How to write an R&B song: soul roots, chords and runs

Knowing how to write an R&B song starts with two things: a groove you can lean into and a voice with room to move. R&B, short for rhythm and blues, is Black American popular music that grew out of blues, gospel and jazz, and soul is the branch that carried church singing into love songs in the 1960s.

The sound has changed every decade, from Motown’s tambourines to the 808s and falsetto of the 2010s, but the core holds: a pocket, rich chords, a singer who bends the melody and words that sound like one person talking to another.

Where R&B and soul come from

The name came from the charts. In 1949 Billboard replaced its “race records” chart with one called rhythm and blues, a term credited to Jerry Wexler, then a reporter there. In 1954 Ray Charles set a gospel feel to a secular love song with “I Got a Woman”, and in 1957 Sam Cooke left the gospel group the Soul Stirrers and had a pop hit with “You Send Me”.

Soul took over in the 1960s. Berry Gordy founded Motown in Detroit in 1959 and polished it for the pop charts with the Supremes, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, while Stax in Memphis kept it rawer with Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. In the 1970s soul turned personal and political on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and smooth late-night radio took its name, quiet storm, from a 1975 Smokey Robinson album.

Drum machines and synths arrived in the 1980s, and Teddy Riley’s new jack swing tied R&B to hip-hop beats. The 1990s gave contemporary R&B many of its classics, from Boyz II Men, TLC, Mary J. Blige and Aaliyah, while D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill brought live instruments back as neo-soul. In the 2010s The Weeknd, Frank Ocean and SZA made it moodier and more private, the sound now called alternative R&B, and late-night pop borrows a lot from that mood.

What to listen for in R&B

• Tempo. Most R&B lives roughly between 60 and 100 BPM. Slow jams sit at 60 to 75, new jack swing pushes past 100 with swung 16th notes, and a lot of current R&B runs trap hi-hats at 130 to 150 with the snare in half-time, so it still feels slow.
• Chords. Extended chords instead of plain triads: major and minor 7ths, 9ths and 13ths, borrowed from jazz and gospel. A ii–V–I in C becomes Dm9, G13, Cmaj9. Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us” even has a progression named after it: in C, Fmaj7, E7, Am7, then Gm7 and C7 leading back round.
• Groove. The bass moves, the drums leave space and the feel often sits a hair behind the beat. D’Angelo’s Voodoo (2000) is the textbook for a pocket that drags just enough.
• Voice. Melisma, several notes sung on one syllable, and runs, its fast version; falsetto; breath and grit; ad-libs between the lines.
• Vocal production. A close lead, often doubled, harmony stacks of three or four parts in the chorus, backing vocals that answer the lead, and an outro where the singer improvises over the hook.

How to write an R&B song, step by step

1. Start from the groove and the chords

Loop two or four bars of chords over a drum pattern before you write a word. Two chords can carry a whole song: Am9 to Dm9, or Fmaj7 to Em7, leaves the voice free to wander. Hum over the loop until a melody sits in the pocket, then find words that fit the rhythm you hummed.

2. Write as if you’re talking to one person

R&B lyrics sit close to speech: “you” and “I”, the present tense, everyday words, and a detail that does the seducing or the hurting. Texts After Midnight’s “Still Typing” is late-night pop, but its opening line shows the close-up writing R&B runs on: “You typed for twenty minutes, and you never said a word.”

3. Leave room for the voice

Write fewer words than you think you need. “I’ve been thinking about you every single night since the day you went away” leaves the singer nowhere to go. “Since you left, the nights go slow”, with “slow” held across a whole bar, gives the voice space for a run, and the run means more because the line was plain.

4. Build the chorus as a call and an answer

Give the lead the hook and let the backing vocals answer, the way a gospel choir answers its lead singer. Keep the answers to two or three words and stack them in harmony:

Don’t call the car yet (not yet),

the rain’s still coming down (coming down),

don’t call the car yet (not yet),

nobody’s waiting across town (across town).

The lines are short, the answers sit in brackets, and long vowels like “car”, “down” and “town” give the lead room to bend. The nine habits of a chorus people remember apply here too.

5. Put the runs where the song peaks

Melisma is seasoning. Sing the first verse almost straight, add small turns in the second and save the big runs for the last chorus and the outro. Start and end each run on a note of the chord, usually the root, third or fifth, so it resolves instead of wandering.

R&B and soul records to study

• Aretha Franklin, “Respect” (1967): a lead and her backing singers talking to each other.
• Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You” (1992): it starts almost bare and saves its biggest runs for the end.
• Boyz II Men, “End of the Road” (1992): four-part harmony as the main instrument.
• Aaliyah, “Are You That Somebody?” (1998): Timbaland’s stop-start drums with a vocal floating over them.
• Beyoncé, “Crazy in Love” (2003): a 1970 Chi-Lites horn sample over a new beat, two eras in one song.
• Frank Ocean, “Thinkin Bout You” (2012): plain words, a falsetto chorus and sparse production.
• SZA, SOS (2022): melodies that move like speech over R&B, pop and hip-hop beats.

How to make R&B stand out today

• Mix two eras. A 1970s soul loop under modern drums, or 1990s harmonies over a sparse alt-R&B beat, sounds fresher than a copy of either.
• Sing small before you sing big. Much of current R&B runs on intimacy, and one close, cracked line can do more than ten runs.
• Name the situation. A room, an hour, a message left on read. Adult feelings in plain, exact words are what the genre has always done well.
• Practise in front of listeners. In Vibnelo’s Voice world you post 10 to 30 seconds of singing over a hook’s instrumental, or a cappella, with dares such as “Sing the chorus”, “The highest note” and “Whisper it”.

When the song is finished, drop the whole thing into Hook Lab: it finds the best part, which you can cut to 8 seconds or keep at 30, and uploads only that; the full song stays on your device (uploading needs a free account, from age 16). In music battles a hook only meets its own genre and league, names hidden, so R&B is judged against R&B. The R&B hooks on Vibnelo are below, hottest first.