Writing Instrumental Guitar Music, Let's Share Pointers Options

[Ben Higgins]

How does one go about writing instrumental guitar music ? It is, in my opinion, much harder than writing songs with lyrics. Once you've come up with some riffs and an arrangement you know that vocals are going to be going over the top of those riffs.

Of course, you can write riff based instrumentals if you're a full band. Orion by Metallica, for example. Losfer Words by Iron Maiden. For some reason, we don't expect these tracks to have lead guitar melodies in place of the vocals, we just accept them for being riff based extravaganzas. And we love them the way they are. Why do you think that is ? Why do we expect riff based instrumentals from bands but different kinds of instrumentals from players like Satch, Vai etc ?

As Joe Satriani has said plenty of times, his approach was to treat writing guitar melodies like they were vocal lines themselves. I think this is perhaps the best way to write instrumentals that are lead guitar orientated.

So if you start off with a riff that repeats 4 times, for example, you would then want to come up with a melody line. Remember that this is taking the place of a vocal hook so the simpler the better. We can add more later. If it were me I'd probably avoid just following the root notes of the chords and avoid changing only when the chords change. If you have a repeating chord progression then one thing you can do to provide interest is to have a contrast with when your melody changes notes and when the chords change. Sometimes it can be the same time but sometimes you might want to let a note hang as the chords change. Or shift the melody note before the chord change. You get the idea.

Ok, now you might want to have 2 contrasting melody lines to work with. You can then use the structure of melody 1, melody 2, melody 1, melody 2 to cover your 4 riff repetitions. This is one of the most common ways of doing it. Now, to take a leaf out of Satch's book, let's create more variation by altering the end of the very last melody. So it would look something like this:

Melody 1, Melody 2, Melody 1, Melody 3.

By taking the 2nd rep of Melody 2 and altering it, we create a melody that hasn't been heard until that point. Having a different melody at the end of a verse serves to prepare us to move to somewhere else, be it a bridge or a chorus.

I'm just getting us started on the subject of writing instrumental music and I know there will be much more advice from the other guys here at GMC so please do feel free to offer any other suggestions and ideas that can help people write better instrumentals.

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