demonofthenight

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CONTOUR

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Well this is going to be a hilariously short and simple article.

Contour is describing the curve of a melody. A good melody should make it’s ascent up towards a climax note (where the melody hits a peak) and make a controlled descent down. A descent that’s short in respect to how much the melody rose doesn’t sound very good.

Notice how this example rises to a D and than comes back down (relatively) slowly to an Bb? Also notice the nice curve this melody makes.

Melodic contour can make an arch (or it can go the opposite way and make a trough), like in the first two phrases of Sunday bloody Sunday; or it can make a ramp, like the last phrase of Sunday bloody Sunday. As long as your melody is moving with purpose and not stagnating, it really doesn’t matter which you do.

Contour also comes down to the range of a melody. For a singing melody, it is best to keep the range under one and a half of an octave, as not many non-musicians have a greater range than one and a half octaves.

For an instrumental melody, I suggest you make the range as large as possible without sounding bumpy.

Well, that’s it. Go home, nothing more to see here.

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PHRASING

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I’m going to introduce phrasing as early as possible, due to the fact it’s by far the simplest and most useful topic I’ll cover.

What is phrasing? A musical phrase is the same as a written phrase. Think of a musical melody as a written phrase. Look at a few of my sentences; they use punctuations (pauses) and full stopes, making it easier to read. A musical phrase is the same thing.

Phrasing, even in its literal definition, has many different and arguable meanings. For instance some people on UG believe phrasing is about pick attack and minute (but important) rhythmic differences in the way one can play the same melody.

In this article, good phrasing means meticulously structured melodies and intelligent repetition that avoids sounding obnoxious.

A paragraph is called a motif. A sentence is called a phrase and the bits separated apostrophes and sentence extenders (and, because, therefore, furthermore) are units. An essay is a song.

Check out the example below. Notice the wavy lines, these are called phrase markings. When analysing music, you should put phrase markings in.

Sometimes phrases won’t have units so don’t worry if you think you can’t discern units. If a phrase is partitioned into units, you will clearly see two parts to the same phrase, but it won’t look or sound separate enough to call it two phrases.

You can usually tell the phrase and unit ends by singing it. The phrase ends are where you take a quick breath to continue humming or singing it. Use this technique with caution, as it’s much more efficient to be able to take a quick look at a melody to analyse it.

you cannot have a big block of notes in you music that have no direction or punctuations seem to flow endlessly without a break just seem thrown together without any sense of thought or creativity because a machine can pull random notes out of its arse and throw them over a progression which would not have any flow and the listener will get annoyed stop listenening it wont be very good just like this paragraph which you should have stopped reading but you havent because your obviously either a very bored person or you have an awesome attention span i think you should divert your attention to the rest of what i've written is a big block of word like a wall of text that most people too long didnt read.

That previous paragraph is an example of what not to do, musically.

When writing a melody, don’t write it like an improvised solo (but you can write an improvised solo like a melody). Try to keep referring to a (musical) main idea. Repetition is probably the best way to do this and I will go into further detail later.

For the moment, there are some guidelines I would suggest beginner writers to stick to.

1. Structure your phrases only x amount of notes. Keep them regular. No 3 note phrases and than 10 note phrases unless you know what you’re doing, it will sound disjointed.

2. Stick to 3/4 timing. It’s the easiest way and I'll go into why later.

3. When transcribing your noodlings, bar them so each phrase is about 1 or 2 bars in length (not 1 and a half or 2 and 3/4!). This is something you'll notice in most melodies, although most composers will bend and break this rule.

These above rules are mostly to keep your melodies neat. At first they might seem strict but they’re not. All you need to do to abide by these rules is remove or add a few notes by embellishment or change the rhythmic value of some notes.

Don’t be afraid to leave a bar mostly (or completely) blank. This should be done to keep the melody neat.

Don’t worry if you're noodlings are only 2 or 4 bars to start with, in the end you can beef these 2 phrases out to 32 bars.

Repetition is probably the easiest way of beefing out melodies. To do this, label each phrase as A, B, C or D and apply some pattern.

The most popular patterns are:

AABA

AABC

ABAB

ABC

AAB

ABA

These patterns have been copied heaps by jazz and classical composers. Check out Mark Levine’s Jazz Theory Book for some examples of what songs use these forms.

You can use modulation to further the expansion of your melodies. It’s best to repeat the melody in modulation to the relative and the parallel minors or to nearly related keys (follow your CoF’s).

See the form used in My Favourite Things is A, Ad, A, Ad, B, Bd, C

What I mean by “Ad” and “Bd” is a developing phrase

A form of repetition in music is also called development (see the example Dance of Death). Each development should have some sort of variance. By doing this we are forcing our songs to be catchy, yet keeping them from being obnoxious.

Remember to keep the amount of unity level with the amount of variance (use your ear). What I mean by unity is how much each phrase is alike to the previous phrase (whether it’s a developing phrase or not). Even B phrases should have some similarities to A phrases.

The most common form of development is to repeat the most important sounding bits of a phrase. You know those bits that sort of become well known in the song? Those are the bits composers like to repeat. London Bridge (below) and “Polly put the kettle on” are really obvious examples of this.

Most development revolves around this sort of repetition. Offcourse, other techniques are usually combined with this.

Most developments and repetitions actually use embellishments. Thus the reason for me introducing embellishments so early.

You could also develop by starting on a different degree. This means although you are keeping within the scale (try to keep your beginning melodies diatonic); you now start on a different note, but keep all melodic intervals diatonically the same as before.

Notice the repetition in the second phrase of London Bridge.

It’s also a smart idea to develop by changing a few key notes in the development, usually the size of a disjunct interval. This is especially effective if it’s the first disjunct intervals that you are changing.

Notice the double note embellishments, the passing tones and how the first phrase resolves on a G#, yet the next phrase resolves on a C#.

Although rare, another form of development is to develop by inversion. It

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EMBELISHMENTS

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I’m going to explain embellishments (or elongations) and diminutions earlier than I should because you’ll need it for some of my other articles to remain comprehensive. It’s a difficult subject and will probably require a lot of questions (which I’m willing to answer). If this article is too much, just skip it and come back to it when you need it (later when I’ve finished my other articles.

Disjunct movement means your melody is moving by more than a degree.

Conversely, stepwise or conjunct movement means your melody is only moving by one degree, which is usually done to resolve.

In addition to regular phrasing analysis (it’s in my next article), you can also think of the first note of each unit and phrase and every climax note as a sort of sub melody. You could even write a sub melody first and add on to it.

Writing like this is very archaic and was usually done in the pre-tonal/chord years. This style of writing has been done too rarely in contemporary music for me to find a real example, so here’s a song I wrote (badly).

Notice the rhythmic simplicity of this song? Now we can use embellishments and passing tones

An embellishment is when we add notes (preferably non-chord tones) to the melody in such a way that the same melody is coming through but there are more notes. Embellishments are usually approached or resolved by conjunct movement unless the embellishment is a chord tone of the implied harmony.

This is effective especially when we have too many syllables for one musical phrase or when a melody is melodically simple.

Passing tones are notes used in between two (usually chord)-tones. These are done quite often in jazz songs, especially as a chromatic run. They can be used chromatically or diatonically. I suggest you refrain from using chromatic passing tones unless you are writing for an instrument or if you are writing for a skilled singer.

Here is the end result of my melody:

The accentuation marks are the original melody. I’ve also added the implied harmony, which would be the harmony I would use if I added accompaniment to this melody.

Notice at “a” I make a leap to the non-chord tone A. This is fine because it resolves downwards to that G, part of our original melody.

At “b” I use a chromatic passing tone (G#) followed by a diatonic passing tone (A) to resolve the first phrase of our melody. Aren’t I tricky? Notice that the notes of the old melody, marked by accentuation marks, are still being played on their original beats.

At “c” I decided that the bar was too empty, so I incorporated one of the most popular embellishments, moving degree-wise out and than resolving back from where I came. This is a very common melody writing technique. I also used this technique at “g”.

Another easy technique is to merely double the non-embellished note, which I did at “d”. This is very common in contemporary music as it’s easy to sing. This is also done at “f” and “i”

I got sort of tricky at “e”. I decided I wanted to use two embellishments instead of one. For this, I used a similar embellishment method as “c”, but moved degree wise back from the first embellishment note. Simple and amazingly effective.

At “h” I used another common classical method of embellishment, which is very similar to “a”. My first embellishment is approached by degree wise movement, but than I skip by disjunct movement down to the other embellishment and resolve by degree-wise movement. This creates a nice effect that’s very easy to sing.

I’d like to explain “j”. At first it looks like a crazy combination of “c” and “b” (not actually a bad idea…, but it’s a little more complicated than that. In minor melodies (which this is in case you haven’t noticed) the best way to resolve is by conjunct movement from the leading tone. Well, the natural minor scale doesn’t have a leading tone so we add one chromatically. I decided I didn’t like the resolution of the original melody so I used a leading tone embellishment.

Well that’s just some embellishment techniques I’ve found. There are millions more and the best way to find them is by experimentation and analysing (preferably classical) music. Don’t be afraid to mix them.

I’d like you to take note that the resulting melody is not chronologically longer, there are just more notes used. The beats of the old melody still occur on the same beats as the new. Nothing is changed, all I did was add a few notes.

But what happens if we have too many notes? Well we do the opposite. To do this all we have to do is look for embellishment techniques and remove them, leaving a lot of chord tones. It’s just the reverse function of embellishment.

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INTRODUCTION

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Oh wow, where do I begin?

The best advice I can give you is to noodle. Just noodle on your instrument for melodies. Don’t ever use a musical convention to write a melody, use these conventions to perfect and explain a melody.

Just before you read on make sure that you have the basics in music theory, as in, complete major scale theory. This is not a beginners theory article, there are many free theory articles on the internet (please check out Josh Urban’s “Crusade” articles on this site). The purpose of my articles is to supply MT’ers with some tips into writing single line melodies for free (20tigers and a few others complained there were no melody writing books in their libraries).

My articles are also a response to the numerous pseudo-musical articles about song writing. In a nutshell, they’re about “writing things down” (HURRR DURRRRR) and “feeling your music,” now imagine that stretched into a 500 word article. Not fun, nor is it helpful.

Don’t expect that you’ll be able to write a chart topping pop song after reading my articles. Not going to happen. These articles might help a little bit but song writing is still a skill and still needs to be practised. Don’t even think I’m that good at writing music, I’m honestly not.

Anyone can write a melody. It's actually not that hard to write an improvised melody, just noodle on your guitar in scale for a bit and eventually you'll find something interesting whilst vaguely following a common idea. After that, it’s just a matter of applying what you know about writing accompaniment.

But writing a perfected melody is a bit different. Think of it as if you're writing a story or an essay, first you note down your ideas, then you paragraph them and then you reread your draft and edit it. No-one will write an essay in one go without at least having a mental idea of what your main points are. This is the same with music; your ideas are the noodlings on a guitar and your product is an essay.

Always write a non-improvised sounding melody as if it's written for a singer. Melodies that are easier to hum, yet interesting, are always catchy. Sure it’s nice to hear those bone crunching rock solos (*insert awesome classic metal star* FTW), but rock solos aren’t built to be catchy. Your melodies are.

As with an essay, be prepared to cut and crop and edit your melodies so they not only sound as you expect them to sound, but also fit well in and flow well. No independent writer will send out his first draft to be published, he would first look over it, edit it and add to it.

I will also expect the reader to be an avid listener in all styles of music and be able to recognise the most popular jazz, rock, classical and pop songs. I’ll try to use as many pop and rock songs as possible, this way some of you will retain interest. I won’t use too many classical songs as most of you only know the most famous classical songs.

By the way, steal my articles, copy them, print them, put them on your websites, hand them out to your friends, but just don’t forget to leave my name on it. As long as my name is written at the bottom of every article, I don’t care.