Aabb system

There is nothing more important than having structure to your song. The AABB System might have 100 different names, but this is the way I have found best to teach people. Working on Fiverr and helping countless other people write songs, getting their lyrics and seeing enough to understand, this is the biggest issue with new writers. Understand the AABB System, and you will have all you need to start practicing correctly.

Traditionally in country music you will see the basic or standard songs looking as follows.

Intro
Verse 1
PreChorus
Chorus
Verse2
PreChorus
Chorus
Bridge or Solo
Chorus
Outro

There are a ton of variations. You don’t always need a pre chorus, you can do a long verse one with a shorter second verse or visa versa. Some songs have both a bridge and solo, some neither. So there is not a set of rules. In fact, look at Empty Glass by Gary Stewart. Great song, but there is a verse and chorus. He just goes back and fourth. No rules. But, there are some unwritten rules, that will help you get a grip on what you need to be aware of when writing. Let’s look at that now.

The AABB System is super simple once you understand how it works, and super effective when you understand how to use it. So, in this short explanation I plan to explain both.

AABB is simply the Rhyme Scheme. What that means is…

 “I found you looking out the window
Knowing there was no where left to go
I don’t think I can win the fight this time
No matter what, Ill always call you mine”

 In the verse above we find 4 lines. The rhymes fall on “Window” “Go” “Time” and “Mine” as depicted below.

“I found you looking out the window
Knowing there was no where left to go
I don’t think I can win the fight this time
No matter what, Ill always call you mine”

 Window and Go rhyme, and Time and Mine rhyme. So that should look like this…

 “I found you looking out the window
Knowing there was no where left to go
I don’t think I can win the fight this time
No matter what, Ill always call you mine”

Window is our first word in the rhyme scheme. It will be called “A”. Go is our second word in the rhyme scheme and since it rhymes with Window, it will be in that rhyme family, so it will also be called “A”. So far we have “AA” Time is 3rd and Mine is 4th. But they do not belong in the previous rhyme family, because they don’t rhyme with Window or Go, but they do rhyme with each other, so they will be “B” and “B”. Making the verses rhyme scheme AABB.

 You can have an AABB scheme, or an ABAB scheme, or ABCB… I will put a few examples below.

AABB                                                   ABAB                                                   ABCB

I will always love you                          I will always love you                          I will always love you

Baby, oh, its true                                Were meant to be                              Were meant to be

Were Meant to be                              Baby, Oh, Its true                                It will always be us

Baby Youll see                                     Baby, Youll see                                    Baby, youll see

This can sometimes get complicated however. When a song uses mid sentence rhyming. For example

In this time, youre mine

It will always be, you and me

The team we make, can never break

We are so strong, it cant be wrong.

This is an AABBCCDD, and it is so, because we want to represent the mid line rhymes, to keep the structure of the song tight, and symmetric. Another Example of a possible spin off would be, and is just another way of writing it, but is formably correct would be…

In this time,
youre mine
It will always be,
you and me
The team we make,
can never break
We are so strong,
it cant be wrong.

 That would also be correct.

 Now, the reason I showed it the first way is because It might be written together to frame how to sing the song, “in this time, you’re mine” might be all on the same chord, or in the same note, etc. There are many reasons to write it like the first example. Also, You might only experience the double rhyme in only one line, as follows

 In this time, babe were here
It will always be, you and me
The team we are, can never break
Its in stone, its history.

The Above Example would be an A(BB)CB, with the ( ) showing they belong to the same line.

Why is this important?

 When you have a song that has a V1 (first verse) V2 V3, Pre choruses and choruses, especially in pre choruses where the lyrics change, you want uniformity, unless youre specifically going about it on purpose to be different with a reason behind it. For instance, you can visually see the issues with the chart below

V1 – AABB
PC1 – ABAB
CH1 – ABCB
V2 – AAAA
PC2 – ABCA
CH2 – ABCB
V3 – A(BB)C(AB)

This is a mess. Here are the verse stacked.

V1 – AABB
V2 – AAAA
V3 – A(BB)C(AB)

 As hard as that is to look at with OCD, it will come across to the listener aswell, if not done intentionally with purpose, it will cause confusion to the ear, and be very unpleasant. You typically want to see your verses all uniform, prechorus uniform to itself, and choruses uniform to them selves. With that said… The rhyme that creates the “A” in verse one, can be a different rhyme in verse 2. So the word “apple” can be the A rhyme in verse 1, and the word “banana” be the A rhyme in verse 2. That doesn’t matter, as long as the rhyme scheme stays the same, then it works.

What about the bridge?

The bridge doesn’t follow any rules. Doesn’t have to anyway. You can make the bridge rhyme scheme anything you want, as long as it sounds good. The Bridge is always an escape from the song, so does not have to follow anything about the rest of the song.

In Summary

            You want to see your verses generally line up with the same pattern. You can use this system to make sure your rhyme scheme is aligned throughout the different parts of your song. Also using commas in lines and highlighting your rhymes will help you see the patterns you have created. 

The final thing to note, you generally 3ant to make sure in different verses you don’t use the same rhyme. If first verse you rhyme “long” & “song” you might wanna steer away from the “ong’’ rhyme. There’s only so many words to rhyme with that, and it’s not necessary, so unless you have a reason to, steer clear and save yourself a potential issue. Imagine you write a beautiful verse and only need one more rhyming word, but you have used them all you painted yourself in a corner either have to get really creative or change the verse and rhyme sound.

DOCUMENT CREATED BY DONNIE EVETTS 2015 ©