Abstract: The subject of research is special techniques of variation of chants and lyrics of ritual songs of heptasyllabic and enneasyllabic accentual verses in local traditions of the Upper Poluzhye and Pooredezhye (based on the published and archive materials of the 1970s - 80s). These territories have common historical and cultural development, which resulted in the formation of similar musical and ethnographic traditions. This similarity of traditions is manifested in wedding ritualism, similarity of prothalamia, sustainability of texts and images, and the system of chants-formulae. However, among the wedding songs, the author has found non-typical chants in which they were being transformed. The research is based on the full notation of sound recordings and the comparative-analytical method which help to identify and describe these special techniques of song variations. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the individual approach to the recording of folk songs, which gives attention to the non-typical songs, and considers them in the context of traditional musical texts. The detected transformations of chants and lyrics in wedding songs help to arrive to the conclusion about special and close interaction between chants-formulae, the transfusion of their key elements, and the implementation of the key idea of a wedding song (the conjunction of families of the fiance and the fiancee) at the level of the musical-ritual language, and to raise the question about the possibility of using such techniques in other traditions and genres.