hey, welcome to 12tone! melodies are hard. when you start learning music theory, it's
easy to get the impression that it's all about harmony, that all our rules and guidelines
are just about how to put chords together, and that when it comes to melodies you're
just supposed to magically know what'll sound good, but that, of course, is nonsense. writing a good melody is just as complex,
just as structured, and just as important to learn as writing a good chord progression,
it's just that the rules are a little harder to define. but today I'd like to look at a couple of
the most important concepts underlying melodic composition. first of all, a melody is made up of intervals. how it sounds depends mostly on the way it
moves between notes. ok, that's pretty obvious, but let's go a
bit deeper. every interval, of course, will affect the
melody differently, but theorists like to break them up into two main groups: steps
and skips. steps are when the notes are right next to
each other, like G and A, or D and Eb. this provides a really clear connection between
notes, and that leaves them feeling fairly restrained. this melody (bang) is all steps, and you can
hear how every note feels almost bound to the ones on either side. step-heavy melodies also tend to have a fairly
small range, because it's hard to move all that far when you have to do it one step at
a time. skips, on the other hand, are anything larger
than that. this could be as close as a minor third (bang),
or it could be an octave (bang) or wider. (bang) where steps provide grounding, skips
provide freedom. large jumps allow you to quickly run through
whatever range you want, and their disconnected nature provides a sense of openness and power,
perhaps best exemplified by this recognizable tune (bang, it's the Star Wars theme) which
is just full of huge leaps. in songwriting, it's fairly common to see verses relying mostly
on steps, and then choruses that use plenty of skips to lift up the energy. personally, though, I find this method a little
too simplified, and I like to add a couple more categories. first, there's static motion. this is when the note doesn't change. (bang) theorists will sometimes ignore this
because, from an analytical perspective, you can kind of just lump them all together like
one long, sustained note, but I think it's a common enough technique, especially in modern
popular music, that it's worth recognizing. the other group is the thirds. these are intervals that are slightly wider
than a step, but still feel pretty close, and I don't really like grouping them with
the larger jumps. this (bang) and this (bang) don't feel like
the same category to me. I like to call the smaller ones "skips" and
the larger intervals "leaps", but that's just me. anyway, how the melody moves isn't the only
thing that matters: individual notes also have important jobs to do. we talk a lot about functional harmony, which
is the idea that different chords in a key have different jobs, or functions, but it
turns out that different notes in a key do too. in fact, the two are pretty closely related:
a chord's function is largely defined by the behaviors of the notes in that chord. for instance, dominant function chords are
dissonant, directional chords that point you back to the root of the key, and they do that
because they include the seventh degree of the major scale. this note, often called the leading tone,
sits a half step below the root. it has a really strong pull upward, and playing
it in a melody instead of a chord doesn't change that. it still wants to resolve upward. (bang) of course, it doesn't have to actually
go there. (bang) this is called subverting the leading
tone, and it makes your listener feel tricked, or cheated out of an expected resolution. it's a great tool, but one that should be
used carefully. most examples, though, aren't as clearcut. the fourth degree of the scale (bang) may
want to resolve down to the third (bang) or continue up to the fifth (bang) depending
on how you approach it. it may even want to leap away to the 6th (bang)
or 2nd. (bang) that may sound like it doesn't really
have a function at all, but that's not quite fair. in each of those cases, it's serving a specific
role, and its relation to the key defines what that role is. going from 4 to 2 (bang) isn't the same as
going from 5 to 3 (bang) even though it's the same interval. which note you're on still
matters, it's just that, depending on context, most notes can wear a lot of different hats. and finally, let's zoom out a bit. we're not concerned about individual notes
anymore: now we need to look at phrases. phrases, basically are complete musical sentences,
and they come in two forms: questions and answers. ok, technically they're called antecedents
and consequents, but it's pretty much the same thing. much like in English, the best way to tell
a question from an answer is by looking at how it ends. question phrases leave the melody hanging. (bang) it feels unstable and incomplete, and
that tells the listener that there's more music to be done. answer phrases, on the other hand, end with
a resolution. (bang) this provides a stronger sense of rest,
and allows the listener a chance to breathe before the next line begins. good melodic structure mostly relies on alternating
between these two types of phrases, but it's still a really flexible framework. you could just play the same basic phrase
twice, changing only the ending (bang) but you can also do a lot more, changing the answer
entirely to juxtapose against the question. (bang) you can ask two different questions,
or repeat the same one twice, before finally delivering an answer. you can even leave a question completely unanswered,
or end your whole song on one, as long as you're doing it on purpose. The rules are fuzzy because melodies are hard,
but if the melody I'm writing isn't quite working, phrasing is always the first thing
I check. of course, that's still not all there is:
melodic composition is full of interesting techniques, like motifs and decorations, and
that's not even getting into how they relate to the harmony, rhythms, and lyrics, but hopefully
some of this will help you write better songs and if not, well… thanks for watching! if you want to help make these videos possible,
please consider supporting 12tone on Patreon. you can also join our mailing list to find
out about new episodes, like, share, comment, subscribe, and keep on rockin'.
