean, how many of us are familiar with, you know,  My keyboard skills are very shaky.
Lockdown has not seen me practicing,  but that is actually, was claimed to have been written by Roy Batam, the keyboard player of Bruce Springsteen,  who claims when Springsteen came into the studio and played in the song,  he was actually working on a synth sound,  a kind of  oriental sound that reflected Springsteen’s lyrics of  off to fight the Yellow Man, which was not Springsteen being racist, it was Springsteen being very down on the American viewpoint  of the Vietnamese.
 But Roy Batan heard Springsteen sing the ball under USAN. I don’t think at that time, Springsteen had even got round to calling it born in the USA. He had a plethora of other lyrics. in fact, he was writing Born in the USA at the same time as he was writing a four track albwhich is actually my favorite album of his Nevada, of Beautiful Tales of Murder ballads.
But he got this huge song, what he thought was huge, so he thought he’d go and play at the E Street band. So, Roy Bean picks up the chorus melody  and plays it on the synth sound. He’s been working on this sort of almost reedy, thing, and it becomes iconic.  You know, you don’t need, you, you can go round that riff forever and ever. so that’s a, a great idea is to concentrate on a, a short, element of your, of your vocal in the chorus.
Move it to the start of your song.  Okay? this brings us an interesting thing as well, which we will look at the difference between a lead line, a a  a me melodic lead line,
