How to Reverse Engineer a Song, and Why You’d Do That

If you want to be the best, it sometimes requires you to pull the best songs apart to see the parts separately. That’s reverse engineering.

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Songwriter at pianoReverse engineering means to take a finished product and break it down to its constituent parts. Usually it’s done to try to figure out what the designer(s) did in the first place to create the product.

Anyone who makes anything at all usually engages in a bit of reverse engineering at some point. In the world of technology, those who work to understand devices such as an iPhone might do some reverse engineering to understand its parts and software.

In music, any songwriter that’s serious about becoming better needs to reverse engineer successful songs to figure out what that writer did to make the song sound so good — to “get under the hood”, so to speak.

There are differences, however, between reverse engineering a song and doing the same thing to a computer device. The main difference is that each musical element loses some of its potency when considered apart from the other musical elements with which it partners.

In other words, in a bid to understand why a song’s climactic moment is so effective, for example, you’ll isolate the melody from everything else, but in so doing lose some of the melody’s power. You notice that the climactic moment in the melody is made even more effective by the chord underneath it, the instrumental backing of the moment, and the chords that support it.

In that sense, you might say that it makes reverse engineering, as a musical activity, all the more important. That’s because by pulling the melody out and experiencing it on its own, you then discover how important the chord of the moment is to the success of the melody.

In that regard, here are some ideas for how to reverse engineer a song, to learn from it:

  1. Choose a song that you love, and that seems to be generally regarded by other musicians as a great song. It might be useful to browse through The Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” to get ideas.
  2. Sing the melody unaccompanied. Get a feel for its general shape and rhythm, especially as it relates to the various parts of the song (verse, pre-chorus, chorus, etc.)
  3. Write down and play the chord progression. Do this without reference to the melody. Try changing the way the chords are played in the song: maybe try a different time signature, a different harmonic rhythm (i.e., how long you hold each chord before moving on), and different backing rhythm.
  4. Write down and recite the lyric. Read the lyric melodramatically, with your voice moving up and down, and try to ignore the melody to which it was originally paired. What melodic shapes pop into your mind as you read the lyric this way?
  5. Find your favourite moments in the song, and determine precisely what’s going on at those times. Consider all the components of the song, and try to identify how melody, chords, lyric and instrumentation all combine to produce that wonderful moment.

Writing successful songs depends in large part on how you understand your favourite music. It starts with basic curiosity, and then on how much you really understand what makes music successful.

I firmly believe that there is no one who is doing well in this business that doesn’t spend a good deal of time asking themselves why this or that song is so good. Reverse engineering them can help you identify the source of that success, and makes it possible to apply the ideas to your own music.

______________Gary Ewer

Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.

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