demonofthenight

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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.