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A good song has a lot to do with the emotion it creates within the heart of the listener. Songs that don’t generate feelings have no way to entice listeners to return to listen again, so as a songwriter you want to build up emotional energy in a way that leaves the listener feeling satisfied, and feeling like they want to experience the song again.
A climactic moment in a song is a spot where the listener experiences an emotional high, after which the musical energy dissipates. Usually, this climactic moment happens once within a verse-chorus cycle, so climactic moments usually return two or three times over the length of a song.
There are several different ways that emotions are generated in music. To create a climactic moment, it often takes the convergence of two or more of these ways. A climactic moment in a ballad might be very subtle, only a little more exciting than the rest of the song, so often we’re talking about subtleties when we’re talking about climactic moments.
If you’re wondering if your song is generating the kind of emotional response in a listener that it could or should be, it may be missing a crucially important climactic moment. Here are some things to think about:
- Think about the instrumental build-up. A song’s verse will often use a scaled-back approach to instrumentation, and then give you its fullest instrumentation in the chorus. Overall, this means that when you look at the verse and chorus together, you’ll see a build-up, where some moment in the chorus sounds more exciting than any of the other previous moments.
- Think about general dynamic level. This typically goes hand-in-hand with instrumentation: you want to have the chorus be the loudest part of your song. As instrumentation builds, music almost naturally gets louder. Find a spot in your chorus where the fullest instrumentation happens, and that’s probably where the loudest part should be.
- Think about your use of chord progressions. As a progression moves from one chord to the next, you start to get the feeling of building musical energy (tension) as you can hear the conclusion of that progression getting closer (release). Tension and release moments happen more often than climactic moments, but there’s usually one release moment with regard to chord progressions that’s more important than the others. And again, it’s often near the end of the chorus. In songs that don’t use a chorus, it’s usually near the end of the verse.
- Think about the shape of your melody. Verse melodies usually sit lower in the voice, moving higher as the chorus approaches. The chorus will then give your audience the highest notes of the song. The moment of the highest melodic note is often the climactic moment, and you’ll either hear that at the very start of a chorus (Like Katy Perry’s “Firework”), or something later, toward the end of the chorus.
- Think about your lyric. Verse lyrics typically tell us what’s happening within a song, and chorus lyrics tell us how the singer feels about what they’ve just sung about. So the chorus is where you’ll hear the height of emotion within the song.
As I’ve mentioned, a climactic moment usually means that two or more of these possible ways of generating emotion are working together, each one experiencing its high point at the same time.
Definitely, the notion of the climactic moment is something that you don’t need to analyze to hard to wonder if it’s happening in your song. Without a climactic moment, a song often feels shapeless or mundane: it’s noticeable.
Even quiet ballads need some sort of climactic moment, so subtlety is an important part of getting this quality to work well. You can use that five-point list above as a troubleshooting guide for your next song. Not every song needs to see all five of those elements in order to work (you might have written an instrumental, so lyrics won’t figure in your analysis), but try to identify one spot in your song where you want emotional energy to be at its peak.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.
Songwriters are very familiar with the chorus hook, but there are other kinds to experiment with, and you will want to discover the power of layering various kinds of hooks in the same song. “Hooks and Riffs: How They Grab Attention, Make Songs Memorable, and Build Your Fan Base“ shows you how it’s done.