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!
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