4. Melody

The melody of a song is a series of notes which represent the main or most prominent musical part. It’s “the notes of the tune of the song”.

Each section type typically has its own distinct melody (e.g. the verse melody will be different to the chorus melody) but may also have none (e.g. an instrumental intro which has harmony but no clear melody).

Melody and lyrics go hand-in-hand. When it comes to writing, you can write lyrics first and then compose the melody (sometimes called “setting the words to music”). You can also start from a melody and allow it to inspire lyrics which fit. In practice you will probably go back-and-forth, adjusting the lyrics to fit the emerging melody or tweaking the melody to match the lyrics as they shape up.

We know from Chapter 5: Active Listening that notes have four dimensions: Pitch, Rhythm, Dynamics and Timbre. Although Dynamics and Timbre are important, they belong more to the particular performance or expression of the music, whereas Pitch and Rhythm are what define the melody itself. We’ll cover these two dimensions separately below, for the sake of explanation and because tackling just one at a time can make things easier at first. In practice, and as your skills develop, you will most likely tackle the two simultaneously.

How To Write A Melody

Writing a “good” melody is often one of the most mysterious parts of Songwriting for the aspiring writer, especially for those who find that lyrics come easily but who haven’t studied music very much. What’s more, what constitutes “good” to one writer may not to another—or to a listener! Does “good” mean it’s catchy? Easy to sing? Fits the genre conventions? Distinctive?

As a musicality-focused songwriter, you’ll find that there are actually a range of building blocks and techniques you can draw on to demystify the process of composing a melody, and with our musician-centric Expansive Creativity approach, you can trust your own aesthetic taste and judgement to guide you to something you’re pleased with.

Rhythm

The Rhythm of a melody is its pattern of note durations and silences. In Chapter 13: Rhythm, Chapter 15: Improvisation, and Chapter 17: Expression we explore the power of rhythm for expressiveness and creativity. Although it’s easy to get fixated on note pitches when writing a melody, the impact of its rhythm is not to be under-estimated!

In Songwriting, the melody’s rhythm is very closely related to the lyrics—but, as we saw above, it is not necessarily the same as the rhythm you might naturally use when speaking the lyrics.

The major difference is that you may not assign one syllable per note. A single syllable may span multiple notes (for example, singing one syllable across the Solfa notes mi re do). Or a note of the melody may be held across multiple syllables. For example, “the verse melody” could have a single sustained note at the end of a line, but then have some verses placing a single syllable on that note and other verses having multiple syllables there. So we want to allow some flexibility in the correspondence between lyrics and melody, and allow the melody to exist in its own right.

When we discussed lyrics earlier, we highlighted how poetry typically allows much more leeway in rhythm than song lyrics. This comes down to the relationship between Beat and Rhythm, as covered in those Part II chapters, which boils down to: musical rhythms exist as a layer on top of an established beat. You can think of this as being a “grid” which determines the most likely placement of notes. If you paid no attention to that Beat grid when defining the rhythm of your lyrics, it would sound more like a spoken-word performance than a song. Clearly, that’s a valid artistic choice! But for the most part, songwriters will compose the rhythm of their melody primarily based on the Beat and the musical rhythms which fit it.

Here are a couple of exercises which can help you tune in to the Rhythm dimension of a melody, and start exploring your own creative ideas.

An interesting example would be the B Section of “Weevily Wheat” from the Starter Songs in Chapter 9: Solfa. Even though each line has similar lyrical content, the exact words produce three different rhythmic patterns.

Sitting down to “compose a rhythm” can seem highly complex to a musician immersed in traditional notation and music theory, or one to whom notation is a mystery. We’ve already seen how our spoken language skills, optionally enhanced by familiarity with Rhythm Syllables, can provide a gateway into rhythmic creativity.

Let’s explore that further in two ways. Firstly, by leveraging our years—or likely decades—of experience hearing music in different styles. And then by more intentionally using the building blocks from Part II.

When we invited vocal expert Jeremy Ryan-Mossman to present a masterclass at Musical U, he included a surprisingly powerful exercise for exploring and expanding your singing voice’s potential. He had our members sing a few lines from a song they know well. Then he invited them to “switch off” their voice, and mime it instead. And then to do the same thing, but imagining the song in a variety of styles, one after another. For example, starting with a folk song, but then imagining (and miming) how an opera singer would perform it. What would it sound like as a country song? What about a heavy metal song? After miming each style, try singing it.

The “mime” step naturally allowed for more effusive and (dare I say) flamboyant performances! And then with voice “switched on” again, it was surprisingly easy to sing in those other styles. The whole process resulted in much freer, more expressive singing when returning to the original style, or something which had emerged as a new style that better fit your own taste.

What does all that have to do with rhythmic creativity?

Well, you’ve spent a lifetime absorbing musical material in a wide range of styles. Your subconscious mind has access to vast amounts of information about what different styles do rhythmically. The following exercise, based loosely on Jeremy’s, will let you tap into that instinctive understanding of musical styles, and free up your own rhythmic creativity.

The exercise is best done recording yourself and listening back, but you can also just listen in-the-moment if you prefer.

With this exercise we aren’t necessarily trying to learn specific lessons or “rules” about different styles—merely to become aware of how deeply-ingrained our instinct for rhythm is, and how easy it can be to be rhythmically creative, when freed up from the world of visual symbols and mathematical music theory. Still, as always, you can be on the lookout for “diamonds”: what ideas or effects did you notice which you might like to deploy in your own songwriting?

Now let’s explore a more precise and conscious approach to writing rhythms, based on the Rhythm Syllable building blocks from Chapter 13: Rhythm. If you haven’t been through that chapter, you can feel free to skip this exercise for now.

This exercise should prove enlightening for you! You will quickly notice where the emphasis is coming out oddly. For example if your first line was instead “I wake up early every morning” we would naturally emphasise “wake” rather than “I” at the beginning, and you might decide that the “I” needs to be placed just before the first beat of the measure, a common feature in setting lyrics to music which is called anacrusis. Or perhaps your first line was “Everywhere I look, I see new signs of new beginnings.” Counting 14 syllables and realising that’s hard to cram into four beats, you might decide to split the line into two measures: “Everywhere I look, I see / new signs of new beginnings.”

Combining the cut-and-dried notation of Rhythm Syllables with your natural instinct for spoken words and musical style in this way can provide you with a wonderful and liberating way to be creative with rhythm.

Pitch

The Pitch dimension of a melody means the particular note pitches used. In Chapter 8: Relative Pitch we discussed how what matters in music is actually the pitch relationships between those notes, and especially relating to the tonic or “home” note, rather than the specific letter-name notes.

There are particular conventions relating to Pitch, most notably that songs will mostly (or exclusively) use the notes from a particular key, and that ending a phrase or section on the tonic note will tend to sound like “coming home” and bring a sense of resolution or completion for the listener. These ideas are explored more in Part II.

There are also common patterns relating to form. For example the sequence of notes “mi re do” is a common way to bring a phrase “home” to the tonic. There are also common patterns for the Pitch Contour’s directions and trends, and the overall pitch of a section (for example having the chorus be at a notably higher or lower pitch overall to the verses, to create contrast).

The more time you’ve spent with the building blocks of Pitch covered in Part II, the easier you will find it to intentionally choose suitable notes for your melodies, but our Expansive Creativity approach also allows you to have success without necessarily using those. The exercises below cover both scenarios.

In both Chapter 5: Active Listening and Chapter 8: Relative Pitch, we introduced the idea of a Pitch Contour: drawing the overall shape of a series of pitches as a line which goes up and down. This can be drawn on paper or indicated by moving your hand up and down. It is often unknown to songwriters and skipped in the process of writing a melody—but it can be a wonderfully helpful starting point, both for understanding melodies in existing songs, and shaping the melodies you write yourself.

If you’ve gone through Chapter 15: Improvisation then try the following next:

Note that with the variety of Playgrounds that are possible, you could use this exercise alone as your entire melody-writing method going forwards!

One defining trait of a melody is how its pitches move in either steps or skips. A “step” is when one note pitch is followed by a neighbouring pitch from the scale, i.e. the note directly above or below. A “skip” is when a note pitch is followed by a pitch which is not directly adjacent (named so because it “skips” over one or more notes in the scale to reach the next one).

As you do this exercise, really pay attention to the musical effect of steps and skips, and of different-sized skips. This adds a layer of granularity to our Pitch Contour model of the melody, even before getting as far as specific note pitches. And just like the Pitch Contour it can be a helpful step forwards in defining our melody and understanding those we hear in music we love.

Like with the Rhythm side, we’ll wrap up with an exercise leveraging any experience you have with the building blocks of Part II. So if you are working on either Solfa, Intervals, or both, now is a perfect time to start putting them to use in your Songwriting!

Bringing It All Together

Now let’s draw on all these techniques (Pitch Contour, Steps and Skips, Expansive Creativity, Building Blocks) to write a melody.

We said in Chapter 15: Improvisation that improvising can be considered “composing on-the-fly” and writing music as being something like “improvising on paper”. The following two exercises will help bridge between these two activities.

Improvisation is not the only way to compose melodies. Let’s try composing a melody by writing first.

I encourage you to try both of these approaches. Some musicians will find they prefer freely improvising and distilling out the “diamonds”, while others will prefer having the concrete written representation to work with and refine. Both have their advantages, and you may like to use a mix of the two as your melody develops.

The important thing is to make sure you’re using Head, Hands, Hearing and Heart together, and taking an exploratory approach to discover what pleases you most.