There are an infinite number of ways to write a melody,
but behind almost all of them are just two basic patterns.
Once you understand how these patterns work and how to use them your themes will have a
better overall shape, better proportions, and it will be much easier to write new melodies.
I use them every single time I write because they are that useful.
So let's go!
Hey guys, I'm Ryan.
I'm a full-time composer for film, TV and video games,
but I also love understanding and talking about the way writing music works.
So there are two basic forms, or patterns, I use when writing melodie.
One is the period form and the other is the sentence form.
Today we're going to talk about the period.
I'll talk about what the form is, what the different parts are and how they're put together,
and then we'll take a look at Octopath Traveler which has a great example of the period form.
Stick around to the end of the video because that's when we'll write a brand
new track using the period form and I'll show you how useful it really is.
So in its basic version the period is an 8 bar form.
There are ways to make it shorter or make it longer but 8 bars is kind of the textbook version.
I'll explain what these terms mean in a moment, but we start with a two bar basic idea
followed by a two bar contrasting idea.
We come back to our original two bar basic idea and close it off with a cadence.
So the basic idea is your main motive, it's the main identifying piece of your theme.
If you think of any of your favorite themes or favorite melodies,
it's probably those first two bars that come to mind and that's the basic idea.
The basic idea holds the main motives and interesting material
that you're gonna use in the rest of your piece.
So the theme starts with a two bar basic idea, usually pretty harmonically stable,
and what I mean by that is you stay on your tonic or on your I chord.
Maybe you do branch out to different harmonies but generally there's a
sense of staying home, of not going too far away.
So after your basic idea you respond to it with a contrasting idea
this is usually new material or variation on the basic idea.
It feels like some sort of response.
It feels like we're going somewhere, we're moving forward from that beginning.
The most important thing about the contrasting idea is that it feels like a question.
By the end of the phrase we should feel like we're unresolved, that there's still more to come,
that we want more, and that the theme isn't finished yet.
This whole first phrase, the question, is called the antecedent,
and then it gets responded to and answered by the consequent.
The beginning of the consequent, and this is very important, is you return to your basic idea.
You can vary it, you can change it, but really at least the beginning of the basic idea should
be the same so that our listener can hear it and understand "Oh yeah this is where we started."
So it should be pretty clear we're back to where we were in bar one.
So bars five and six are the repeat of the basic idea,
maybe with some variation, and then finally in bar seven and eight we have the cadence.
This is when you wrap it all up.
It could be a perfect cadence that feels like we're all done and we're home .
It could be a half cadence, but it should feel like a pretty strong sense of punctuation.
We should feel like the whole eight bar theme
was a complete thought and we're ready for either a repetition of it or for something new.
Usually I think it's a good idea for your cadence to be the opposite
of whatever happened in your contrasting idea.
So if your contrasting idea ended on the V chord
you probably want to end your whole theme on the I chord.
Or it could be the other way around.
Your contrasting idea may have ended on the I chord
and you want to end the whole eight bars with a half cadence on the V chord.
So I said before the whole theme feels a bit like a question and an answer.
Another metaphor I like is to think of it kind of like tossing a ball up,
and it hangs in the air and we're waiting for more,
and then the second four bars it falls back down and we have a conclusion.
The two most important parts are that that contrasting idea leaves us with a feeling of
wanting more and that bar five brings back the basic idea and we feel that sense of return.
I think some people think it's called a period form as in a "full stop" or a "period punctuation
mark," but I think it means period more in the sense of a passage of time like a season.
And I've heard the period described before as a
circular shape because we have that basic idea that returns.
So let's take a listen to Cyrus the Scholar from the Octopath Traveler score by Yasunori Nishiki.
We'll listen through the theme one time and then I'll go through and point out the key moments.
So we have this one bar intro and then the theme actually begins with a pickup.
Our two bar basic idea is right here.
Notice that it's on the F minor chord the entire time.
That idea I said before of harmonically stable.
We're just staying on F minor.
It's home, we're not going anywhere.
It's followed by the contrasting phrase which has some similar rhythms
and some similar motivic shapes but we can see that harmonically it gets much more interesting.
We actually have a chord progression happening.
That I minor leads to the V chord and we reach up to this high Eb as a peak to the whole phrase.
And then very importantly notice we ended on the C pitch and that C chord, the V chord.
It feels unresolved.
It's that question mark, that ball tossed up in the air.
At the end of this whole first four bar phrase it feels incomplete.
We know that there's more that needs to come.
And then in bars five and six we get the basic idea back exactly how it was before.
It's clear to anyone listening "Oh yeah, I recognize this.
This is from the beginning of the theme. This is familiar."
And I think subconsciously people actually know "OK, the first time I heard this basic idea
you led it to a question mark. This time I expect it to be resolved.
To actually have some sort of ending."
And we get that ending in bars seven and eight
with the cadence, which is pretty traditional here.
I-V-I.
It's pretty clear to our ears "OK, the theme has ended. This is the end of the eight bar phrase."
Either we're going to repeat it, or something new is going to happen,
but we feel pretty satisfied that this was a complete arc.
So let's listen through one more time.
We have the basic idea.
Contrasting phrase which is more harmonically interesting.
A question mark.
We come back to our basic idea and we close it off with a cadence.
This is a textbook example of the period theme, but it works.
It's a nice melody.
There's nobody listening to this thinking "Oh no, he just copied the period form!"
It doesn't work like that.
These are the patterns that work.
These are the forms that are satisfying to listen to and feel like a good musical story.
If this makes you think of another melody or theme that uses the period
form, please let us know down in the comments.
We'd love to know what you find.
So let's use the period form and write a new melody, and I'll show you that using
this formula or this pattern you can get 80% of the way there to a good melody pretty quickly.
So I'm going to start by just labeling my different sections like this.
Now as far as an idea, why don't we look
at the end of Cyrus the Scholar and see if there's anything we can pull out of there.
So there we had...
So let's shift that over to C major we would get...
And if we put that in 4/4...
That's my basic idea.
That's just going to be over, it's a C major chord.
We'll hold that down and we'll even give it just a placeholder chord for now.
Let's hear what we've got.
Oops, I wanted this to be...
Now we need a contrasting idea, and I already know that here I'm gonna want that G, that V chord.
I'll do this one.
So maybe I can think of a way to build to that.
Maybe just to keep this simple for now we'll just do a IV-V.
So I'm already just going to plan F chord to the G.
OK, so I skipped ahead through some of that noodling.
What I came up with, I want that I will climb there.
I'm gonna keep the same rhythm we had before.
I'm gonna go... let's just do that.
That's just like the Cyrus the Scholar did, he did that fifth in the melody.
So placeholder chords for the moment.
I think I'll probably do my usual C over G to G.
Fill in the chords here.
I'm going for the basic overall shape and then
I might come back and try to make things more interesting.
Maybe I'll try different chords or different
intervals but this is to get us most of the way through.
Then I'm going to come right back to that opening idea.
And it's kind of nice to think that all this time has been saved.
I'm already three quarters of the way done just with that move, but it really works.
So let's hear what we've got so far.
So now I'm back to that basic idea and I want to lead to a cadence.
So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to start bar five exactly how I did in the beginning,
but then go somewhere new for bar six.
And so I think an obvious but probably good sounding place to go would probably be
to the A minor.
So if we just try that out even.
That will work and then let's just go real traditional while we try to finish this off.
IV-V-I.
Put in our half notes here.
So I'm already planning out my chords because I know that these are the points I want to hit
harmonically to make the shape feel right and to feel like the proportions are satisfying.
So now I'm looking for some sort of closing phrase.
My thought is to kind of lean towards the contrasting idea that we had before
and see if there's anything in there I could use.
But instead of kind of going up we'll just bring it back down.
One of the most useful things I ever read was this idea that the ends of
themes are much less important and much simpler than the beginnings of themes.
That if you look at a lot of the great music,
the end of the theme is a lot of times like a scale going down or an arpeggio.
And that really freed me up to realize that I should spend most of my time
on the basic idea, the beginning of the theme, and that the whole point of the
ending in the cadence is to kind of wrap it up, simplify things, get towards the end.
So I'm not going to overthink this.
I'm looking for something that fits this IV-V-I progression and gets us back down to the C.
Listen back.
That will work.
So there you go.
I already have a melody completely finished.
Basic idea, contrasting idea, return to the basic idea and cadence.
It's pretty plain right now.
It's in C major.
It's using very traditional harmony.
But there is an arc to the first four bar phrase.
There is an arc to the second four bar phrase.
And that also manages to give us a whole climax and peak for the overall eight bars.
So there you go.
It's pretty traditional. C major.
Very traditional harmony, keeping it pretty safe and diatonic.
But I'll put on the screen here how long that actually took me to write
before I cut out some of the fluff in the middle.
But hopefully you can see that it was pretty quick to get a theme that's pretty good.
Now the rest of my time can be spent trying to figure out how can I make this more interesting.
What can I pull out of here?
What different harmonies could I explore?
Or maybe I keep it how it is pretty plain for the beginning and I want to explore more interesting
chords and harmonies and intervals later in the piece.
So that's the period form.
If you have any questions or comments, things you want explained a bit further,
please let me know in the comments below.
I can respond to you there.
Or you can help me know what I should make future videos about on this topic.
The next video in this series will be the sentence form which
is my favorite of these eight bar formulas.
A lot of the theory from this form comes from one of the books that I
talk about in this video so please do check that out.
So thanks for watching and I'll see you then!