Melodies
An Introduction to Melody
Every song has a melody, just as every song has to be sung. But just what exactly is a melody? Here’s a definition that I found on the Internet:
‘the perception of pleasant arrangements of musical notes’
Great, but once again, not very helpful. Well, my definition is this; a melody is a succession of different musical pitches that when performed create a specific musical effect.
Anyway, all the best songs are memorable and most of them have an exciting and memorable melody, so I reckon it’s a good idea that all of our songs have a great melody too.
The important thing to bear in mind when writing melodies for songs is that they’re going to have to be sung. This may seem like an obvious point, but it does mean we have to bear a couple of things in mind when we’re writing:
Singing ranges for Men and Women
It’s very important that you keep your melodies within the range that a typical singer can sing!
In my experience, female singers tend to sound their best between ‘E’ below middle C and ‘C’ above it, and male singers sound best between ‘G’, two octaves below middle C and the first ‘E’ above it. This is at best a rough guide, as many singers have a much wider useable range than this, and the ones that do really enjoy showing it off whenever they can. But these days, especially as we’re still in the era of ‘pop idol’, most singers are not that technically adept and so need as much help as you can give them. Keep your melodic range fairly modest.
Make sure your melodies ‘sing’
By this we mean that your melodies need to be suitable for a singer. They can’t move too fast, singers tend to be human beings and so can only sing a finite amount of notes in a given time frame!
Also, big jumps or intervals between the notes in your melody can be taxing on a singer, especially if they’re not very experienced. As a general rule, a jump of more than six notes in a melody is a little ambitious unless your singer is a professional. And even then, you should have a very good reason to make that big a jump.
The way to avoid both of these problems is to make sure that you sing your melody as you compose.
You’re asking me to sing?
I’m afraid so. It’s of fundamental importance when you’re writing the melody and the lyric of a song that it sounds right; comfortable and natural when sung. Through the centuries, the tried and trusted way of ensuring your song sounds right is to sing it. The songwriter herself will be humming or ‘la la la-ing’ the melody whilst composing, and singing the lyrics as they’re being written. Sorry.
It really doesn’t matter if you don’t have a great voice, no-one is going to hear you, just take comfort in the fact that every, and I really mean every good song writer writes like this.
How do I write a melody?
Before we get onto the nitty gritty of melody writing, we must have a quick recap of some of the points from last week’s handouts. If you have them to hand, it would be a good idea to re-read them to remind yourself of the basics of chords, scales and keys.
The basics of melody
Most of the time, your melody will be based around the notes that are in the current chord that you are playing. Let’s consider the case of a pop song in the key of C Major, and we are playing the chord of C.
Our old friend C Major
As we can see from the illustration above, the chord is made up of three notes, ‘C’, ‘E’ and ‘G’. If you hum the note ‘E’ whilst playing the chord C, you should quickly notice that your humming feels harmonious, it feels like it fits nicely with that chord.
Now try again, but this time hum the note ‘G’ whilst playing the chord C. Again, your humming feels like it fits with the chord, although it feels slightly different this time as you’re humming a different note.
So far so good, let’s try using both notes. Play the chord, and then hum the note “E” followed by the note ‘G’. Notice that both notes fit the chord, feel different to each other and also feel quite optimistic and positive. You have just hummed a simple melody that works very well over the chord of C, using the third and fifth notes of the chord.
But a melody is more than just a sequence of pitches, we are writing songs after all! So, before we move on from here, play the chord once again, but this time sing the word ‘sometimes’ using the two notes ‘E’ and ‘G’ like this:
Some-times
E G
Notice that this extremely simple melodic phrase now sounds like the beginning of a song (in fact, it is the beginning of the song ‘Sometimes’ by Depeche Mode), and is now far more than a just sequence of pitches. It is of fundamental importance to keep your lyric in mind whilst you are writing a melody, a point we will return to later.
Passing notes
It is perfectly possible to write a melody that consists entirely of the notes that belong to the chords being played. This will tend to sound OK, maybe a little child-like, even slightly mechanical and precise. Try doing this as an example:
Playing the chord of C, hum the notes ‘E’ followed by ‘G’
Now play the chord Dm, humming the notes ‘F’ and ‘A’
Now play the chord Em, humming the notes ‘E’ then ‘G’
And finish with the chord G, humming the note ‘D’
The melody fits the chords just fine, it’s 100% harmonious and in key and sounds like it could be the beginning to a child’s lullaby. Its useful to note this fact when you bear in mind that the biggest market for singles is children!
But this melody does not sound particularly exciting to most ears, and certainly does not sound very modern. There must be notes we can use other than those contained in the chord, surely?
Yes there are, and in musical theory these are known as passing notes.
Lets go back to our chord of C again.
As we know, this chord consists of three notes, ‘C’, ‘E’ and ‘G’, but what about the notes in between, ‘D’ and ‘F’? Can we incorporate them into our tune? Nothing could be simpler: Play the chord of C, and hum these notes in this order: C,D,E,F,G. Sounds perfectly natural, doesn’t it? It may even seem quite familiar, as it is the opening line of the song “Thank You for the Days” by the Kinks:
‘Thank-You-for-the-Days’
C D E F G
Here’s another example:
We’ll move to the key of G Major, which includes the black note F#, and use the chord of G:
This chord consists of three notes, ‘G’, ‘B’, ‘D’, so let’s try playing that chord and humming these notes: ‘D’, ‘F#’, ‘G’. We use the note ‘F#’ in this case as the passing note from ‘D’ to ‘G’, and you’ll notice that the phrase seems to flow nicely, finishing quite naturally on ‘G’, the fundamental note in the chord G. If this melody seems familiar too, try singing it over the G chord with these words:
There-She-Goes
D F# G
It’s the opening line to ‘There She Goes’ by The Las of course.
To summarise…
Ultimately, you can use any notes you wish in your melody, but you will find that the most memorable and natural sounding melodies are based almost entirely on the notes in the chord you are using, with passing notes getting you from one note in the chord to another.
What next?
So far, we’ve only dealt with a simple theory that helps us choose notes for a melody, but there are plenty of other things that we need to consider when we’re writing our melody. For example, does the lyric fit with the melody? What kind of rhythm should we be using for our tune? Are we writing a song for a male or female singer, is our song a duet? Luckily, we can deal with almost all of these questions in one go in the next section…
Melodies for songs
Where do we start?
I think we all know the cliché of the song writer sitting at a piano stool staring at her manuscript book, the empty pages staring straight back at her. Eventually she starts bashing her head against the keys, wailing and generally taking herself extremely seriously because she finds it impossible to come up with anything that can start her song.
Thankfully, we’re going to avoid this situation completely by using a simple technique that’s very popular with professional writers. To get us started quickly we will commence with a title for our song. This can be almost anything; it can be the title of another pre-existing song (‘My Girl’, ‘Another Day’), it can be the way you are feeling at that exact point (‘Happy to be Here’, ‘Frustrated with You’), it can a newspaper headline (‘Jordan and Andre Forever’, ‘Never Had it so Good’), it can be a phrase you overheard someone say on the bus or train (“Whatcha gonna do?” “Who does she think she is?”), maybe someone’s name ( “Michelle”, “Daniel”).
Sometimes it can be a good idea to use a current ‘buzz word’ in your title. When Catatonia released their song “Road Rage” in 1996, the phrase was new and fresh, sounding trendy and current. They had tried the same trick the year before to great success by calling their first hit single “Mulder and Sculley” after the lead characters in the then popular science fiction series ‘The X Files’. “Road Rage” was the band’s biggest hit.
One good place to find these ‘buzz words’ can be in lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Cosmopolitan and the like. You can often get great song titles from the captions used under photos and headings over articles. Here’s some examples I found in Marie Claire from May 2004:
- “Could You Go Without?”
- “In the Closet”
- “Get the Look”
- “Larger Than Life”
- “Be My Light”
- “Bright Young Thing”
- “Feeling Guilty”
Just so you know, we’re not breaching anyone’s copyright by copying titles. If we were copying whole lines from articles to use as our lyric then we could be in trouble, but titles are safe. Having said that, you can avoid a whole load of trouble by not calling your songs things like “Lord of the Rings” or “Coke is it”!
Making your title ‘Hooky’
There’s plenty of other ways of finding a good title, and plenty of ways of making it ‘hooky’ or ‘memorable’. Here’s one well tried idea, popular in the 1960s and to the present day; adjust a well know phrase:
Title Artist
I second that Emotion Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
Stop in the Name of Love Diana Ross and the Supremes
Love in the First Degree Bananarama
The Closest thing to Crazy Katie Melua
Unfinished Sympathy Massive Attack
These titles are ‘hooky’ as the audience is already aware of the original phrases, the small changes appear almost like gentle jokes or puns and are memorable because the slight change in the phrase comes as a surprise.
Of course, a variation on this would be to use a popular phrase and just leave it at that:
Title Artist
You and whose Army? Radiohead
Prince Charming Adam and the Ants
I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing Pet Shop Boys
Take Me Home Sophie Ellis Bextor
Living on a Prayer Bon Jovi
Wish You Were Here Pink Floyd
Sophie’s been waiting for hours you know…
Here’s another way of making a memorable title; unusual combinations of words. This is often called juxtaposition:
Title Artist
United States of Whatever Liam Lynch
Thug Love 50 Cent
What time is Love KLF
Darts of Pleasure Franz Ferdinand
Novocain for the Soul The Eels
Liam Lynch. Enough.
So far so good, but don’t labour for too long over your song title as you can always change it later. The reason why we use this technique is that it gets us off the blocks, so to speak, gives us a focus for everything else that we need for our song; we can use the title to help inspire the lyric, and we can use it to mould the first notes of our melody. Speaking of which….
Motives
When we’re writing a song, before we do anything else it’s usually a good idea to start by writing a simple melodic phrase that fits our title. The technical term we will use is Motive (or Motif), by which we mean a simple, short, memorable musical phrase. Let’s take one of our titles from Marie Claire as an example:
Bright Young Thing
Try speaking the phrase out load a few times…do you notice anything whilst you’re saying it?
Chances are that you instinctively pitch the word ‘Bright” higher than ‘Young” or “Thing”. Also, I bet you pitched the word ‘thing’ lowest of all. This is quite normal in British English, where in most accents the last word in a phrase tends to be lower in pitch. But this also gives us an instant starting point for our melody, a shape that will help us choose our notes.
Also, ‘Bright Young Thing’ sounds optimistic, energetic and positive, so naturally we would be thinking of using a major chord for our harmonic bed. The chord of D tends to sound very alive, especially when played on a guitar or keyboard, so let’s use that:
D Major
As you can see from the keyboard above, we have three main notes to chose from: “D”, “F#” and “A”, and we know that using the spoken pitch shape that ‘Bright’ will be our highest note and ‘Thing’ the lowest. Ok, well how about this as our main motive:
Bright Young Thing
A F# D
That works just fine; in fact it’s the same melody used in the song “International Bright Young Thing” by the 1990s band Jesus Jones, which was a major international hit.
International, bright and young. Maybe. Jesus Jones 1n 1991
Thing is, it’s not very exciting really is it? Our melody still has a nursery rhyme feel to it…let’s try something different. Maybe if we changed the chord sequence to make it a little more interesting we can come up with a better motive. How about:
Em.G/ D
E Minor
G Major
D Major
Well, that’s instantly more interesting. We’re starting the phrase on a chord that isn’t the fundamental chord and ending on the chord that is the fundamental, D, so the sequence feels rounded and complete. How about this as a melody:
Bright Young Thing
F# E D
Sounds promising to me. Now try playing the chords and singing the phrase over the top, like this:
Melody and lyric:
Bright Young Thing
F# E D
Chords:
Em G D
Now that’s more like it. It’s far more interesting, it actually sounds quite cool. Notice that ‘F#’ does not belong in the chord of Em, and ‘E’ does not belong in the chord of G, but they both make sense in this context because they are passing notes leading to the ‘D’ that sounds at the same time as the D chord.
In fact, because the first two notes are passing notes and do not belong to that chord we have created a very simple instance of tension and release, one of the guiding principles for great melodies. The first two notes heighten our expectations, creating a subtle sense of anticipation for the last note that resolves the harmonic conflicts of the original two.
Ok, so we’re off. We have a title, a chord sequence, an opening motive and a key to work with. What now? Well most melodies involve a large amount of repetition, not necessarily the exact same thing repeated but maybe a repetition with a slight variation. We have a strong melodic shape already, three notes descending, so why not do that again but slightly higher? Try this:
Melody and lyric:
La La La
A G F#
Chords:
Em G D
That seems to work just fine, it follows the same melodic shape and also includes a certain amount of tension and release as the note “A” doesn’t occur in the chord Em.
How the Pros do it…
Let’s take a quick break from our melody writing and see if we can spot these principles in other people’s songs. See if you can spot the repetition of melodic shape in these songs, maybe also the principles of tension and release:
“It’s a Fine Day” by Miss Jane
“Bring Me To Life” By Evanescence (look for the chorus)
“I Come and Stand at Every Door” by the Byrds
“I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From” by Royksopp and Kings of Convenience
“Cavalina Rusticana” by William Orbit
Pietro Masagni and William Orbit. But which is which? Yawn…
Ok, I’m beginning to get this, but why all the repetition?
It is the repetition in the melodic phrases that embeds them in our memories, that’s how we get the melodic hook thing. You don’t have to repeat the exact notes, you don’t have to repeat the exact melodic shape or even the exact same rhythm when you’re writing your melody, but the more repetitious aspects you can work in without boring your audience the better.
Also, don’t forget that by the time your song is completed this melody will be sung with words too, which will disguise its repetitive nature from your audience.
Meanwhile, back in our song…
So far we have two lines in our melody, refresh your memory if you need to by playing and singing them to yourself right now.
We already know that most songs are based on phrases of four lines, so let’s see if we can write another two lines based on what we have already. We know that our chord sequence is strong so let’s not mess around with that… how about rising the melody line even higher to create a climax and make a variation on the melodic shape, and then rounding it off with a repeat of the first line? Something like this:
Line 3
Melody and lyric:
La La La La La L-La
B A D/ A/ G/ F#/ E
Chords:
Em G D
Line 4
Melody and lyric:
La La La
F# E D
Chords:
Em G D
So there you have it, a hooky or catchy melody written from a simple title found in a magazine. Couldn’t be easier.
This feels a bit contrived, do songwriters really write like this?
Yes and no. The best songwriters know all the principles we’ve discussed so far, but they probably would never describe or discuss them in the way we have. As they have been writing songs for years, maybe decades, all the principles come to them as second nature, a kind of intuitive knowledge so they don’t necessarily have to consider melodic shape and whatnot. This is because:
They can feel whether something sounds good or not
Through years of dedication and experience, these writers know when they hear their melody whether it’s ‘hooky’ or not, they don’t have to analyze their work in the way we have just done.
It’s a bit like knowing a language. All of us here can speak English, but I bet we would find it hard to explain the grammatical principles to a foreigner. We would, however, be able to correct their English based on what “sounds” right in our head, without necessarily being able to explain why. It is this unconscious fluency that we’re aiming for.
The thing is, whenever you analyze what’s going on within a great pop song, you tend to find the simple principles we’ve been discussing occurring in every song, whether they were put in intentionally or not. As we’re all beginners here, it’s a good idea to pick up these musical principles to give us a helping hand. That’s why we study the structure of melody and use words like motive and melodic shape. Then we can go straight to writing great songs like the masters, whilst avoiding the pit falls.
So don’t worry if much of what we’ve learnt today feels like music theory. Through practice and dedication, all of the principles we’ve discussed will become second nature to you too.
Burt Bacharach, one of the most successful and celebrated song writers of all time
Definitions
Interval
The difference in pitch between two notes.
Middle C
The note C found at approximately the middle of the piano keyboard. Its frequency in the equal-tempered scale is 261.626 Hz
Pun
A humorous play on words.
