How To Write Songs Randomly With A Deck Of Cards

• standard deck of playing cards
• writing materials

1. Draw seven cards -- ace through 7 -- from the deck to create a rhythm.

A.  Divide a 4/4 measure into eighth note beats, giving you 8 “slots” where you can put a chord.

B.  Take your seven drawn cards (the suit doesn’t matter) and shuffle them. Deal one card. This is the number of “strums” in your pattern. For example, if you drew a 4, you will have 4 strums in your measure.

C.  Now, add an 8 to your seven-card hand and reshuffle. Deal a number of cards equal to the number of strums in your pattern. The face value of these cards become the “slots” in your measure where you will put a strum. Following the example, you would deal 4 cards because you dealt a 4 in the previous step. Let’s say you’ve just dealt 2, 5, 7, and 8.

D.  Divide a 4/4 measure into 8 parts: “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”. You can also write this “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8″. Your strum pattern in this example is “r 2 r r 5 r 7 8″ where the r’s represent eighth note rests and you strum on the 2, 5, 7, and 8.

2. Draw cards to create a chord progression.

You could have just one chord for each strum, a different chord on each strum, or a combination of both. To decide where to change chords in the measure try this:

A.  Take 4 cards, Ace through 4, and deal one card. This is the number of different chords in your measure. Let’s say you deal a 2. You will have 2 chords in your measure. Now, what chords will those be? Do this:

B.  Take cards Ace through 7 and deal two. These map directly to the diatonic I through VII chords in a scale. If you are not familiar with finding the 7 chords that fit in a single key (the diatonic progression), check out this helpful description. This is valuable information for every songwriter to know.

The VII chord is least likely to fit in this type of scenario, unless you are playing jazz, so you can leave out the 7 card.

3. Play through your newly created measure and see how it feels.

You now have a measure of rhythm and chords that were drawn from a deck of cards. If something doesn't work for you, change it up and re-deal the cards.

4. Take the rhythm and chords and continue developing the idea.

You can take this concept further by using the cards to:

- randomize your key and/or key changes

- randomize a capo position if you’re a guitarist

- split a measure into 16th notes and make more complex rhythms

- split two measures into 16 eighth notes and make a two measure pattern (or even more)

- randomize your time signature and do the same for 3/4, 6/8, 5/4, etc.

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