The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Par t 3:Tunes

Let’s look at a song that has a verse, a chorus, a verse, and another chorus. The

form of this song would look like this:

ABAB

Note that when the verse repeats, we don’t give it a new letter; it keeps the “A”

designation—even if the lyrics change. Same thing with the chorus; the B sec-

tion is always B, no matter how many times it repeats.

Now let’s look at a song that has two verses, a chorus, and a final verse. The

form of this song looks like this:

AABA

Things get more interesting when you add a bridge to the mix. Consider a song

with two verses, a chorus, a bridge, and a final chorus:

AABCB

Or how about a song with two verses, a chorus, another verse, a bridge, a final

verse, and a final chorus:

AABACAB

It’s not really that hard to follow, once you know what letters stand for what.

Incidentally, some songs are all A. This is fairly common in folk music, where

you have one melodic phrase repeated over and over, each time with a different

set of lyrics. Think of “If I Had a Hammer,” or “Where Have All the Flowers

Gone?” as good examples. Neither song has a chorus, per se; they’re all verses,

and lots of them.

Head Cases

There’s a unique musical form associated with jazz music, and with some rock-

and-roll “jam” bands. This form, called the head arrangement,is ideally suited

for extended improvisation.

In this type of music you play the “head”—the main melody, or sometimes both

verse and chorus—relatively straight, and then repeat those chord progressions

for a series of instrumental solos. (Jazz musicians call this “soloing over the

changes.”) The head is then repeated, straight after the soloists blow themselves

out.

In terms of form, this type of tune might look like this:

A (head) A (solos) A (head repeat)

If a more complex song (complete with both verse and chorus) is used as the

head, the form might look something like this:

ABA (head) ABA (solos) ABA (head repeat)

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When you have

variations of a sin-

gle section like this,

you can label each

instance of the section by

a number after the letter, as

in A1, A2, A3, and so on.

Tip