1. Happy Tuesday! I’m very glad to be with you today.

a. You can set your guitars down beside you for now.
b. Today, we’re going to write the second verse to our class song, and then learn
what a bridge is and how to write one.

2. Let’s take a look back at the verse and chorus we wrote last week.
a. Sing through it
b. The next step is to write another verse. We’re now bound by the rhythmic and
rhyming schemes we set up in the first on. So let’s think of a sentence with the
same number of syllables as our first line.
c. Alright, now we need to rhyme it.
d. Let’s repeat this process to finish out the verse.
e. Great! Now we repeat the chorus, and we’re almost done.

3. There’s one more essential piece of a song’s structure we have to talk about. It’s called
the BRIDGE.
a. A verse is the same music with different lyrics
b. A chorus is the same music with the same lyrics
c. The Bridge is DIFFERENT music, DIFFERENT lyrics. It appears often in place of
a third verse.

4. You know what time it is. It’s Taylor Swift time.

a. “Out of the Woods” has a real iconic bridge
b. Stand when you hear a verse, sit when you hear the chorus, and yell “Bridge”
when you hear the bridge.
c. Let’s listen to another one, this one from Yellowcard: Ocean Avenue
d. Repeat kinesthetics
e. If we only have time for one we’ll do Yellowcard
f. A bridge can be achieved through contrasting lyrics and melodies, but some
bridges are only different from the precious verses in that they’re instrumentals.
The point is to create contrast-- something interesting and new for the listener.

5. So basically, we need to stay in the same key and the same -general lyrical zone-
thematically, but we can essentially do whatever we want that’s appropriate for school.
We can even change the rhyme scheme.
a. So, who’s got a line locked and loaded, ready to start us off?
b. Alright, let’s rhyme it. What rhymes with ___?
c. We have a SLANT rhyme-- a word that ALMOST rhymes, but not quite, so it
sounds good in the song but isn’t an actual, pure rhyme.
d. Let’s continue this storyline.
e. Maybe this would be a good time for a brief instrumental.
f. Then we crescendo (get louder) into the last chorus)
6. Awesome job today! All that’s left for us to complete the song is to assign chords to the
Bridge and pick a strumming pattern.
a. By the end of class, check in with me about your independent song progress.
You should have started brainstorming ideas, and tomorrow you’ll be tasked with
writing your first verse.