So, repetition. Why, why, why repetition? Well, we all know, or we, or, or we think we know that repetition has a, has a fantastic place in songwriting normally in the chorus, we, we, we endlessly talk about the contrast between the verse and the chorus.
 I like to, to discuss it or look at it like the, the chorus is the emotional heart of the song. the verse, the narrative is the head. I think it’s Ray Charles or some very, very, very, very  beautiful, songwriter, said, bring the gospel  to the chorus  and the soul to the verse.
Not that that kings makes any sense at all. I knew what he meant.  He meant heart for the chorus,  head for the verse. So, we tend to look at the repetition in the chorus as being, as being what we work with. we all know that therein lies the hook. we’ve looked, or maybe not here, we haven’t, but, maybe it’s something, that I will do  in one of the forthcoming masterclasses is the idea of song title as just chorus.
So that’s boiling it down to, to a very basic repetition. We, we could talk about, Sunday Bloody Sunday U2.  It seems to me that  the shorter the chorus, the bigger the hit, really, with or without you. Another great one from you two. The Stereophonics’ biggest hit record in America was, have a nice day title, simply repeated, back to classics from the eighties. You spin me right round baby, right round like a record.
Great titles make great choruses,  and you can, should you wish, repeat  that one line as a chorus. but what I wanna look at today is some techniques that we can use  on individual word repetitions in verses and choruses. we, we, we know about melodic repetition in a verse. you know, if you’re telling a narrative in a verse, then you, then you don’t rely on the repetition of a single word or a line like a chorus  ego.
You would never be able to tell  the story. You would never be able to set the scene if you are limiting yourself to, to, to, a sense of repetition like you do in a chorus. So in verse, we tend to use melody as repetition, which is great. And I like to think of the word symmetry. I love that word symmetry. And it’s more to me about the metering, the feel  of the rhythm of the words that should somehow match. So maybe the feel of the words in verse in line one and line three match, and the feel of the, the words in line two and line four match maybe the feel of the, the words in line one, two, and four match, as Martin points out, sometimes the, the happy birthday effect where the third line speeds up the metering, da, da, da.
So verses traditionally aren’t used for repetition. we have in the chat, six participants raise their hand. Ah, no, I thought that might have been a problem, but no problem. We’re doing well.
 If you do have any problems, please give some sort of sign. I dunno what that may be. so I’m gonna pick quickly pop over now to my PowerPoint, because these, these are quite long term names. We’re gonna look at, anaphora, epiphora, antanaclasis, epizeuxis and anadiplosis. They all sound like strange film stars.
They all, all sound like they begin with Anna. They’re actually repetition techniques that are used in contemporary and old scale. Â Sounds so nerdy. I love it. I saw that particular one. Okay, but no, seriously, they, they are used to great effect. why would you wish to repeat sort of one, one word at the start of every verse that is the same? There’s a, there’s a great sense of rhythm when it’s the same word. It really makes when you come back from the end of a line to the start of the next line, a familiarity.
It’s sounds easy to do, but it’s choosing the right word. It’s choosing the line that follows it. Â It’s choosing whether to use the repetition at the start of the, line, which is phora, which is where you would choose to use the, the one word or phrase, a short phrase to, open your, your first line. And you use the same phrase to go through each line and you continue it. Â So let me, share, yeah, Bowie modern love does that We will be using an example of Bowie’s, song in our first, technique.
So without a, do, let me share my screen with you. So you can actually start to soak in these very long words.  It would be to your advantage if you could kind of make a note, possibly a screenshot of these words and what they do,  because there is a lesson or a task as, as usual at the end of this masterclass.  And that is, I want you to go away and write a song,  any song, any genre,  but I want you to use a minimum of three of these techniques  in the song.
it’s not hard, but getting it, getting it to sound really good  is the secret. It’s very easy to stick any word at the start of your, of your line if we’re gonna use anaphora. But it’s getting the right word, the right word, the word that has a right rhythm,  the word, the right word that sets up the rest of the line.
It’s not always, a, a, a, an easy ask to pick what particular one word would set up four lines. Or in the case of our first example, we’ll go to probably every single line of the verse. So let me start. And you can, you can bamboozle yourself with the wordiness and the sheer, the sheer. let’s go up,  poof,  at that intellectual prowess, you’ll be learning phora  the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of successive lines,  epi forer or EPIs extraphy as it’s sometimes called.
But I like to keep the forer at the end. So you realize that is the repetition of a word or a phrase at the end of successive lines. Â These kind of things do work in choruses, and you’ll see that a lot of artists mix them up, which is what I want you to spot.
So I’m not gonna always  point out what a particular artist is doing. We may well be looking at anaphora, but that particular artist may well have used a couple of other techniques in the songwriting. So we have to reiterate one and phora, that’s probably the most common, which is the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of every single line.  You may think, oh, this makes my lyric writing easy, but it doesn’t because  what does that line, represent?
How does that line set up or that phrase rather set up the, the successive rest of the line? And how can you then continue the narrative as you move to line two, opening up with that same phrase or same word, how do you get off? How do you get off the page? How do you come back to it? Phora repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive lines. there is, there is a couple on here that I’m, that I’m gonna drop in as we go through Simpl, is the use of both together.
 So you start, this sounds very complex, but it’s actually very doable. It’s all about the choice of the right word. So simpl is actually the use of both anaphora and phora together. So you open  your first line with either one word  and you end it with a phrase.  And, you do the same thing simultaneously in the lines two and three and four.
 And the story tends to, change with the lines that are in between those two. It’s a sort of intellectual sandwich, I guess sounds a bit odd. epi, that is not the summoning of Thor’s hammer.  It is actually probably the most joyous one, and the one that is used in pop  the most, it may sound like a Greek God or a,  or some sort of historical, weird place, but it’s the repetition of a single word twice or more.
It’s used a lot in, in pop and rock. Â It has that kind of, it’s the technique really where the word sounds like what it is. It’s actually used really, it kind of, Â kind of finds its own, I guess, in post choruses or pre-chorus, where I guess the idea could be to take one particular word out of your chorus and use it to great effect by repetition, in a post chorus setting.
 Or as we will look at an example with nirvana, how you can use it to set up your chorus.  It’s, these techniques are not exclusive to pop. They work from, from the prog rock of Genesis to the, to the Seattle grunge of Nirvana to the empowerment pop of Katy Perry, to the bloody alt fantastic pop of my, of my David Bowie to some of the biggest pop songs ever.
