You know the feeling. The verse ends, the band leans in, and everyone in the room — including the people who claim they hate singing — opens their mouths. That moment is rarely an accident. A chorus that sticks is usually built from a handful of old, reliable devices, and most of them were doing the rounds long before anyone thought to call a song "pop". Folk singers knew how they worked; pop producers simply turned them up. Here are seven you can try this week, with examples from both traditions.

1. Write the hook before anything else

Most weak choruses are weak because nobody decided what the song was actually about until the last line of the last verse. Flip the order. Write the chorus first, in isolation, as if the rest of the song did not exist. If it does not work sung twice in a row with no accompaniment, the verse will not rescue it.

Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" puts its title at the very top of the chorus, on a leap upwards, and the phrase returns like a hammer. The Spice Girls did the same with "Wannabe" — the title phrase is the chorus, delivered plainly, and it never moves.

Decide two things before you write a note:

• Where the title sits. First line, last line, or both. Pick one and keep it consistent across every chorus.
• What the chorus promises. One idea, stated once. If you need a second idea, you probably need a bridge.

2. Keep the melody narrow and the feeling wide

Choruses that are easy to sing tend to move around very few notes. The Oasis chorus in "Wonderwall" circles the same short melodic phrase, shifting only slightly, and that is exactly why a field full of strangers can manage it. Folk tunes have worked this way for centuries: the melody repeats, the words change a little, and the meaning deepens with each pass.

Try restricting a chorus to three, four or five pitches. Use rhythm — not extra notes — to create interest. A chorus that leaps about in every bar gives the listener nothing to hold on to.

3. Build a lift, not a copy

The chorus should feel like a step up from the verse, in pitch, volume or both. In "Someone Like You", the verses sit close to speech, almost conversational, and then the chorus opens out and climbs. The contrast does the emotional work; the words only carry it.

A useful test: find the highest note in your chorus, then go through the verse and remove it entirely. If the verse has already used your top note, the chorus has nowhere to go. Save something for the moment that matters.

4. Let the vowels do the work

Open vowel sounds travel. They are easier to sing, easier to hold and easier to remember. "Loch Lomond" hangs on the long, open sounds of "high road" and "low road" — the melody could survive without the meaning, which is precisely why it has.

Here is a practical method. Sing your chorus melody on nonsense syllables first, before you write a single word of it. If the shape sounds dull, no lyric will fix it. When you do add words, place your longest, most open vowels on the highest and longest notes. Save cramped, closed sounds for the quick passing notes. "Scarborough Fair" repeats its herb-and-spice line partly because the vowels sit so comfortably in the mouth.

5. Repeat, then break the pattern

Repetition is what makes a chorus feel like a chorus, but straight repetition for thirty seconds becomes wallpaper. The trick is a pattern of three, then a turn: say the same thing three times, then change the fourth line to land the payoff.

Folk music is full of this. Sea shanties such as "Leave Her Johnny" work on a repeated refrain with a call in front of it. "Hey Jude" stretches a single repeated phrase far past the point where most writers would stop, and it becomes the best-known part of the song. Repetition is not laziness; it is architecture.

6. Leave a hole for the crowd

Some of the most enduring choruses contain very few words. The Fratellis' "Chelsea Dagger" is largely a sung "da da da", and it is one of the most reliably roared-along choruses in British pop. A gap gives a room something to fill, and a crowd filling a gap is a chorus doing its job.

Count the rests in your chorus deliberately. Try writing a version where a bar or two is left instrumental or wordless, and see whether the song gets bigger. If you can clap along without thinking, you are close.

7. Make the last line the one that lands

The final line of a chorus is the line people remember, so it deserves the most drafts. Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town" places its title at the end of the phrase, after the imagery has done its work — the listener waits for it and gets it. "The Parting Glass" finishes on a line that closes the door gently, and it stays with you.

Write that last line five different ways before you settle. Try ending on a question, then on a flat statement. Try ending with the title. Try ending without it. The version that keeps returning to you an hour later is the right one.

A chorus you can test in ten minutes

Once you have something written, put it through a quick, honest check. None of it requires equipment.

1. Sing it unaccompanied while walking. If you lose your place without an instrument, the melody or the lyric is doing too little.
2. Record it on your phone and listen back the next morning, when you have forgotten writing it.
3. Swap the title line for nonsense words. If the chorus still sounds good, the melody is working. If it collapses, the words were holding up a weak tune.
4. Cut a quarter of the words. Choruses usually improve when they lose syllables.
5. Teach it to one person and see whether they can sing it back within a couple of listens. That is the whole point.

None of these seven techniques is a formula on its own, and using all of them at once will give you something shouty and hollow. Pick two, write four choruses, and keep the one you cannot stop humming. That is usually the one worth finishing.

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels