Song Forms

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12 Bar Blues

The 12-bar blues and its many variants use a three-line form of the I IV V progression that has generated countless hit records. his form is broken up into three 4-bar sections.

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8 Bar Blues

In music, an eight-bar blues is a common blues chord progression. Music writers have described it as "the second most common blues form" being "common to folk, rock, and jazz forms of the blues". It is often notated in 4/4 or 12/8 time with eight bars to the verse. Early examples of eight-bar blues standards include: How Long Blues (Leroy Carr, 1928) , Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out (Bessie Smith, 1929)

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16 Bar Blues

The sixteen-bar blues can be a variation on the standard twelve-bar blues or on the less common eight-bar blues. Sixteen-bar blues is also used commonly in ragtime music.

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32 Bar Form - AABA

The 32-bar form, also known as the AABA song form, American popular song form and the ballad form, is a song structure commonly found in Tin Pan Alley songs and other American popular music, especially in the first half of the 20th century.

As its alternative name AABA implies, this song form consists of four sections: an eight-bar A section; a second eight-bar A section (which may have slight changes from the first A section); an eight-bar B section, often with contrasting harmony or "feel"; and a final eight-bar A section. The core melody line is generally retained in each A section, although variations may be added, particularly for the last A section.

Examples of 32-bar AABA form songs include "Over the Rainbow", "What'll I Do", "Make You Feel My Love", "Blue Skies". Many show tunes that have become jazz standards are 32-bar song forms.

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Basic AABA Song Form

At its core, the basic AABA 32-bar song form consists of four sections, each section being 8 bars in length, totaling 32 bars. Each of these 8-bar sections is assigned a letter name (A or B), based on its melodic and harmonic content. The A sections all share the same melody (possibly with slight variations), and the recurring title lyric typically falls on either the first or last line of each A section. The B section musically and lyrically contrasts the A sections, and may or may not contain the title lyric. The B section may use a different harmony that contrasts with the harmony of the A sections. For example in the song I've Got Rhythm, the A sections are in the key of B^b, but the B section involves a circle of fifths series of dominant seventh chords going from D7 - G7 - C7 - F7. Song form terminology is not standardized, and the B section is also referred to as the middle eight, bridge, or primary bridge. The song form of What'll I Do by Irving Berlin is as follows:

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The 32-bar form was often used in rock in the 1950s and '60s, after which verse-chorus form became more prevalent. Examples include:

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• Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" (1957)
• The Everly Brothers' "All I Have to Do Is Dream" (1958)
• The Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" (1960)
• The Beach Boys' "Surfer Girl" (1963)

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Ballad

Ballads were originally written to accompany dances, and so were composed in couplets with refrains in alternate lines. These refrains would have been sung by the dancers in time with the dance. Most northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables.

The lyrics to songs written in ballad meter can be interchangeable. The following are some examples of songs in ballad meter: Amazing Grace, O Little Town of Bethlehem, House of the Rising Sun, America the Beautiful, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, and The Ballad of Gilligan's Island.

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Blues Ballad

The term blues ballad is used to refer to a specific form of popular music which fused Anglo-American and Afro-American styles from the late 19th century onwards. Early versions combined elements of the European influenced "native American ballad" with the forms of African American music. From the 20th century on it was also used to refer to a slow tempo, often sentimental song in a blues style.

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Blues Ballad Structure & Variations

The blues ballad often uses the Thirty-two-bar form of verse-verse-bridge-verse, in contrast to the 12-bar or 8-bar blues forms.

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Popular Blues Ballads

The first blues ballads tended to deal with active protagonists, often anti-heroes, resisting adversity and authority, often in the context of industrialization. They usually lacked the strong narrative common in European ballads, and emphasized instead individual character. They were often accompanied by banjo and guitar and often followed a standard 12-bar the blues format, with a repeated refrain in the last line of every verse. Blues ballads are usually anonymously authored and were performed by both black and white musicians in the early 20th century. Ballads about anti-heroes include "Wild Bill Jones", "Stagger Lee" and "John Hardy". The most famous blues ballads that deal with heroes in the context of industrialization include those about John Henry and Casey Jones.

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AABA Redefined

Depending upon how you look at it, many songs that technically have more parts than the traditional AABA format, can be defined as having an AABA structure. To do this, many combine the verse and chorus as a single part. If the song has the structure of verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge(middle-8), verse-chorus it can be defined as being an AABA song. Another approach would be to add a letter to the structure, such as C. In that case, the previous song might be defined as ABABCAB.

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Blues Ballads In Other Genres

From the late 19th century the term ballad began to be used for sentimental songs with their origins in the early Tin Pan Alley music industry. As new genres of music, including the blues, began to emerge in the early 20th century the popularity of the genre faded, but the association with sentimentality meant led to this being used as the term for a slow love song from the 1950s onwards.

Today the term is used to describe a song that uses a blues format with a slow tempo, often dealing with themes of love and affection. Examples include songs like B. B. King's "Blues on the Bayou", Fats Domino's "Every night about this time", Percy Mayfield's love song "Please Send Me Someone to Love", and Buddy Johnson's "Since I Fell for You". The blues ballad format is also popular in rock, jazz, country music, such as Janis Joplin "Cry Baby", Jimi Hendrix "Red House", Grand Funk Railroad "Heartbreaker", Jazzy blues singer Charles Brown "Merry Christmas, Baby", "Please Come Home for Christmas", Phoebe Snow "Poetry Man", "San Francisco Bay Blues", country singer Crystal Gayle "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue", and Freddy Fender "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights".

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Rock Song Structure

There really is no definitive formula, but there are a lot of examples of similar song structures. There is definitely a lot of disagreement and confusion on the naming of the different parts of a modern song. The following is a list of some common parts:

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Intro	The intro, if the song has one, can be either related to a part in the song, such as the verse, chorus or middle-8, or it may be completely disconnected. The intro might be a few bars of the main instrumental hook, a few strummed chords, or even a spoken intro. Another common intro trope is the main riff or chorus backing track, but with the drums removed. This allows for a buildup, a big drum fill, and then an exciting resolution when the full drum part kicks in!
Verse	The verse is generally the most creative part of the song. The melody and chord progression tend to stay the same while the lyrics change from verse to verse. In the case of a song that tells a story, verses can be seen as a buildup to a final reveal, much like the acts of a play, or chapters in a book.
Pre-Chorus	Most songs follow a basic structure that involves alternating verses and choruses. But sometimes, you need another song element to split the two up.   It might be for dramatic reasons, breaking up two high-energy sections with a short, slow one to build up the sense of anticipation. It could be for musical reasons, using a few bars to set up for a key change.   But what's for certain is that if you have a few bars after the verse and before the chorus that feel like a transition, that's a pre-chorus.   Not every song needs a pre-chorus. That said, they're a wonderful tool for building interest as you move from your verse to your chorus.   A somewhat common use is where the verse is fast-paced, but slows down during the pre-chorus. Simultaneously, the wall of sound behind the vocals start to build. It accumulates, then drops out for the last lines of the pre-chorus, only to return dramatically for the chorus.
Chorus/Refrain	This tends to be the part of the song that the listener remembers. It is triumphant, it is catchy. This is often where the main hook is at.   Choruses usually convey the main message or theme of the song.   Think of a song like a play: parts of the song like the intro and verse deal with exposition and moving action. But the chorus is an opportunity for the speaker to have an aside with the audience and tell them how they really feel. A good chorus gets across the feeling that the song is supposed to get across, both through lyrics and music.   Because it's the central idea of the song, choruses tend to repeat as well.   Sometimes, the verse or bridge in between can help paint the chorus in a new light each time it comes up.   The chorus can also sometimes be referred to as the refrain.
Post-Chorus	Post-choruses can be harder to spot than their pre-chorus cousins. Often, post-choruses are filled with nonsense syllables that are meant to get stuck in your head. A lot of songs also have purely musical post-choruses after their chorus before they get into the next verse.
Bridge	The bridge of a song connects two parts that are distinct from each other. A bridge is really any section that is difficult to classify in a different category. In general, the bridge makes a one-time appearance within a song, usually anywhere from 50% to 75% of the way through. A bridge can be in many forms and go by many different names.   Solo Any non-standard, non-repeating piece of music, especially with a focus on one instrument, can be a solo.   Interlude Interludes are like very small solos that transition between sections of songs. They're like extremely short bridges, though they might repeat.   Middle 8 Middle 8s are a specific type of bridge that usually serves as a turning point in the story. You'll usually find a key change during or after a Middle 8 because it represents the change happening in the song's narrative. The middle 8 is not necessarily in the middle and it is not necessarily eight bars long.   Like a bridge, a Middle 8 can have a different rhythm, melody, and accompaniment than the verse, chorus, or any other part off the song. But what really dinstinguishes Middle 8s is that a Middle 8 tends to connect one chorus to another, whereas a bridge doesn't necessarily do that.
Outro	The outro is the ending of the song. It can be its own new musical idea, but it's most often just a bombastic version of the chorus. It usually brings back other tags or hooks from earlier in the song, while also including elements not heard before to bring everything home.   In the old days, songs often faded out while the band played on.

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Some Examples of Song Structure

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