Hi Everyone first post here as I’m a beginner when it comes To songwriting, I’m currently writing a song inspired by my baby Girl, I’ve wrote the lyrics which I’m fairly pleased with, but now I need to start writing the music for it,
Welcome to the forum. I've been here a couple years now and I think it's the best one.
I play guitar and a bit of piano would you recommend just working out a melody first or a chord structure?
Either way is "right". There are any number of ways to get started. You could:
1. Take a chord progression you know you like (maybe from another song or part of one) and that suits your lyric, noodle around with it and see what happens.
2. Decide if you want it to be in a major or minor key (or even another mode) and start experimenting with melodic intervals within that framework.
3. Try listening to some rhythm tracks to see if they give you any ideas.
Other members will, no doubt, have other ideas. One of my favorite ways is to play loops in different styles and keys and get ideas from those.
Also my 3 verses have different amounts of syllables to each other Do you think this could be an issue?
Yes, it could. If they're drastically different from each other, you'll have a hard time getting a melody to fit all your verses. If the difference isn't too great, you can likely get away with using melisma to fill in the gaps in the shorter lines.
Really enjoying doing this and hopefully I can get a decent end product For her to treasure as she’s growing up
She will surely treasure it, because you wrote it for her.
I hope this is a little helpful. You'll find the active members of the forum are usually willing to help each other out when someone gets stuck.
Vicki