Melody II

As promised, this chapter gives all my practical tips about writing melody. But first, we discuss the one truth that explains all of them.

All pitch is relative

Pitches, by themselves, don’t have any value. It’s not like the “F” is always sad, and the “D” always uplifting.

No, pitches are relative. They get meaning, or have an effect, based on what is around them.

It’s the same principle of contrast from before. If all your pitches are very high, none of them feel high. If your whole song does the same huge jumps between notes, then they don’t feel huge anymore after thirty seconds.

This gives pitches several interesting properties:

• Their feeling or meaning depends on their distance to the tonic of the scale.
• They want to “resolve”. They want to go “somewhere”. (Some more than others.)
• They are fluid. For example, our voice can “slide” from one note to another, hitting all the pitches between. (Something you can’t do with rhythm.)

Hopefully, you start to understand why I started with rhythm. It has a more strict, predictable structure—which, if you break it, often immediately sounds terrible. Pitch, on the other hand, can do whatever it likes.

Principle 1: Understand how notes feel

Because pitches are relative, music theory often names them relative to the tonic (or “root note).

For a C Major scale, you’d get …

• C = Tonic
• D = Second
• E = Third
• F = Fourth
• G = Fifth
• A = Sixth
• B = Seventh

As you see, they simply count up from the root note. No matter how simple, this is a powerful tool.

Because, in general, you can assign these meanings to the notes.

• Tonic = home, safe, at rest, everything wants to come back here.
• Second = warm, cozy, soft, relative safety.
• Third = also feels safe, but more exciting and harmonious at the same time. (It’s an actual jump away from home.)
• Fourth = this is decidedly not home, but it’s the second best thing. It feels warm and soothing, without strongly wanting to go somewhere.
• Fifth = it’s the second most important note of the scale (“perfect fifth”). It harmonizes the best with the tonic and really loves going back to it. The jump is large enough to provide excitement and surprise.
• Sixth = this often has a magical fairytale quality to it, a more “surprising” jump away from the tonic. It could resolve to a number of places, though people often choose the fifth.
• Seventh = the most dissonant and tension-filled note. It strongly wants to go home, or anywhere else really.
• Octave = a full octave leap is very energetic, powerful and uplifting. It will always work, because, well, the tonic sounds good with itself.

In general, low notes bring rest, safety and warmth. High notes bring excitement and power.

Depending on other factors (scale, support instruments, vocal, …) these moods will shift. But the list above is generally true.

When stuck, apply this knowledge.

You want to write a soft lullaby? Go for those seconds and thirds. Go for warm notes that don’t really want to go somewhere. Limit tension or energetic jumps.

You want to write a powerful rock song? Keep the verse more monotone, then go for huge jumps and notes that want to resolve everywhere.

For example, here’s the start of a lullaby song I once wrote for a musical. It uses only jumps of a second or a third.

Even when it goes higher and reaches a “sort of” climax, it stays within these small intervals. Because it’s still a soft lullaby.

Principle 2: Tension & Release

I spoke a bit about tension before. Let’s go more in-depth now. Because it is a topic worthy of such discussion!

People like art because of this effect: tension and release. Because we love the feeling of release. We love that feeling of letting go, solving a problem, relaxing. But we can only get that if we first experience tension.

A song only connects emotionally if it builds enough tension—and then releases it entirely.

Don’t hesitate here. That’s a mistake I made for a long time. Writing songs that were too “soft” and “meandering”. I didn’t want to add too much tension or take too much risk, scared it would annoy people.

The result? Songs that all sound the same. They are all “okay” but nobody really loves them. Because they lack that cycle of tension and release.

How to apply this? Add tension on purpose, then followed by release. Both for the big picture (the whole song) and the smaller details (individual melodic lines).

That’s where the “verse-chorus-bridge” structure comes from! We start the song at low intensity. We ramp it up with the chorus. Up, up, up, until the bridge/solo goes all out and has maximum intensity. But we don’t just stop randomly at some point during the solo. Songs take time to climb down their mountain and go back to a lower intensity ending.

This is another reason why I recommend starting with well-known structures. There’s a good reason for their existence. Once you have some experience with them, you can break the rules and try other structures.

On a smaller level, you could …

• Use a note not from the scale; then go back to following the scale again.
• Use more dissonant or unexpected notes, such as the sixth and the seventh. Usually, they resolve to the tonic or the fifth afterward.
• Use a pattern that is clearly going somewhere. For example, if your notes keep going higher and higher, the listener is waiting for the moment you get to the highest note. The longer this moment is delayed, the more tension will build inside of them.

Here’s an example with a tense (dissonant) note before returning home. When that note (C#) appears, you build tension, wanting it to resolve to something else.

Here’s an example of building a pattern which, after a few tries or seconds, “releases” into its final note.

Principle 3: Rhyme & Copy (again)

This is similar to what I explained at Rhythm II.

Once you have one melodic phrase or idea, multiply it into an entire song.

Copy the idea to other places. You can repeat it (in identical fashion). But most likely, you want to change one or two pitches for variety.

More globally, use a rhyming scheme. Let’s look at a nice example: “The Hanging Tree” (written for the Hunger Games movies).

It’s a really nice melody. Well-structured, but with more variety than most. And it follows this rhyming scheme approach.

• Are you, are you (A), coming to the tree? (B)
• Where they strung a man (A*), they say he murdered three (B*)
• Strange things did happen here (C), no stranger would it be (B)
• If we met, at mid (A) night in the hanging tree (B*)

I’ll break it into two examples (for clarity). Even without listening, you can visually see the rhyming and the patterns.

That’s a long melody. Four phrases, takes time to execute. But it’s really just three parts copied and rhyming with each other.

Again, this isn’t lazy. Nobody has called that song lazy, right? This is the perfect balance between structure and surprise. This is what humans feel is good art and interesting.

Principle 4: The mountain approach

Alright, all these principles are great. But they’re mostly helpful if you already have a good melody in your head or know your way around some instruments / music theory.

What if that isn’t applicable? First, remember what I explained at Where do I start?. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Prime your brain, give it time, and it will come.

Besides that, I think the “mountain approach” is the most useful. Here’s the idea:

• Start the melody at a low or safe note
• Place your most important note somewhere near 2/3. (The highest, the most dissonant, the most surprising, whatever.)
• And end with a safe note again
• So you can repeat / loop this melody.

This shapes your melody somewhat like a mountain. You merely need to fill the space between the notes. And now you have tools to do so:

• Create jumps that match your feeling
• Invent a pattern (like “two up, then one down”) and repeat it in varying ways
• Use longer notes or silence to fill some space, reserve shorter notes for the meat of the melody

Once you’ve played with that, you can move the mountain. Start with your most important note and only go down. End with your most important note, so you can immediately race into the chorus.

It’s a really simple idea that will work 100% of the time. It won’t generate the most creative or inspired melodies, but it’s a great starting point.

For example, here’s our mountain structure

And then we just fill in notes in between

Principle 5: Chord schemes

The details of playing chords are, again, not part of this guide. But now that you know scales—and that they are just a pattern you can look up—you already know enough!

If you’re really stuck, pick a random scale and a random chord scheme within it. Just play the chords on a loop. Then try to create a melody over them. (By using notes from the scale, or maybe just notes from the same chord.)

Melodies are harder to find online. (There’s no great way to communicate them, unless you resort to sheet music or a tab for the guitar. Even then, rarely does anybody tab anything more than the guitar solo for the song.)

But chords? They are abundant! Look up the chords for your favorite song. Copy them, play them, use them to invent your own melodies.

Below is an example using the “four pop chords”. If you don’t know what those are, look up the “Four Chord Song” by Axis of Awesome. They show you, in a funny way, how every single pop song is written using these chords. Notice how the melody just picks a note or two from the chord supporting it.