The 4 Critical Parts to Writing a Melody

hey guys so in this lesson I want to talk about something very specific I want to take a scale and in this case I'm going to use AC minor scale so that one and I want to look at how you would take that scale and create melodies out of that and this could be in the context of improvising or you're writing a song or you're coming up with a solo or whatever now this is the kind of thing that you could spend a lifetime trying to get good at and rather than sit here and talk about this for hours and hours I'm going to give you what I think are the four most important things to start thinking about so you could you could consider this kind of a getting started guide or something so here's the problem here's what happens for a lot of people and you're starting out you learn some chords and learn some scales maybe a little bit about rhythm and you start trying to put it together and when you do you get some very disappointing and uninteresting sounding music so here's an example let's say I'm going to take a shot at this I'll use a C minor seven chord use this in the last lesson so hopefully it's kind of familiar I'll go ahead and invert it just be a little bit clever and then I'll play it with this kind of 6/8 rhythm okay and then in my right hand I'm just going to use this C minor scale so my first attempt would probably sound something like this okay now I know this is what it would probably sound like because I've taught a lot of people and this is usually what happens the first time they try this so on paper there's nothing wrong with this the cord is nice the rhythm is nice the scale is you know ifit's that's fine but obviously it's not very interesting and I don't think anyone would call that good music so the question is how do you make it good you know what are the things you start doing to get something good to happen and honestly a lot of this stuff is very counterintuitive it's not always what you kind of instinctively do so we will start with item number one when you create a melody you need space you know there's this feeling like you need to be filling the air with notes that's kind of what you feel instinctively but that is the opposite of what you want if you think about like a good actor they are very comfortable with silence if they take these long pauses and they communicate a lot with what they're not saying and you want to do the same thing here so if you took what I just played you know this if you kind of graphed it out I won't use you know full notation here just kind of a basic idea of the rhythm it would look sort of like this would be note note note now I'll show you what happens when I start putting spacing here I'm going to take this first note I'm going to play it and then I'm going to wait and then I'll play the next note and then I'll wait and I'll play two notes together and then wait and then two notes and then you know finally a bigger group of notes so it might sound something like this okay I'm not doing much more than just putting a lot of space and it sounds way better already so here's what that would look like if you map that out now this isn't a perfect graph but you can clearly see the difference between this and this just taking this and stretching it out and putting lots of space and making it just way more interesting by pushing things apart and putting notes of these different groups now you'll hear the term phrasing thrown around a lot you know people will say there should be kind of a question phrase and an answer phrase and music should sound like a sentence of that and that's all fine that's great but it can lead you to think the wrong way I think you know a lot of times saying you know that sort of question-and-answer phrase can a lot of times lead to something like this it's like you have a phrase and then you have another phrase and that's not a whole lot better than than doing this you know I think just thinking in terms of space in terms of putting silence in the music just kind of naturally leads to the idea of phrasing I mean this is well phrased but it doesn't look anything like this and it probably should this is not terribly interesting either now like I said this is kind of counterintuitive you know if you think about someone who's nervous a lot of times they talk way too fast and they kind of stumble over their words when you're writing music if you're not sure what to do you're not super comfortable a lot of times this is kind of what happens you wind up putting too many notes together and the the teaching community does a terrible job with this I think I can't tell you how many little workbooks or exercises I've seen you know where they'll give you like you know a couple measures or something and they'll say you know okay for these four measures fill in the melody it's like my melody has two measures of silence and then one note for the next two I mean it would look like this you know what kind of great are you going to slap on that one note so there's this kind of thinking that there needs to be a lot of stuff in a small amount of but there does that's almost never what you really want okay so item number one is space now honestly this is almost enough if you are good with space you would be astounded at how much you can do in fact one of my all-time favorite piano pieces is nothing more than a couple very basic chord changes a major scale and some really well chosen space I'll put a link to it if you want to hear it in fact I'll play the beginning just just so you can hear what I'm talking about it's called travel around Stars and that's it I mean obviously that develops throughout the song but it's not much more than that just some really really well chosen space okay so I don't number two I got to keep moving here number two um has to do with scales try not to think of scales as being scales I'll tell you what I mean this is kind of a sore spot for me almost always when you were taught a scale you're taught it in this very linear sense start at the beginning you play it to the end and sometimes you you know play it back down the other direction and in fact if you ask almost anyone hey play me a scale we're gonna do that I mean that's what I did a minute ago it's just kind of ingrained in your head but you were hardly ever going to play these notes in this purely linear way no I I know I just gave you an example of a song where that happens but that is super rare in fact the reason I brought it up was because it's so rare you know that's like one percent of the way you're going to do this if you want to look at these notes almost like the way a Pinner looks at a paint palette it's like each one is a different color and it has a different mood attached to it and it interacts with you know whatever you're playing you're left-hander or the rest of the music in completely unique in different ways for example you know playing in this case a C but that's my tonic note it's very final sounding it's almost like leaving a period at the end of a sentence you know it has a very strong role attached to it you know whereas playing addy this is a note that's not in the court it's not the tonic so it has this sort of tension attached to it and I can use that tension to sort of you know move into one of the chord tones like this up so this is in the chord it's a very powerful movement there because I'm using the unique properties of each note so rather than just play up and down I want to start looking at what each one sounds like and trying to get you know these different moods attached to each one now this this requires some knowledge of theory or at least understanding you know what what's happening in your left hand and what notes are part of the chord and you know how they they work kind of in the big picture of the key your knowing that you're this is your tonic note I'm not going to mess with a harmonic scale but know a leading tone this very tense sound that sort of stuff so you want to learn some theory for that but you also just want to have a lot of hands-on experience you want to play a lot and just really develop this field for you know what in the fourth scale degree sounds like you're playing a 1/4 you'll even learn that you know this sixth scale degree doesn't sound very good so I would you know probably avoid harmonizing that with the cord oh I did a whole lesson on core tones and non core tones and a lot of this stuff so I won't talk too much about it but that is kind of point number two is that you want to look at each note individually and really get a feel for what it sounds like and you should fight every instinct to just look at this stuff as this big line of notes all in order because that's that's naturally what happens when you're taught scales and you sit there in practice scales going from bottom to top you might not even realize it but that really gets burned into your head okay so keep moving number three number three is rhythm I'm going to spell it right for once now the idea here is that choosing when to plan out is every bit as important as choosing which particular note to play and so in my case you know if I'm if I'm playing in 6/8 kind of visualize the rhythm a little bit like this you know if I'm playing this one two three four five six you know have kind of this this strong part of the beat and then sort of weaker parts in that strong part in a weaker part that's kind of the gist of a measure of 6/8 all right so if I choose to put a note for example here then that's this is a perfect parallel but you can almost think about that like playing a tonic or the root note it's like a very comfortable sound and then you know if I choose to put a note say here it kind of sort of has this tenseness to it it's like it's not quite what you were expecting don't take that analogy too far because you don't necessarily need to resolve this into that or whatever that you could but just think of it as that you a note like this or putting it out here or putting a note here as a very comfortable predictable sound to it and putting a note here or there or there on one of these kind of weaker parts of the beat it has this less predictable more unexpected sound to it so to kind of combine these two ideas let's say that I'm going to take you know thinking about what each note does I'm going to take this scale degree number two this notice not in the chord I'm going to play it off of this note which is a note that is in the chord so we get this sort of tension resolution and if I start working with the rhythm I could say to start with plate you know if I put notes right here right on the downbeat it's got this very solid very predictable sound to it if I put that out say here instead I get this much looser much kind of less predictable kind of sound and what's really powerful is to start you know combining those things so I put some notes on beats like this in other notes you know say on these beats so it could sound like this right and just that small variation of using one of these weaker beats causes this to go from being very predictable and most kind of plotting sounding to something much better or at least more interesting to me now another thing you can do that I think is really cool is to do something like this where you put a note here put a note here and then put a note here and what this does and this is a measure of 6/8 and you know the whole idea was 6/8 is that you have these two beats and each beat has three little parts to it but by doing this you're causing this to feel almost like three four it kind of feels like there's you know one two three beats in here they call this a pollen this is a kind of a simple polyrhythm but that is what it is you're kind of doing these two separate rhythm styles at the same time so that would sound sort of like this I'll just use these three notes whereas the kind of normal 6/8 rhythm is to me like that so if I kind of combine these two things like taking this idea of putting notes and these sort of weaker odd spaces and then using something like this this kind of three over four thing it could sound sort of like this somethings were like pong with all this that you should look at the rhythm as is much of a choice you know as choosing which note to play you're going to be choosing when to play a note and putting it in these different precise locations creates completely different feels it can change you know everything about what you're playing okay so the fourth thing I want to talk about is repetition now this can also be very counterintuitive you know same thing with space where it feels like you're supposed to be filling the air with notes it can feel like you're supposed to be pumping out you know one cool idea after another but in reality that's that's actually very tiring for someone to listen to you know it's fatiguing the music you know keeps changing and it's hard to really you know get a grip on it and it actually just doesn't make for good music so you actually do want to be repeating yourself now often enough that's just a literal repeat you'll take a melody and you'll play it again later and you might even play that you know many many times but often you're going to do kind of more subtle things you'll take a particular pattern and you'll repeat that pattern maybe in different places and that gives the listener you know something familiar while you while you're also doing something new so for example I could take you know a little musical pattern like this this is a nice little gesture because it's starting on you know one of those notes that isn't in the chord and then you're moving your notes that are so it's this nice little tension resolution thing again okay and I can take that pattern and play it in different spots and create this really cool kind of music so it could sound like this right and if I just kind of played down that scale just sort of rambling and picking different notes it would kind of just it would sound like that like I'm just sort of wandering down the scale but by taking a pattern and repeating it in different places you know I'm giving the person listening something familiar to kind of I don't know sort of guide them through that so being repetitive is something you're going to look for and actively try to do and the more clever you can be about it you know the better try to repeat things try to repeat you know similar melodies or similar patterns or similar rhythms you know give the music some themes and try to you know establish those themes throughout what you're playing okay so I know that can all feel very abstract so as far as actually learning this stuff and getting good at it here's what I recommend do what I would call the two note challenge right so start by choosing two notes and to choose them think carefully about this idea that certain notes have certain sounds and others have different sounds so maybe you start with these two you know a core tone and at non-core tone and then you know playing this you know play only those two notes and try to explore the idea of space as much as you can when I'd see how long you can go before you think your heads going to explode you don't play another one or just see explore as many things as you can there so it might sound like this and just look at grouping notes and pushing them apart and doing the whole space thing and you know part of that would be rhythm start thinking about trying to put them in as many interesting places as you can and focus on that for a while and then maybe focus on repetition but do one thing at a time and just try to take that idea and explore it as far as you can and start getting comfortable with all these different things and I will leave you with one more example this is just something that I made up today while I was filming this video but hopefully you can just kind of hear the different elements of spacing and rhythm and repetition and that sort of stuff kind of coming together a little bit this is still just on one chord which I know is getting boring at this point but I wanted to keep it simple so here's just some little thing I made up anyway something like that hope you kind of get the idea with all this I know it's a lot but just one thing at a time and you should do great that's it for now support me on patreon if you want to help me make more of these leave me questions and comments let me know what you want to see next and I will see you in the next video thanks

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Views: 797,919

Rating: 4.9556103 out of 5

Keywords: melody writing, melody composition, melody mining, melody tutorial, create a melody on piano, how to create a melody

Id: iEKFuSQndhs

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2016