Writing a great tune is half the heavy lifting in a songwriter’s day. Coming up with a melody folks can remember after one or two listens, and sing along to – now there’s a skill!
Fortunately, there are some time-honoured rules of thumb that give you an idea of what contributes to a successful melody.
First up, a melody is just a bunch of related pitches (notes) sung or played for different time periods (rhythm). What you have to decide is which notes, held for how long. 50% of the melody is the notes you use, and 50 % of it is the rhythm you play or sing them.
Secondly, most good tunes have a small kernel of an idea within them called a motif – a little core group of notes in a certain rhythm. Generally, a motif is short – no more than 2-8 notes – but it’s distinctive and acts like a song’s identifier, like the two notes (one repeated) on the very first word of The Beatles famous song, Yesterday.
Thirdly, the way the notes of a song’s melody change over time is organized. The core of a melody is the motif but it is built into longer phrases, which are fashioned into song sections like a verse. Commonly, lengths of about 4- 8 bars are used and a number of techniques to build them.
Melodies use repetition – either exactly, or as sequences – same rhythm but starting on a different pitch. This helps with recognition of what the tune is. Melodies also use variation – so we don’t die of boredom. In Yesterday, the motif is heard again a little higher on the words far a-way.
Fourthly, the difference in pitch between notes you use whether they’re close together or further apart is called an interval. Notes can be a step apart (one whole or half tone) a skip apart (two whole tones) or a leap (three whole tones or more). The intervals you choose between any two of your notes can go up (ascend) down (descend) or stay the same (unison).
The choice of intervals a songwriter uses in a melody winds up giving a shape to the melody called a contour. Getting this right helps make the melody easier or harder to sing and to remember. Not enough shape and the melody never really goes anywhere, but too many leaps between notes makes a song harder to sing or be readily retained.
Finally, most melodies will use the root note (also called the tonic) and the fifth note of the scale at some stage (also known as the dominant). This is part of establishing what key the tune is in, then creating tension within the melody by moving away from that home base. The fifth note in the scale is the furthest from the root note you can go.
Those are some principles to be aware of but how can you apply or adapt them to your own music? Here’s 5 ways to start. They are different ways of prompting your own melodic invention by either starting pitch first or rhythm first. Think of them as fire starters!
- Use the notes of a scale to write a motif
- Use the notes from a chord
- Go naked – no instrument and create from thin air, vocally.
- Rhythm first (notation or with a beat prompt)
- Start with a lyric. Say the words aloud and let the natural stress patterns of speech give you an idea for a rhythm.
1. Start with a Scale
Whatever instrument or DAW you’re using, pick a scale and use it as your own private alphabet of potential notes. The idea is to improvise with short combinations of notes – in different orders and rhythms – to find connections that catch your ear and spark your imagination.
It can help to cycle through the intervals step-wise, in skips or leaps, exploring the relationships between any two notes played one after the other. And don’t forget to change directions too – one ascending or descending interval might change everything.
Check out the melody of the popular carol, Joy to the World. It’s just a descending major scale, but the trick is in the rhythm.
Beyond the major scale, there are also the three types of minor – natural, harmonic and melodic to work with. And both the major and minor scales are part of the wider family of modes. You can also try using the shorter pentatonic scales too.
The point is to play around with generating a motif of your own you can develop into a ‘something’, according to your own taste. If you always use a particular key or type of scale, shake it up right from the start with a new ‘note alphabet’. Explore your options.
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2. Use your Chords
If you have a chord progression already, then another way into writing the tune is to use the individual notes within the chords as a starting point. Play around with reordering them in arpeggios. Havana (Camila Caballo) is a fine example. The verse has a really strong motif that uses all three notes, which make up the first chord in the song’s progression, G minor.
The notes of the tune are B♭D, B♭ again, and then G. Basically, it’s a descending G minor arpeggio. It helps that two of those notes (G and B♭) are also found in the second chord in the progression, E♭major. Simple, but simple ain’t always easy!
A couple of extra points to note: a) the melody doesn’t start on the root note (in this case G for G minor) b) the notes within the motif are repeated. Ha-va-na-o-na-na - only 3 pitches but 7 notes. c) the whole motif is repeated three times in a row – a great way to get the tune to stick!
3. Go Naked – going instrument free
Get out of your studio and go somewhere with only your voice recorder or phone for company and pull a tune out of thin air. If you can walk somewhere, great – your body is already moving to a rhythm.
But this also works if you’re riding a train or in the back of a tour bus, some mode of transport when you can daydream….and try singing something – anything. Record it as you go. Give yourself a good 30 edit-free minutes.
The idea is not to get a great vocal performance but to allow melodic fragments to surface. Unless you have perfect pitch, the key may vary from one you usually gravitate towards, the prompts may be subliminally or directly environmental – what you see as you travel, and it can shift your compositional perspective.
One example where this method was the total kick off for a song was when a lead guitarist of a successful alt rock group here in New Zealand went for his regular run. He didn’t have a phone with him, but an idea for a tune came to him on the hoof, so he ran to a public phone box enroute and phoned home to leave it in a voice message.
4. Focus on Rhythm
A melody has two big variables – not just the notes you use, but the length of time each note is held: aka rhythm. The tunes of many great songs are recognisable just from the rhythm of the melody – just try singing one of your songs with no rhythm. Harder than you might think!
There are a couple of ways to approach working from rhythm first. You can use notation and set up a template (handwritten manuscript or score editor/DAW) or start with a beat (live or dialed in).
Notation Templates
Many songs use sections that are 4, 8 or 16 bars or measures long. Start with 4 measures and dial in a potential melody – only one note and one regular rhythm.
Like this:
I know – nothing to write home about! But from there, you can change note values deliberately bit by bit, until maybe the rhythm feels more like what’s in your head. And you can readily see the ever so slightly more rhythmic idea, repeated and varied.
Once you find a rhythm you like, then think about what the actual pitches would be. I’ve done this in real time on guitar, with my online songwriting class making suggestions on how to alter rhythm and pitch to get to a 4 bar melody phrase. They suggested ‘up a third’ or ‘down a third’, ‘start somewhere different’, ‘make the end more complicated’, and in the end something that was pretty prosaic sounded like a tune, pretty quickly.
Live Drummers, Beats and Plug Ins
One of the interesting things about watching The Beatles ‘Get Back’ trilogy was how attentive Ringo Starr was to the songwriting efforts of Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison. He was constantly supplying a seemingly endless source of great feels, surrounding the songwriters with something to work off but also to quickly generate instinctively but also able to take direction to make the songs sound like drafts quickly. A boon for workflow.
Failing having a wonderful in-house drummer on hand, using whatever plugins, drum machines or loops from your own studio/laptop is a great place to get a vibe going to sing or play ideas over in response to the groove. A full ‘beat’ usually gives you harmonic content, but there’s nothing to stop you just running with rhythm only programming first. It doesn’t have to be a full kit of course, and much can be made starting from minimal, interesting percussive sounds.
5. Lyric Rhythm – Words First
Words come in accented or stress rhythmic patterns all of their own. Using these to create the melodic rhythm can deliver extremely singable melodies that weld tightly to the lyric because a melody created this way already has the natural rhythm of the words emphasized. This is the magic sauce of prosody - the uniting of words and music as a single entity.
Ev-er since the wa-ter-me-lon
is a throwaway line from Paul Simon’s song, The Myth of Fingerprints. The syllables are sung as 8 equal eighth notes or quavers, with a stress on Ev of ever and Wa of watermelon. Meaning…? Jury’s out on that, but man, is it easy to sing!
Many conversational phrases are full of such rhythms. Chances are if you can say it easily, you can sing it. Finding the patterns of stress or unstress in particular words or phrases is called scansion, and it gives good rhythmic bones to your potential melody. Seeing how your lyrical ideas sound when you speak them aloud, and finding the rhythm within can be a solid starting gate for a great tune.
There’s an awful lot to learn from the songs you love. Chances are their melodies will hold some of the principles discussed, but they will have all started from something pretty small and built from there. So listen again, listen hard and listen closely! If ever you’re stuck for a starting point, give some of these ideas a go, and write something wonderful.
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