Rhyme Patterns

I think understanding rhyme is one of the best ways to increase your songwriting ability. To me, rhyme is one of the fundamental building blocks, or can be one of the most destructive forces, in a song.

While a literal scene is important, the rhythm of the line, or flow of cadences in written or spoken language, is where the songwriting craft becomes more than a reporting of facts.

The elements making up rhythm include:

• Prosody - the art of versification, and
• Meter - the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a verse
  

Rhyme is about sound, not spelling, and helps bring regularity, linking, audio separation, tempo, and many other things to the rhythm of a song or poem. It's often overlooked, but can be one of your strongest tools when writing a song.

One of the best ways to understand the power of rhyme is to look at other songs and their rhyme patterns. Graphing a rhyme pattern is easy, and follows a very basic process.

With each end rhyme, you'll indicate a letter (always start with A). As you progress through the song, with each end rhyme change, you'll indicate the next letter in the alphabet. If you hear the same sound later in the song, use the letter associated with the sound the first time you heard it.

Sounds complicated, so I'll just show you. Here's a graphed rhyme pattern for a song called "Chasing Pavements":

Verse
I've made up my mind, A (long i sound)
don't need to think it over. B (ur sound)
If I'm wrong I am right, A (long i sound)
don't need to look no further. B (ur sound)
This ain't lust, C (u sound w/s consonant)
I know, this is love. C (u sound w/v consonant)