any good source/book for the structure of songs?

 

Any book about songwriting or composition should have a dedicated section about it. I would recommend to study songs that you like and analyze them as much as you can. Most places will tell you to assign letters to large sections of the song (Verse is A, Chorus is B, Bridge is C...), you can try that as a macro visualization and then go into the details into each part.

 

Do you have a special style or genre?

Writing The Hook (An Intuitive Approach) | The Hit Song Architect S1E4

SONG STRUCTURE 101 (Pt. 1-A) - THE BASICS: Verse, Chorus, & Bridge

 

A lot of people who do masterclasses on songwriting all over the world consistently suggest this book in their list of top ten good books for reference. Considering who Jimmy Webb is it's probably got at least a few good tips considering how many hit tunes he has written in popular music. Always find the right information from someone who has done what you want to and been where you want to go, not me or any other faceless internet person.




https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/614772.Tunesmith

 

I only came in here to recommend the Jimmy Webb book but BaSsDuDe beat me to it. That and The Manual by Bill Drummond.

 

Books can only cover so much ground in a Practical/effective way..

Some can go very in Depth indeed,
but unless they're focused on the same exact music style/medium as the one you're working on,
it will hardly be of any use, except in a general culture sense..

I agree with the previous posts, the best you can do is gather References and study them
do an Structural and Harmonic analysis, and see where it's going, how it does what it does, and maybe why..

So having good references is paramount,
unless it's a very personal style you've worked on forever..

And it's good to Study and try to understand them,
and then when you've got it all sorted.. just forget about all it, follow you instincts and do your own thing

 

Arrangements are genre specific, songs with faster tempos have more complex arrangement, its still easy, as far as electronic music is considered. Shorter songs = simpler arrangement.

I always create timemarkers of the original track, when I decide to create a remix, it helps in the placement of vocals and also a general idea of the arrangement of the remix.

Making complete songs helped me understand arrangement a lot better

 

USE YOUR EARS BRO

 

Was looking into this myself a while ago and found that this course by PML was a really good introduction. I particularly liked that it dealt with what each section of a song is supposed to be, and what its function is in terms of tension and release within the song.
https://www.productionmusiclive.com/products/arrangement-course

 

this one might be useful
https://www.hooktheory.com/education

 

I found this advice really unhelpful. I could see the things I needed to see when they were pointed out to me, but none of it was intuitive at all. And because I didn't know any actual musicians, books were the place I could get that stuff pointed out.

 

Spotify or YouTube

 

I like ABBA especially the blonde one

 

Structure and Arrangement in Electronic Music: Course
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYFZbm0f2qsFKq9BvLb4WVax2WDMMnit

https://www.dancemusicproduction.com/intro-arranging-formal-structure/

article
https://www.edmprod.com/tension/

 

learn the 4 times table

 

four chords and the truth, or alternatively two drums sticks and a lie
50/50

seriously though, ezkeys offers two tools, one thing is it comes with a library of chords and structures (for different genre), but another button it has that i like alot is once you select a chord structure you like you can ask it to play that "like" a different midi file.
another great tool thats overlooked is BIAB, recently in 2021 they added the ability to take a prerecorded performance of a soloist, and rearrange his recording to be a completely different solo. and its the same guy. i don't know how they do that but its lifelike. not to mention its a structure tool too.
thirdly have you looked at scaler? there are several similar technologies that give you structure based on a one finger press, but the farther i dig into scaler it has some pretty serious tweeks for legit composing