How To Write Better Vocal Melodies | Make Pop Music

[Music] what's up make pop music it's austin here from make pop music and austin hall audio and visual and we are back with another video and this week i wanted to talk a little bit about how to write better vocal melodies but before we actually hop in i do just want to say like every aspect of creating music this is going to be super dependent on your personal taste and style and preferences so just remember that whatever your personal taste is you just want to take some of these tools tips and techniques that i'm going to talk about in this video and apply those to your personal style you don't have to go copy my style you don't have to do everything to a formula as it may seem in these videos i just try to make them as structured as possible so you can follow along with whatever your personal style or preferences are so today we're going to be jumping into track and actually looking at how i would approach writing the vocal melodies we're going to go over some tips tricks and techniques that i like to use basically from start to finish and you'll probably pick up a few things that are not in your normal workflow so we're going to hop into that but before we do if you like this video make sure you like comment and subscribe it helps us out a ton and we really really appreciate all the support we can get and if you want to check out more of our stuff head over to makepopmusic.com where you can check out all of our free and paid content but without further ado let's actually get into the dot and talk about how you can write some vocal melodies all right so now we're actually at the desk and we're in the daw we're ready to start talking about some of these tips and the first thing i want to talk about is something that's not super glamorous it's something that we're not going to demonstrate in a ton of detail in this video but that is actually active listening when you're listening to music that you like so one exercise that i like to do is whenever there's a song that comes out that i'm really kind of resonating with or something that i think is extremely catchy or extremely just kind of contagious or it's got some cool elements that i like what i'll do is i'll typically listen to that song a ton and i'll actually go ahead and make a quick little word document or something like that where i can put the lyrics i can put different notes about the actual arrangement and doing this will definitely help you kind of determine what melody styles you like so you can make little notes about okay this line is rising this line is falling i'm noticing that i really prefer songs that are in these certain keys i definitely like writing in this tempo and then you can even start building off and seeing things like what kind of rhyme schemes do you like what kind of subject matters do you like and that's a really good way to use references where you can kind of analyze them and you can take different tips and tricks from those but you're not really just recycling the same melody from a dual leepa song that you heard and you liked you're more so like okay well i like how she split that rhythm up in the first half and then she kind of expands on that in the second half i like that the melody rises to the end of the phrase and then it falls in the next phrase and you just kind of want to pay attention to how the melodies will crescendo and how they'll kind of build throughout the song and just how they'd like to split it up from structural element to structural elements so if you guys want to see a whole video on active listening we could probably do an entire video just showing you how to actually go in and analyze a song and take some of those notes and kind of pull a song completely apart that way you can put it back together in your own way so let us know if you guys want to see that but that definitely had to be my first tip because that'll kind of build some of the things in your own particular taste that i think will really start to resonate with some of these extra little tips and tricks that we're going to talk about because again your taste is everything so if you can figure out what you like and why you like it you can start to figure out how to easily incorporate that in things that you're working on all right the second thing that i want to go ahead and do when i'm working on a vocal melody is determine what key i'm writing in so if you have produced the song you're probably going to have a pretty good idea of what key you're in or roughly what key you're in if you're working on a song that you've got hired to write or that you're working with for an artist or a producer definitely get the key that they're writing in because that will definitely let you know what chords and what different notes you can use while you're actually working on that song so let's go ahead and actually hop in and take a look at the song that we're going to kind of be working on throughout this video today it's just this quick little kind of atmospheric dark pop beat that i just made really quickly so we could write something over and it sounds like this so what you want to do basically is determine what key and if you have any experience in music theory at all even at a very basic level you'll probably be able to pick up on the key really quickly either by hearing it or just kind of determining what notes and what chords have been used but if you don't have a background in theory uh there's a couple different things that you could do one of the tools that you can use is something like auto key from antares and that'll basically just take a listen to whatever track you put it on so i like to put it on my main key track or my main bass track and then it'll just spit out kind of a rough uh key that you can kind of work in so i'll let it play for a second and see what it comes up with [Music] so this is telling me that it's f minor i know that that's actually correct because that's what i wrote the song in and if you don't want to use auto key you don't have the funds to get it or you just don't have access to it you can always use something like this free site musictheorysite.com they do have a tool on here where you can go to a key identifier and then you really would just need to put in whatever kind of chords you're using so you'll need to know what chords you're using but typically for playing guitar or you're playing piano you can easily at least pick that up so for this song i would just put in whatever chords i was playing on that synth and it would go ahead and it would spit out f minor as well and then once you have f minor you know that that is the key that you're going to be writing in those are the notes that you can use so you can literally just type in notes of f minor and then this will spit out all of the ones that you can see so you can use an f a g an a flat a b flat a c a d flat and an e flat so you'll know that when you're working on your melody those are the notes that you're going to want to stick to otherwise you're going to fall out of key unless you're going to do some kind of extra mode or some kind of different interpretation of that key so typically just find that key using something like auto key or something like that music theory site and then find out what notes you can use and then it's really just kind of your taste from there once you've found that key and you know exactly what notes you can use now it's time to determine what the goal of your song is and this is something that i like to think about from a melody level and then i'll kind of build on it with lyrics later and it's basically just determining what is the goal of the song especially once i put vocals on is it going to be something super inspiring is it going to be something very introspective and depressing is it going to be something happy and uplifting is it going to be something sexy is it going to be something anything it could literally be whatever kind of mood you want but that's going to have a huge influence on the kind of melody that you're going to do so like when we take a listen to this this is definitely dark it's definitely atmospheric so we could lean this into something that's sad and introspective we could lean this uh to something that's like kind of fun and sexy we could lean this more towards hip-hop more towards r b or we can kind of lift it up and take it in that pop realm especially once these drums come in [Music] and once you determine kind of how you want to structure those melodies to set aside that goal and that kind of mood and atmosphere that you want to go then it's time to start talking about the pacing which is actually our next thing and pacing will tie in really really closely with how you actually structure those melodies because it's as big of a part of your vocal melody as the actual note selection is so we can look at two songs for example that are very different and they create very different moods just from the way that the vocals are delivered one would be something like i will always love you by dolly parton or whitney houston where you have that big soaring chorus you know it when you hear it it's just big it's open it's airy and that big open feel definitely makes it feel cinematic it makes it feel authentic it feels really really desperate and that ties into the actual lyrics and the mood and the theme behind that entire song and it fits really well with the instrumental that is composed behind it so that song is a really good example of how you can use something like space and depth in your vocal to really basically say more by saying less the chorus of that song is super super simple it's literally just a couple words and phrases and just the way that they're held out just feels really really desperate it feels really intimate and personal and i think that that really gets the idea of that song where then on the other hand you may have something like hot girl bummer by black bear where the verses are kind of like a hook in themselves because it is just so fast and rapid firing and the song is kind of bitter it's kind of angry and it's kind of attacking somebody and the way that those really really fast melodies float on top of each other almost feels like a tommy gun and it feels like you're at a roast where somebody is just having this kind of lucid train of thought where they're literally just going phrase after phrase after phrase after phrase and having that kind of cadence behind those melodies and behind those words definitely makes it so those words poke out a little bit more and that verse definitely flows in the realm of kind of a hip-hop and pop verse but it's still kind of delivering the message that black bear wants while not getting too melodic and too soft so think of your melody as a way to kind of enhance the mood and the theme and you can really do that with note selection and with cadence selection the next thing that you're going to want to look at when you're writing vocal melodies is what do you want the dynamics of the song to be so are you going to have really small verses that then open up to these big soaring choruses are you going to have kind of faster speedy verses that will kind of die down into this really small like anti-chorus there's a bunch of different things you can do and again that's all going to be dependent on your taste which you can find from the song analysis or it's going to depend on your taste by the melody and the rhythms that you've already kind of chosen but this will really help you determine okay are my verses building on top of each other to create a chorus is my chorus going to be kind of an antithesis to the verse are they going to work in harmony or are they going to kind of contrast and those are really really big ways that you can tie in melody because if you have a song that basically feels the same for three and a half minutes it's very very rare that you're gonna get a listener to sit through and listen to that three and a half minutes if the melody is not progressing but if it's just progressing at a very gradual level that's also not really dynamic it's just increasing so if you're kind of building something up make sure that you can bring it back down you might want to mix faster melodies with slower melodies you might want to mix like a rising melody with something that's going to fall a little bit later it's all about tension and release and you can really really do that when you're determining what kind of vocal you want to put in your song and how you want that vocal to progress throughout the entire song all right now that we've gone over all of the technical stuff now it's time to actually get into the fun stuff and this is where your taste will really come in and the first thing that i want to recommend is just try different ideas you can either sit down with like your keys and you can kind of you know write them out with a keyboard or with a synth or with a guitar or you can sit down and have something like a voice memo on your iphone going or you can have something like a sure sm7b or another dynamic microphone that you and the other co-writers can just hold in their hand while you listen to the song on a loop these are all super common ways that kind of writing camps will deliver as many different vocal melodies as they possibly can and then they'll go in later and they'll kind of pick and choose what parts they like from what different ideas that they had just kind of naturally come up so we're going to do that really quick we're going to go through a couple different kind of variations and ideas that we could do behind the song so we'll take a quick little listen and then we'll hop in all right so super ambient we have space we could either create rhythm with movement in the vocal or we could create space and atmosphere and really just kind of uh build on the atmospheric vibe that we have going so what i'm going to do right now is i'm literally just going to pull up a piano so i'll pull up something like keyscape you can pull up literally any kind of synth or key sound that you want it really does not matter for this so now that we have our piano and we know what key we're in we know what notes we can use so we can use f g g sharp a sharp c c sharp d sharp and back to f so those are the notes that we can use so what i want to do is i'll quickly riff on this and then i'll do a vocal version where we're kind of just going to build it so we might get a little bit of latency but bear with me [Music] so what i like to do is i'll kind of try a couple different things i'll kind of do something that moves a little bit more like that and then i'll try some things that kind of uh you know just kind of depend on one particular note which is more of my personal style i typically like to stay between kind of three and five notes when i'm doing something because i don't want it to get way too out and i want to leave notes that i can kind of build on later so when i'm writing for one specific section i'll try to really contain that to three to five notes that way i'm making sure that i'm just saving a little bit um so let's do something like that all right so so i know that i kind of like staying right in there that kind of gives me room to bring it back down into more of the root notes or take it up to the next octave and in my personal vocal that gives me plenty of room to work with so now we'll go ahead and we'll just hum some stuff along alright so let's go ahead and hum something that's going to be a little bit more open and airy and then we'll try something that's a little bit more rhythmic so we could do something like this do so we could do something like that we could do something a little bit faster [Music] all right so we could really choose and pick and let's go ahead and talk about kind of how we can build it so if we do something super open then i'll probably want to speed it up when we get to these drums over here so let's just say we have something like so typically i'd have like a voice memo going or like a microphone or something like that where i could just keep track of ideas and typically what i'll do is i'll just hum and mumble until i find something that feels really catchy to me and i'll literally try as many ideas and especially if i have a mic going i might track four or five different ones so i can get something that i really like and so those have both kind of been in the same section let's go ahead and venture out of those couple notes and let's go to somewhere different in the key and see if we can find something a little bit different all right so let's try that that might be a little high for reverse that kind of feels more like a pre-chorus that you would kind of build on but uh let's just go ahead and try it [Music] all right so you can see that as soon as we determine that key and we know what keys and chords we can use then it really is just so much of personal preference but once you find a kind of rhythm then you can really expand on different melodies within that rhythm so again for each section of the song you might want to track something that's a little bit more open and melodic and then you might want to track something that's a little bit faster and you might even be able to frankenstein those where you kind of have an a and b section of the verse where you kind of have something open and airy and then you kind of speed it up or you can use it later for a chorus or pre-course or something like that so once you've tracked a few ideas and you kind of have a lot of things going for you typically what i like to do is i only have one here just for time i don't want to take up a ton of your time doing this with a bunch of different things because it's all kind of the same tool and technique but once you have something tracked this is just tracked on an sm7b with me holding it um it's not really a good take it's literally just me mumbling and it sounds like this [Music] once you have that something that i really like to do and i don't see a ton of people doing this is especially if you find yourself typically writing in the same kind of melodies or kind of refraining to the same kind of see what i was talking about earlier i typically stay between kind of three and five different notes and that's exactly what this is um and if you find yourself kind of writing in that same thing a lot what i like to do is then i'll literally just make a copy of this vocal so i'll duplicate the track and then what i'll do in cubase you just go to edit you go to functions and you can go to convert to real copy and now i can go in and i can edit this and it's not going to screw up the initial run so what we're going to do is we know the key we're in so we know exactly what chords and notes we can use so right here i'm going to take this up to let's take this up to like a g sharp and then for this let's take this up to that f and then for this let's take this like right here to that d sharp and then for these we can pull those right here to the c-sharp for these we'll pull these to a c and for these we'll pull these to a b so we should still be in the key let's go ahead and take a listen [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so i don't love that as much as the original so we can actually take it down a couple what i'm gonna do now is i'll pull these down just a little bit let's take these down to right here and uh let's see how this feels and we'll pull this down to f let's try this all right so what i'm going to do now is i think that if we drag that down to a c and we pull this down to that and then we need to just pull this down one more and probably this down one more let's try this [Music] all right so now we've got that now we can even build on that some more we could even i mean this is going to get super funky right here but let's just see kind of what we get and just remember that the more that you kind of mess with these and tune these up it's going to start to get super artifact this is really just in the writing process i've had this happen so much when i actually go to tune a vocal and i'll tune it to the wrong note and it ends up being a super happy accident because i just like it a little bit better so then i just go back and i retract that one little section so let's go ahead and take a listen to what this sounds like so like that's actually if i could you know perform that really well that would be really nice let me uh let me take this up even a little bit more and we'll kind of keep playing [Music] so really once you have that key just go in and you can kind of drag it anywhere you want like in cubase you can actually set the chord tracks and then it'll let you know by a color identifier what it falls into the key of core track just doesn't particularly work that well for my eye but this is a really really good way to kind of take a melody that you thought felt really good but it might be similar to something you've wrote before but you kind of like the structure and you like the initial idea and you can just repitch it however you want so this is also like i said before a really really nice way to add harmonies and it's just sometimes a happy accident when you're going through and tuning one of your vocals and you send it to the wrong notes so basically once you mix having those initial ideas and kind of analyzing your track and analyzing other things you like you've kind of determined your style you've determined what your goal for this song is you've given yourself time to kind of try a bunch of different melodies and then you really go in and you just experiment with the melodies that you've come up with that is typically how i like to go about writing my vocal melodies and again it's just all taste and you might want to experiment with how much depth and how much room you leave because typically what i find in super amateur sounding top lines is they just don't have enough room in between stuff so like it works for something like this it's kind of fast spoken and it's kind of driven like a hip-hop track but if you have a pop song and you're just finding that uh it just feels a little corny or a little kitschy it's probably that your melodies are just a little bit too on the nose and you're not really leaving any room for anything to kind of set in with a listener and create some space and some depth in the actual song itself but i think that's pretty much going to do it for what we're going to do in this video again so taste dependent but again if you want us to cover any of those initial ideas especially like active listening and analysis let us know we can do a whole video on that because that could be a 30 minute video in itself but again just develop your taste and then you can develop your tools to actually hone in on that all right and that's my approach to how i go about writing vocal melodies as you can see it's really just about thinking and planning before i actually go into the writing stages and most of that happens subconsciously like i don't sit down like i do in these videos and literally go okay what's the focus of this song what am i doing i need to write down all these notes it's typically something that kind of comes especially if i'm producing the song in that production phase and then typically i just carry that over to writing the vocal but for these videos i do like to demonstrate that as kind of intentionally and clearly as i possibly can and then it's literally just about trying different things make sure you have that voice memo running or you have something like that dynamic microphone in your hand you can lay down all of those ideas and kind of pick and choose sections that you like and then once you get a really really good melody feel free to pop it in you can kind of tune it retune it however you want see if you can find any happy accidents and then you just have to put in the lyrics and kind of refine everything as one cohesive song but hopefully this video helped you write vocal melodies again this is so subjective and this is so dependent on taste and style i don't want any of you to kind of get pigeon holed into a certain thing or into a certain formula but i do hope some of these tips and tricks can actually help you when you're in your writing process so let us know what you think of the video if you have any questions comment below if you like this video like comment and subscribe it definitely helps us out a ton and again if you want to check out our stuff head over to makepopmusic.com but that's going to be it for this video and we will see you guys next week until then much love everyone peace out [Music] you

Channel: Make Pop Music

Views: 105,899

Keywords:

Id: -Zer3UEfdOk

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021