How to Write a Great Melody (Over Chords)

let's say you found a chord progression that you really like how do you write a melody line that fits with it take this progression four chords a minor g f e seven it's a really common progression known as the andalusian cadence after its use in flamenco music [Applause] [Music] my friend jake over at signals music studio just did a video all about it where he shows how it sounds in various styles it's a lot of fun do check that out afterwards if you want to learn more about this progression so let's use this as an example how would we write a melody line over these chords [Music] if you're a songwriter you might just try stuff out just try singing some melody lines over the top until you find something you like and of course that's totally fine but what if you're struggling to come up with ideas [Music] well that's where i'm here to help and i'm going to give you 10 tips for writing a great melody over an existing chord progression and these will work by the way not just for songs but for instrumental music as well so we'll count down from 10 starting at the most obvious ideas and gradually getting more and more subtle the way we handle our melodic lines and first up let's look at the notes from the chords so here's our progression again and each chord has three notes the a minor has a c and e g major has g b and d the f major has f a and c and the last chord the e seven has four notes e g sharp b and d so i've roped in my friend charlotte who's an amazing violinist and i'm happy to say she's going to play all the examples for us today which should make things a lot more enjoyable to listen to and for our first example the very simplest thing you can do is just use the notes of each chord as you move through them [Applause] [Music] let's try another example but this time slightly faster [Music] if you think this approach might seem a bit limiting there are some pretty famous tunes that have been written using nothing more than the notes of the chords below but our first example did more than just stick to the chords if i take the starting note of each of the bars i've written it's the same as the chords in each case a g f e but you could easily choose one of the other notes from the chord and create a different overall shape in fact that's just what jake did in one of the tracks in his video now instead of playing these entire chords let's just play one note from each chord alright so for my a minor chord i'll just play a for g major i'll just play the b for f major i'll play c and for e7 i'll just play the d so i've picked one note of each chord it gives me the simple ascending pattern of a b c d so now let's try using a similar melodic pattern to before but now beginning on these new starting notes so here are the four notes jake found the a b c and d and here's a melodic sequence that uses them and again the faster version [Music] now any standard major or minor chord known as a triad has three notes so it has three different inversions depending on which notes at the bottom so here's the standard one in a minor with a at the bottom that's called the root position and then there's the first inversion with the c at the bottom and then the second inversion with the e at the bottom and in the first three bars of this example we've moved from a line that starts in root position on a minor to the first inversion on g major to the second inversion on f major and you can hear how each bar has a slightly different feeling it's now just a tiny bit less predictable than it was in the first version so so far we've only used notes that are part of the chord and that's a dead simple way of making sure everything is going to sound good but of course it's pretty limiting so let's try now using a few notes that aren't part of the chord one of the easiest things to do is to add notes in between the notes of the chord these are often called passing notes [Music] here you can see i've made a scale by adding in a b and a d in between the notes of the a minor chord so the a c and e are all from the a minor the b is a passing note from the a to the c and the d is a passing note from the c to the e one of the most effective ways of adding a bit of emotion into your melody line is with what's called an accented passing note that's where the note that isn't part of the chord falls on the beat which gives the phrase a little bit more motion or tension on the third beat of each bar here we have an accented passing note which i think gives a real kick to the phrase [Music] so a passing note is a kind of non-chord tone a tone that isn't part of the chord below there are lots of other kinds a neighbor tone a changing tone an escape tone i don't think it's very important to know the names of any of them but it's good to be aware of which notes are part of the harmony and which are bear in mind that a non-chord tone will create a certain degree of tension in comparison to a chord tone but that however tense it is you're never more than a step away from a resolution so to round off this section on non-chord tones let's make a longer line filled with loads of them try playing this section back a few times and listen out for the way each note works relative to the chord beneath try listening through once just looking out for the chord tones and then again just for the non-chord tones [Music] oh but hang on we haven't quite finished yet with our non-chord tones a different way of thinking about them is that they're notes that you've borrowed in one way or another from another chord this leads to things called suspensions anticipations and pedal tones again these are good at introducing tension or emotion into your line and remember you're only ever one step away from the resolution so here the a from the a minor chord is held over into the g chord creating one of those little juicy moments of dissonance which then resolves satisfyingly onto the b and the same happens in the next bar the b is suspended over the bar line here clashing with the f major chord before resolving upwards to the c [Music] anticipation is the reverse of this process play a note from the next chord before it arrives here the d is not part of the a minor chord instead it's anticipating a note in the g chord that follows again the same with the c at the end of the next bar [Applause] and finally a slightly longer-term way of holding harmony from one chord to another is a melodic version of a pedal tone which is a tone that's held through a series of chord changes you normally associate pedal tones with chords a tone that's held over in the bass from one chord to another but it can also be a very effective melodic strategy giving a sense of continuity to the melody even as other notes change here the f and the e remain unchanging throughout creating a slightly different feeling against each chord [Applause] so we've made a good start on how to approach creating a melody over a chord progression we've looked at how you can use just the notes of the chord and at the various ways you can use notes that don't belong to the chord so what's the next tip one word that's come up which we haven't talked about yet is the sequence here are the first two examples we saw in both i used a shape and moved it down in each chord so you have the same shape but over a different chord in one example it was a simple arpeggio going up and down [Music] and in the other it was a more lyrical melody line both take the shape from the first chord and then simply move it down with the next chord and that's called a sequence the same melodic shape moved on to a different chord and probably the vast majority of melodies use sequence in one form or another a sequence is a kind of shape and we should also think about the overall shape that our progression makes if we go back to those first examples you may have noticed another thing that both melodies did they both did something different when it came to the last bar this wasn't actually something i planned but i realized afterwards that i'd responded to the shape of the chord progression this progression does have an obvious shape the chords lead downwards one after another [Music] so obviously that might mean your melody has some kind of downward motion but more importantly to me i think it gives this final e7 chord a sense of arrival the chords form a sort of downwards arrow and that final e just sounds like the place they're all leading to oh careful dorian so instinctively in both cases i ended up doing something slightly different in both final bars i took the pattern we'd had before and i slightly altered it to give it a bit of a sense of ending on our arrival the structure or the shape of the chords has influenced the line above so i think it's good to think about the overall shape of your progression but bear in mind deciding what that shape actually is will not always be quite so obvious as this one to take another quite standard chord pattern c a minor b g now you could read this progression in a bunch of different ways you could see it as a sort of see-saw rocking either side of the c or you could see it as a series of falling fifths a minor d g c all leading down to that final c or you could think of it as d minor and g as a two five on one part and the c a as another part so a kind of two part structure none of these are right or wrong but in each case it gives you a different way of thinking that will probably give you different ideas as to how the melody line should behave above that but you could also think in terms of the overall shape of the melody particularly in terms of register this is a concept i first learned about in indian music where the notes of the raga are gradually introduced one by one climbing higher and higher little by little even if your melody is only a few bars long a sense of its overall register changing in some way can be very powerful just listen to how the notes gradually rise in this example so we've talked a lot about patterns but sometimes you'll find the pattern you're using doesn't fit the situation and that's where our next tip comes in when you're writing melodic lines these kind of little corners where something doesn't quite fit always make for an interesting challenge let's say for example we like the first two beats of our melody and we know that we want to end the bar on a high e on the fourth beat if we just carry on the way the pattern would naturally continue we end up on a slightly uncomfortable d or as i did originally i ended up on a g sharp it sounds okay but it's not quite what we wanted with that top e so what other options have we got well we might try a little chromatic slide instead or you could try a longer chromatic slide like this or you could really go for it with a higher arpeggio like this and this is where your creativity comes in as a composer you've got to try and find a way to manipulate the pattern just tweak it here and there to get it to do what you want we talked earlier about the non-chord tones and how you'll usually want to move either to them or away from them by step well thinking about the balance in your melody between stepwise motion and larger leaps is something that's worth generally keeping in mind a melody that is all leaps will sound a bit chaotic and all over the place especially when you combine it with non-chord tones the sort of stereotype of an atonal melody people sing is basically exactly this you know a tonal flamenco but the other extreme a melody that moves only by step will be probably be dry and uninteresting [Music] think of it this way movement by step is the minimal effort approach to melody and any leap is to some degree an expression of effort whether you can say a leap is by default more emotional or more expressive i'm not sure but some kind of balance between steps and leaps is definitely important as so often my mother was right everything in moderation my second to last tip is not what you first think of when you think of melody rhythm and my advice here would be to not allow yourself to get too locked into the chord pattern as a rhythmic structure try to find rhythmic ideas in your melody line that change at different speeds to the chords below for example in this idea i used a little pattern that repeats over five sixteenth notes so it can't change exactly with the chord like that last example this forces you to find different solutions to figure out how to handle this unexpected clash for example in this case i really like the way the g only clarifies the harmony on the second beat of the bar so again creates a nice sense of suspense until things are resolved rhythm overall is way more important to melody than is often realized i enjoyed guy mitchell moore's video about melody writing where he took apart the imperial march from star wars and showed how the rhythm itself is far more important to the recognition of the theme than the pitches [Music] themselves it's almost unrecognizable there's no darth vader marching towards me there mate whereas if you just play the rhythm i'd argue that there's more darth vader in that than there is in the tone but the rhythm is a vital part of making your motif uh interesting when we think back and try to summarize all the ideas we've looked at here today we've seen how our starting point is the notes of the chords and then there are various ways we can add in extra notes to keep things interesting but the main overall point i would say it's important to think about alongside all this is how you are playing with the listeners expectations a simple repeating sequence like the one in the very first example quickly becomes boring if it's unchanged from one chord to the next we get used to the idea of what's coming and if the music does exactly what we expect our interest starts to fade by surprising us with unexpected notes rhythms that don't change with the chord and so on you're more likely to hold our interest but alongside that keep an overall eye on the sense of shape or progression how does it move or expand does it feel like it's leading somewhere or just going around in circles i very deliberately haven't talked about what you're trying to say with your melody and what kind of expression you're after instead i've aimed at something extremely practical a bunch of ideas that you can pick up and use straight away and get your own melodies going stay tuned in a second for a longer solo line i've written that incorporates all of these ideas and brings them all together i'll put a pdf of all of these examples up on my patreon if you're interested and if you'd like to support the channel do please consider joining my fantastic supporters over there thank you so much to everyone who already does thank you for watching and thanks again to charlotte for playing so wonderfully and i'll see you in the next one [Music] my [Music] [Applause] hey [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 112,529

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Id: jA7gdz56LtY

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 03 2022