Alphonse Nguyen

The melody is one of the most important elements of a piece of music (some say it would even make or break it). Many popular melodies are famous due to their catchiness, but being catchy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actually good. So please try your best to write something you’d be proud of. Following my advice from before, whatever melody you come up with should fit into the whole composition (e.g. bouncy melodies don’t work very well with a tragic mood).

Sing sing sing. Many great melodies are singable, and for good reason. When you sing out loud, you can feel the music that much more, and you can also get a better sense of what’s working or not. You will also get an idea if the melody is too fast or too slow, if it’s out of range, or if it’s too awkward, etc. Singing also keeps things simple (unless you can sing like Pavarotti, in which case it’s all relative).

Now I prefer to compose the melody and the harmony (the harmony, not the actual accompaniment) at the same time, but you can figure out either the melody or the chord progression first if you want. Nevertheless, singing in my experience helps to facilitate the melody-writing because it flows out of me better. But what if you’re stuck? Then I’d recommend trial and error.

Let’s use The Foot and the Sock as an example, and let’s say I wanted to end off the chorus but I couldn’t finish the melody. I know what chord progression I want, so it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks:

So let’s try some examples out by trial and error:

In the end, I chose something fairly simple, and yet that A-natural gives it a bit of a bite that makes the melody more distinct and memorable:

In the following example, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, 1st movement, you will find three important key concepts. The first is phrasing, which is kind of like saying a sentence’s worth of music. And a sentence should have a beginning, middle, and end. The key thing is that the end of the phrase may be incomplete (it may sound like the melody can go onto the next phrase) or complete (it may sound like the melody has arrived at a conclusive cadence). Many phrases are four bars in length because then it’s not too short or too long for you to have your say. More importantly, it sounds balanced/even this way (and it’s also very natural to gravitate towards this arrangement). Looking below, see how the first phrase is self-contained (beginning, middle, end) but incomplete (lands on the II chord), which leads itself quite nicely into the next phrase because it needs to sound resolved. This second phrase is more complete as it ends on the tonic chord (and yet it’s not fully complete as the melody ends on the mediant note, but that’s beside the point because it goes onto the next phrase anyway). In addition, this second phrase demonstrates the use of sequence, which is a repetition of a certain phrase at a different pitch. Sequences are excellent tools that connect phrases together, but don’t overuse them. And finally, in these two phrases, you are also introduced to the concept of motives. They are small, recognizable fragments of the melody that you can use later on in the same piece (or different movement). The fun in using motives is that you can manipulate these building blocks in various methods to make your music sound more cohesive.

To end off this post, I want to show you guys something that I’ve noticed: a lot of melodies in pop/contemporary music are confined to intervals of a perfect fifth. I don’t know why that is, but that could explain why a lot of this sort of music sounds uninspiring and unoriginal (but I’ll admit the two Caillat songs aren’t that bad).

• Colbie Caillat – Realize
• Colbie Caillat – Bubbly
• Beyonce – Single Ladies
• Leona Lewis – Keep Bleeding