It's easy to write a mediocre melody but it takes some extra effort to write one that's good.
In this video I'm going to show you five ways to make a boring melody more interesting.
So if you want to write melodies that people find
more memorable and enjoy listening to stick around!
Hey guys, welcome to my channel!
My name is Ryan.
I'm a composer for film,
TV and media, but I also love figuring out and talking about the way that music works.
In a recent video I talked about the period form and how we can use that form to write new themes.
In that video it took about 10 minutes to write a brand
new melody using the period form, but the result was kind of boring.
It was not the greatest melody ever.
So to make that melody better, today I'm going to go through five steps that
you can use on your own melodies to make them more interesting and more musical.
These steps are in no particular order, this is just the way I did it.
So the first thing I want to do is listen back
to that old melody and show you what we're starting with.
So the first thing I want to do here is make the rhythm more interesting.
There are a few spots that I think are pretty good, but in a lot of places it's very square.
It's very on the beat.
So my first thought is to use some syncopation
try to move things around and make it a little more active.
So you can see right here at the beginning I shifted that first note an eighth beat later.
That's to give the theme some momentum, a little energy.
It also gives some separation between the harmony and the melody,
which gives them some nice independence.
And then I did that exact same eighth beat shift forward in bars three, four, five and seven.
One big change I did make was in measure four,
I had that G holding out a whole note and that started to feel very boring
and static with everything before it starting to feel so much more active.
So I did change that to a lick that matches the rhythm of the rest of the piece.
So far looking through it I was otherwise pretty
happy with the way the basic rhythm was so I didn't make any other changes there,
but let's take a listen to how that syncopation makes things a little more interesting already.
The next thing I want to do is look for places where I can add some ornaments and frills,
grace notes, things that are going to bring it to life, make it feel a bit
more organic in a lot of ways and also make that surface level a little more colorful .
So to do that I'm looking for points where there's somewhere to accent
and where there's somewhere with room for more notes.
So you can see every two bars I started with a little grace note
up into the first pitch of the phrase.
And then I filled in these gaps here
in bar three and in bar seven with a little more rhythmic activity.
Some more notes to make it more flowing, feel more alive, and kind of connect the phrases more.
The other thing I did was bring the tempo up to 148 beats per minute because it's
starting to feel like it wants to be active, it wants to be energetic.
Probably the number one thing that anybody could do to make
their music better is to avoid a medium middle of the road tempo.
Either go slow or go fast, but if your tempo
is just kind of straight down the middle medium it feels uncommitted.
So let's listen to how the increase in tempo and these little ornaments and
grace notes give it a lot more energy and start making things more exciting.
So I used the period as the model for the form here,
and the textbook version of the period form is eight bars long.
But I do think I can make things a bit more interesting if I make it longer
by stretching those eight bars into something with a bit more substance.
There are three places you can make it longer.
You can make it longer at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end.
And the effects are a little bit different.
To add time at the beginning there's two things you could do.
You could add introduction material.
A lot of the times that just means use your accompaniment, let it vamp for a bar or two.
Or you could add some time after your first phrase and let it breathe.
I don't really think that breath is going to work here.
That will kind of kill the energy and the momentum.
But we could back up a bar and let the accompaniment come in.
For this example I'm just using placeholder pads,
I don't really have an accompaniment pattern, but I think for demonstration it could still work.
To expand time in the middle the best place to do that is anywhere where you have a sequence,
because it's very easy to keep that sequence going.
So for example in bar six there's that sequence of a third going up,
so I could repeat that third motive and keep going with it.
And it gives this kind of continuation feel, where things will just keep rolling
on towards that cadence until I'm ready to break out of the pattern.
And then the last thing you can do is add a coda or an ending, which is your melody
technically finishes, you're home ,but you have a little bit more to say to wrap it all up.
It might not always make sense to add a coda if you haven't changed
the length of anything earlier, because then you might become a little end heavy.
But if you have added some extra time at the beginning or in the middle
then maybe your proportions are off and it would help you to have a coda to have
some extra time to balance it out and make it feel like a more complete arc.
So here's what I get when I extend the length.
I have that extra bar at the beginning,
and again I have no accompaniment here so I'm just going to hold that harmony out.
Then I extend that lick of a third.
And with the harmony what I did was a very simple pattern.
So as soon as I started extending that third I could feel that there
was some more momentum and things were moving, so I upped the harmonic rhythm.
I went from instead of one chord every bar to two chords every bar.
It was very easy to go down from that Am7 to the F, the IV chord of the key.
So I figured if I'm going down by a third what happens if I keep going down by a third?
So I go down to the Dm.
What happens if I keep going down to a third?
In that case I'd get a Bº if I stayed in the key and that
didn't really sound right to what I wanted.
But I could go down a third to Bb
which is the bVII chord in the key of C, and it sounds perfectly natural.
I've already set up this pattern all the way back from the C.
From the C to the Am to the F to the Dm, our ear is just used to these rolling down thirds.
If I add a chord down a third from anywhere it's probably going to feel like it makes sense.
We've established this pattern.
So I can just keep going with it until I decide to break the pattern into the cadence.
Then I did two things for the ending of the cadence here.
I actually repeated this last lick that ended the phrase on the ii-V-I.
I repeated three times, which is kind of a classic move.
Then after I hit the I I did this kind of little amen chord progression thing
right at the very end to just extend that one bar ending into a four bar ending.
But notice melodically it's over.
I left it alone.
The theme has ended but I'm using these four bars to balance the one,
two, three, four bars that I added earlier in it.
So what we've done so far is we've spiced up the rhythm a little bit with some syncopation,
added some grace notes and fills to give it a little bit of life,
extended the length to give the whole thing some more substance, and increased the tempo.
So let's listen to what we've got so far.
The next thing I want to do is add dynamics,
because that's really where the life and breath of the piece is going to come from.
So I decided I want to start quiet at piano, and to make that introduction a
little more meaningful than just a pad why don't we have it sneak in from nothingness.
Then I have a slight swell and back down.
That might be felt more than it really is heard,
but the idea there is that that whole phrase is kind of a breath up and back down.
Then I repeat the same thing in measures three and four.
Then in measure seven and eight, where I had that sequence extended time,
I take advantage of that for a crescendo up into a big ending at the cadence.
And then to spice things up, on the third time through this final closing lick
I drop down suddenly to quiet and build up really loud.
And then the very same thing on that coda.
Drop down really quiet, build it really loud.
It's really a pretty quick combing through the piece.
Just saying, like, "OK, quiet, get a bit louder, come back down,
get a bit louder. Let's go loud here."
But when we listen through I think you're gonna hear that this is one of the most important steps.
It really does a lot to change from what we had before, which was very static and monotone,
into something with a lot more life.
So let's take a listen to the melody now that we've added dynamics.
So with the exception of the Bb and bar eight we've stuck to very
traditional diatonic harmony up to this point.
So the last thing I want to do is go through and see what other chords I could use,
what other harmonies I could do to make things more colorful and a bit more interesting.
So the first thing I looked for was places where I could use secondary dominants,
which really means five chords from another key that resolves to a chord in your piece.
So one of the things I want to do at the very beginning is
actually keep things pretty harmonically stable.
So I'm going to hang out on that C chord for the first phrase of the piece.
But there is room to get more interesting in the second phrase.
Looking at this G as a target, can we fit a D7 there to go to it.
And looking at the melody, every one of those notes fits under a
D7 naturally so I'm pretty sure it's gonna work.
And then when I see that I have this F here, rather than go
F-D-G let's take advantage of the fact that there's this line cliche available to us.
Here's just the harmony there.
And then I saw the same opportunity with the Am over here,
say "what's the V in Am? It's E7. Does this melody work on E7?"
And it's a chord tone from E7 so it's gonna work.
So let's listen to the harmony there.
Again a secondary dominant is just borrowing the V chord from another key.
You pretend that we're in Am for a moment.
How do we get there?
It's from the E7.
If you pretend we're in G, how do we get there?
With a D7.
The next thing I want to change is the repetitiveness in this final cadence phrase,
which is happening three times.
We did already spice it up a bit by changing the dynamics here, dropping it down to piano,
but we can take it a step further and just change one of these to be a little more colorful.
What I decided to do was twist the progression from
the major key that we're in to its minor parallel.
So instead of using C major chords we're using C minor chords .
Tis is a trick Mozart would do all the time.
It's super smooth because we're staying on that same tonic of C, so home hasn't changed,
but we're kind of changing the whole color of everything above it.
So just listening to those chords.
So I ended up using the II chord from minor, the Dm7b5.
And then the bVI to V from C minor, that Ab to G7.
And it's just a little bit of spice.
I didn't change half of the theme to C minor.
It's just this moment right here so it catches our ears like "that's different, what is that?"
And then I immediately change it back to the C major.
Then the last thing I did was use that same borrowing from the minor key
for this progression at the very end in the coda.
Before it was F to Dm.
I just changed it to Fm Dm7b5.
Really it's just changing that A in C major to an Ab from the C minor.
So now we have...
So before we listen to this final version let's take a quick listen back
to where we started with the original melody to see how much has changed.
And it's evolved just one step at a time.
So here is our original melody.
And now we have the final version after changing the rhythm,
the ornaments, the tempo, the harmony, and the length.
Oh and the dynamics.
It's important to remember that part of the reason this was so easy to do,
to go step by step just making these minor improvements,
is because we were starting with something that was solidly in a good formation.
It was maybe a little boring but it was using that period form which is a reliable structure.
The proportions were there, it had a story arc to it,
everything was set up for it to feel like a good tune even if it wasn't super interesting.
On the surface then we were able to go through just one
pass at a time and make these improvements.
Think of that period theme we started with as choosing the perfect block of stone
and then each of these other layers carving away into the details.
If you start with a bad piece of stone you're going to have a hard
time making a beautiful statue no matter what you do with it.
So using that period form was our way of kind of making sure we're starting
with a good piece to work around.
So thanks for watching, please leave a comment below to let me know what you
think and especially which step in this process you think is the hardest for you,
that you wish there was a video on that went into more detail.
Please don't forget to hit like and subscribe,
it really will help this new channel get started, and I'll see you in the next one!