Rules & Patterns

I wanted to explain this earlier. If you remember one thing from this guide, make it this thing. So why didn’t I do it? It was hard to succinctly explain (and give examples) if I wasn’t sure you knew some of the other principles. Knew the basics of rhythm and pitch.

But now is the time! This will both be extremely interesting and ruin creativity for you slightly.

Writing songs is nothing but inventing made-up patterns. Then you repeat them until the listener accepts them as truth.

Why?

Applying a pattern once isn’t a pattern. It must be repeated, several times, before it becomes a pattern which the listener can pick up on.

And what is a pattern? It’s just a rule. Any rule! As long as you can apply it consistently, it’s a rule, and it creates a pattern.

For example, you might say:

• Every three notes, we jump an interval of a third
• Every five notes, we go back to the tonic
• We do “one down, one up, two down, two up, three down, three up, …”

Those “melodic ideas” in your head are usually nothing more than one or two rules you invented. That, when applied, will sound good—and you know that through experience.

I’ll show this again by applying the first two simple rules I gave (as examples) above.

Simply by applying the rules, you already know 5 of the notes for certain. Then it’s much easier to fill in the rest: you can literally do anything. The rules already provided structure, preventing it from becoming a mess. So I picked the other notes at random.

Think about it. Go back to the previous lessons learned. Go back to my examples during Repetition & Surprise. You’ll see just how often good melodies come from applying simple rules, whatever they are. And how quickly they sound messy or chaotic if you don’t have any pattern.

Why does rhyming and copying work so well? Because you’re repeating a pattern! You’re re-using the same rule!

Why do so many songs seem to have a general trend of “melody goes up” or “melody goes down”? Because it’s a simple and effective pattern!

How to use?

When in doubt, make up rules for your song. For the rhythm, the pitches, the lyrics (which we’ll talk about next), everything. Follow those rules often enough to turn them into a pattern. Then apply variation and surprise everywhere else.

And the rules themselves don’t matter. They can come to you as you stand underneath the shower. You can design them following some mathematical principle. You can pick an existing song, find its rule, then turn it on its head.

Here’s a last example to make certain this concept has nestled in your brain!

I picked two random rules:

• Very short note, followed by a very long one
• Either notes are the same, or they jump by intervals of a sixth

This isn’t amazing … yet. But it takes ten seconds to create this structure, from which you can make the melody prettier (using everything I taught so far).

It’s always easier to start with something, than to start with a blank page (or “silent song”).