So, one thing I find myself wanting to do and struggling a lot at the same time is wanting to write songs longer than the 4 minute mark.
Most of my songs are around 2 - 4 minutes long, although I did make something that's around 5 minutes and 30 songs long once (i posted it outside of BOTB though)

I wanna try writing songs that are at least 5 minutes long or more, and I even wanna try to write a 10+ minute long prog suite if I can at some point.
But then i feel like I might end up making my songs repetitive if i make them too long; along with the fact that I can be impatient when it comes to songwritting sometimes, instead of letting an idea actually grow properly

So.. I wanna know and would like some advice over how you people write longer songs. Like what are your techniques, the thought you put into that songwritting process, how to make something that goes on without feeling repetitive and that actually develops meaningfully?

Sometimes I'll write one part of a song, and then work on another part that sounds completely different, and worry later about how I'm going to bridge them together. Or sometimes I don't bridge them at all, and I just let the different parts rub against each other. That works too.

Be less selective

my 2 hour song was made from a script that generates a .vgm file with a sequence of random registers and values

unfortunately i don't, but i also think that the song will let you know if it needs to develop further. i'm a fan of the "say what you need to say and then get out" school of songwriting

perhaps listening "long songs" might help - https://zinginstruments.com/best-long-songs/

I'm a big fan of what defmech said and I've actually had a lot of people tell me that they like my albums for being that way. That said though, the question is specifically "how to do this", I just wanted to offer more consolation regarding the feeling you might have that you "have to" or "should" make longer music, just knowing I used to be sensitive about my own output in that way.

My writing process is always fairly improvisational, like "okay, what do I hear next in my head??" but planning ahead can work for ensuring the piece never gets stuck in "well, guess that's it then!". Like you know you wanna start at one style and level of intensity and end at another, then you have some groundwork to plan the emotional arc of the song. or if you're like "I will use This type of song structure" and write to that.

Sometimes I will have an idea like what blast said, but I often have a hell of a time trying to figure out how to connect the two in that case..
I'll have all these blocks of music that I just have to keep kicking down the road further and further until their time comes or I simply leave it in an old version of the project file when I "save as..."

I think an often overlooked method to bridge parts together is the humble solo drum fill, be it one that that extends the meter or form of the song or one that just happens where the rest of the instruments would usually continue. It resets the brain just long enough to make a completely new sounding segment of music feel way more natural and "earned" than if you just heard those two sections together in immediate succession. It could of course be some other kind of non-tonal thing that happens to create some space or even just a chord held out or bass line being repeated for half a measure etc etc, but that's the one I chose.

Starting with or arriving at some kind of more ambient/ethereal/somber/minimalist/etc section also works, of course.

My friend Devi McCallion once smartly pointed out to me that sometimes all you need to do to make a section feel more fresh is change the drums behind it when you bring it back and the "change one thing" method works in many other ways too: same melody over different chords, responding to a melody with itself, played by another instrument (Jun Ishikawa does this all the time on his SNES soundtracks and it never sounds bad even once), same exact music but transposed to another key... or time signature heh

And then of course you can just write "rhapsody" style and just sorta throw all kinds of new sections in succession and maybe never return to anything at all... maybe include a motif or two??? It's less common than repeating structures but it's out there.

And then you know... the dance music type method where you extend repeating things by building with one new element at a time, take some away, bring most of it back, etc etc using rhythm to create the tension, release, and momentum we usually associate with tonal choices.
I feel like this also kinda ties to the idea of changing chords LESS often (many BotBrs hate seeing these words) to give more breathing room to other kinds of development, longer melodies/whatever and make the eventual change more impactful

A straightforward method to make a long Prog song is to take the generic Rock song structure (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus) and elongate parts of it. Make the intro a minute and a half long and stretch the bridge to three minutes and you might already pass the seven minute mark. Make the bridge musically distinct and it already feels like a suite. You could even replace each verse-chorus instance with a long multipart journey, and the underlying Pop structure will still be identifiable. This is how many Yes songs work (e.g. Close To The Edge).

New sections can be generated by taking a single element from an existing part (e.g. background ostinato, bassline, pads) that sounds different when isolated (due to the absence of harmonic context) and building a new part around it, possibly while repurposing motifs from the existing parts.

Thank you all for the kind words and help.
I don't necessarily want to make my songwritting to be like super long songs only, I just wanna try doing a few longer songs as a fun exercise,
I know that shorter songs already say a lot to the listener and communicate what I need to say too pretty well :3

an example of long songs i remembered now, for motivation/inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr94cmmNpkM

maybe we all need some long song battles for practicing! ;) (around 30 minutes would be a great exercise, fitting in a vinyl lp whole side)

ooh, nitro, a script to generate a .vgm file sounds neat :D love me some algorithmic processes to cultivate *something* on a blank canvas that you then pare down to whatever feels most musical!

as others have pointed out, repetition is your friend, and repetition with variation even more so. listen to most long-form classical works and you will find many repeated common threads, interwoven together with such variety that even when the same melody is repeated, it feels like you've turned a kaleidoscope, making new shapes and colors from familiar pieces. the inimitable Arnold Schoenberg would use the phrase "developing variation" to refer to this.

in contemporary terms, this can be, for example, repeating a melody but changing up the drums or the bass or all kinds of textural elements, or *starting* a melody as a repeat but then wandering off the trail with something new.

I'd also spend some time thinking about form in songwriting. considering the purpose of an intro, verse, chorus, bridge, coda, how to arrange those building blocks and how to mess with convention, can be very useful for maintaining a sense of coherence over time.

I won’t get too much into this right now because it kind of spoils my album, but there is a song on there that’s pretty dang long.
One thing that really helped me push the length of that song was this strategy that I guess I will just call “scapes” (short for soundscapes I guess)

So I’m in FL Studio, and I’ve got this idea for a song for my album, and it’s moving along pretty well, right until the 3ish minute mark. I needed something that would keep the ball rolling and quickly because I was shooting for something pretty fast paced and experimental/progressive. (I think this strategy works for any genre to a certain extent.)

So I created a pattern (in FL studio, like the tool) and named it “scape 1”, basically what I did from there was just scroll through all of my plugins and presets within the plugins to find any random cool synth, perc, arp, or sequence I liked. Then I’d take 2-4 of those, make any random/unique progressions/melodies/harmonies for them to play together in the pattern, and I’d get this “soundscape” as a result, which is basically just a couple cool synths playing some related patterns over eachother. (These scapes would usually register in the middle-high end of the audio spectrum so that I could layer basslines and drums to go under them, and a lead on top or something)

And in this song for my album, I made like 10-15 of these scapes that usually just lasted 8 beats before looping, and was able to make a bunch of different, unique sounding sections because the “scapes” that served as the base of the sections were generated with just anything I thought sounded cool, layered on top of eachother. Sorry if this isn’t clear, it’s kind of hard to describe.

If you feel stuck with a song being too short before becoming repetitive, why not trying the rhapsody/variety-hour style? You can end up with an epic composite song made of many little songs. Just be sure that all of them have at least one common axis to stick together and work on the transitions between them so they are coherent.

mixtape-as-song is legit

*also* this series of posts on effective loop usage is absolutely amazing: https://cohost.org/paperaviator/post/5339089-how-to-use-music-loo https://cohost.org/paperaviator/post/5477453-how-to-use-music-loo https://cohost.org/paperaviator/post/5677486-how-to-use-music-loo

Oh yeah I read those posts a while back. I think they're quite great for that kind of stuff.

make a couple of 3-minute (or shorter) songs that are in similar keys and sound similar and then just connect them. that's how this was made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zm_fNPaAFc

Take a look at longer songs that you like and analyze it's song structure. If you can identify the different sections of that song, it'll help you during your songwriting process. So don't worry about copying whatever you're inspired by.

B-Doh is right, studying is good; if you can perceive what you're hearing it makes it a lot more painless to pull it off yourself. I like to try and listen to a tune and see if I can manage to write down the form after one go. Doesn't have to be complicated, you can just put something like "intro, A section, B section, A but plus drums, sax solo," etc. As much or as little detail as you want. But when you're focusing on memorizing the sections, you start to "feel" the whole. My 2 cents. I do find it hard to write longer things "naturally" in trackers because it's hard to work in big gestures... when you have paper in front of you, you can just draw a big line.

@Stupe the big line thing is something i was genuinely taught in school, that you can draw your own arc of intensity for the form of the piece of music you're writing, essentially just a graph over time of how you want the energy levels to be shaped - can be as vague as you want, a dome shape or a couple ramps up that leap back down or whatever. thinking about the overall form of your music is super important though! i strongly believe in that kind of planning ahead, or considering that path as early as you can in the process. if you have a plan, writing is easier and more focused.

+1, also was taught the big line, and have been struggling to conceptualize it in digital interfaces

tonally, I also enjoy thinking in key centers -- starting in I major, saying ahead of time that the B section is in vi, a bridge will be in bIII, etc

to me, that helps to establish structure and to come up with little in-between gestures (and to come up with harmonic interest! how do we get from I to vi? how are we approaching a secondary dominant? little questions like that shape musical ideas and give birth to cool gestures)

(Hopefully I'm adding to, and not being redundant on top of, the above stuff)

In my (admittedly limited) experience, something that has helped me think of longer tunes is having a core idea and finding ways to imagine that in different contexts, while still holding on to the same core idea. It could be starting with a simple motif and trying to use that in different keys, genres, emotional contexts, all of the above; or you could even work the other way and have an idea of the different parts of the song you want to have emotion-wise or stylistically, and figure out what it is that you want to have to unify those parts together.

I tend to think of longer songs as inherently telling a story in some way, so the song needs to behave as such in how it goes places, what it handles, and how the overall topic of the story is reflected both in each part of the song as well as in how the parts fit together. Of course, that doesn't mean every song is a concrete tale with a paragraph of lore behind it; but when one takes the listener on a long journey, they want to enter it having a vested interest in seeing where the song goes and leave it feeling satisfied with the outcome of what they got to know. That maybe a bit of a hardcore way of putting it, admittedly, but it's something I would deem worth considering (that being what keeps the listener listening to the song for so long).

I would offer more concrete compositional advice, but it would seem such has been tackled at length by the above posters, so I will save my breath and your ears. I hope you are able to make a truly grand tune!