Idiot's Guides - Music Theory

by Michael Miller

  A melody that emphasizes the defining features of the underlying major and minor chords.

  Whichever chord tones you use as the major notes in your melody, you can then use appropriate diatonic tones in a step-wise fashion to move from one major tone to another. For example, if the major melodic tone in measure one is a C and the major tone in the next measure is an F, use a D and E to smoothly move from one to the next. These passing tones make your melody more melodic, as opposed to just jumping from one chord tone to the next.

  A melody that uses passing tones to move from one major tone to the next.

  Making Memorable Melodies

  Back in Chapter 8, we worked through the basics of what makes a melody a melody. As I hope you recall, a melody is a logical succession of tones and rhythms. Place the right notes in the right order, and you have yourself a melody.

  A melody has to make harmonic sense—that is, the notes of the melody have to fit within the given key and the specific chords employed. Melodies can go up or down but they have to move somewhere, or else all you have is a single repeated note. The best melodies not only work within the chord structure but define and sometimes predict the song’s chord progression. And the best melodies are not only singable (or at least hummable, if you’re not a great singer) but also help tell a story or set a mood. (You learned about constructing simple melodies in Chapter 8.)

  All of this brings us to the key question: how exactly can you create a memorable melody?

  Center on a Pitch

  You don’t want your melodies wandering around all over the place, like a dog looking for a place to do his business. What you want is more of a hunting dog of a melody, one that knows where home is and, at the end of the day, finds its way back there.

  The “home” of your melody needs to be a specific pitch. When you pick a home pitch, your melody can then revolve around the pitch. You can start on that pitch (although you don’t have to), and you should end on that pitch. Equally important, the other notes in the melody can play around that pitch—and even land on it, occasionally.

  Note that your home pitch doesn’t have to be the tonic of the scale. You can make the third your home, or the fifth—but probably not the second or sixth or seventh, because they’re less related to the tonic triad of 1-3-5.

  For example, listen to the following melody. It’s in the key of G, but revolves around the home pitch of B—the third of the scale.

  A four-measure melody in the key of G, which hovers around the third of the scale (B).

  What you want to avoid is having each measure of your melody center around a different pitch. If your melody wanders around in this type of fashion, with no central core, you won’t know how to end it—you won’t know where home is.

  Make Sure You End Up at Home

  Many of the most memorable melodies use the home pitch to lend logic to the melodic flow. In fact, it’s good if your audience can listen to part of your melody and, based on the prominence of the home note, hum the end of the melody before they ever hear it.

  When you don’t end your melody on the expected note, you create an unresolved tension that can be unsettling to listeners. Although it’s okay to insert that kind of tension in the middle of your melody, you don’t want to end with that kind of tension. You want to resolve your melody so that there’s a feeling of completion at the end.

  What you want to avoid is a melody that wanders around aimlessly. Let your ear be your guide. Play over the melody and see if it holds together. It’s a little bit like writing a good paragraph or a good stanza of a poem; when you’re finished, the best thing to do is to read it aloud and see if it really works.

  The wrong way to do it—you don’t want to end your melody with unresolved tension.

  Go Pentatonic

  You can make things even simpler by sticking to five key notes within a given major scale—the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth of the scale. (In C Major, these notes are C, D, E, G, and A.)

  These notes combine for what is called the pentatonic scale. (The word “penta” means “five”; five tones equal a pentatonic scale.) By using only these five notes, you avoid the two notes in the scale (the fourth and the seventh) that sometimes create harmonic tension.

  TIP

  On a piano, an easy way to see and play a pentatonic scale is to play strictly on the black keys. These five keys—G♭, A♭, B♭, D♭, and E♭—comprise the G♭ pentatonic scale.

  When you use the five notes in the pentatonic scale, it’s virtually impossible to insert a “wrong” note into your melody. However, you can overuse these notes and end up with a vaguely Asian-sounding tune—or even something that sounds a little bit like the theme to an old cowboy movie!

  A melody based on the C pentatonic scale.

  Find the Hook

  For a melody to be truly memorable, there needs to be a piece of it that really reaches out and grabs the listener’s attention. In pop music this is called the hook, because it’s the part of the song that hooks the listener. In more traditional music, this piece of the song is sometimes known as the motif—and is repeated throughout the entire piece of music.

  A motif is typically fairly short—a few notes (think of the five whistling notes in Sergio Leone’s theme from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) or, at longest, one or two measures. When you hit on a good motif or hook, don’t be afraid to use it—repeat it as often as you need, throughout your entire song.

  A simple four-note motif, repeated throughout a longer melody.

  Create Variations

  You can create additional melodies in your music by varying your motif slightly, such as changing its rhythm or moving its tones up or down in the scale. You should retain enough of the main motif so that listeners can tell where it came from, but add enough variation so that you create a new—but related—melody.

  How can you vary a motif? You can reverse the rhythm, simplify the rhythm, or make the rhythm more complex. You can reverse the notes (so that the melody goes up instead of down, or down instead of up), or change the middle notes in the motif, or shift the notes up or down a third or a fifth. In short, just about any variation is fair game, as long as the initial motif isn’t completely obliterated by the variations.

  Take a look at the following example, in which the simple four-note motif from the previous example is run through a number of variations—both rhythmically and melodically.

  The same four-note motif, with variations.

  Remember that you want your variations to relate to the original motif. If you get too far away from the original motif, it isn’t a variation anymore—it’s a brand-new melody!

  Make It Move

  A good melody doesn’t just sit there; it goes someplace. You can propel a melody rhythmically, or tonally, through the “motion” of the tones. In this sense, motion refers to the progressive upward or downward direction of the pitches, or what some call the contour of a line of music.

  A good way to think about the upward or downward motion of a melody is to look at the starting note and the ending note—while ignoring, for the time being, all the notes in between. To create an upward-moving melody, make sure the ending note is at least a third (and ideally a fifth or more) higher than the starting note. Same thing with a downward-moving melody; force the last note to be lower than the first one.

  All the notes between the first and last notes help you move to that final note. The notes don’t all have to go in the same direction, but they do have to gradually move up or down to where you want to end.

  A melody with upward motion.

  Note that it’s okay to have a melody that starts and ends on the same note. What you can do is make the midpoint of the melody higher or lower than the starting/ending pitch. If you choose a higher midpoint, the first half of the melody will have upward movement, and the last half will use downward movement to return to the home pitch.

  Take Small Steps

  The most singable melodies progress i
n small steps, which means each note is only a step or two away from the previous note. The smaller the steps between the notes in your melody, the more lyrical your melody will sound.

  NOTE

  A melody that progresses in half or whole steps uses what is called step-wise or conjunct motion. Melodies that progress by leaps larger than a whole step use what is called skip-wise or disjunct motion.

  When you throw large jumps—of three or more steps—into your melody, it starts sounding random, and becomes much more difficult to play or sing. It’s much better to use a series of passing notes within your chosen scale to move from one main note to another.

  Obviously, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. (And every rule is meant to be broken, anyway!) Think, for example, of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or “Moon River,” or “When You Wish Upon a Star.” All of these songs feature leaps of anywhere from a fifth to an entire octave in their melodies. So it’s okay to leap, if you know what you’re doing—although small steps are better suited for less-experienced songwriters.

  Small steps and large leaps in a melody—the small steps sound more lyrical and are easier to sing.

  Stay in Range

  You don’t want to cover too many notes in your melody. If the distance between the lowest note and the highest note is too wide, singers will have trouble singing all of your melody—and your melody will start to sound random and disjointed, without a home.

  Consider, for example, America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key put his words to one whopper of a tune, one that has a rather wide melodic range. Think of how hard this song is to sing—and how many well-trained vocalists have trouble hitting all the notes. The broad range in this song doesn’t make it a bad song; it just makes it one of the more difficult songs to sing or play.

  NOTE

  Ironically, the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner” comes from an English drinking song called “Anacreon in Heaven.” Maybe the high notes are easier to hit after a few pints of British ale!

  Thus, if at all possible keep the lowest and highest notes in your melody within an octave of each other (or at most, within an octave and a third). You should also consider the absolute range of the voice or instrument you’re writing for, and try to stay within that range. (To learn more about voice and instrument ranges, turn to Chapter 20.)

  A melody with too wide a range—really hard to sing!

  Set Up—and Resolve—Tension

  One of the most common melodic techniques is to divide your melody into two parts, and set up a harmonic tension in the first part that is then resolved in the second part. This gives your melody a distinct form, and its own internal logic; it also helps to propel the melody from the first part to the second.

  One way to create tension is to end the first part of your melody on something other than the tonic of the scale. (When you factor in the chord structure, you find that tension is achieved by ending the first part of the melody on a IV or V chord instead of on the tonic.) Practically, you can create tension by ending a phrase with the second, fifth, or seventh notes of the scale—which correspond to the notes in the scale’s V chord, if you’re reading ahead.

  The half note in measure two creates tension; the next two bars resolve the tension.

  You then have to relieve this tension by manipulating the second part of your melody back to the tonic of the scale—or to one of the notes in the tonic triad (the I chord). The notes in the tonic triad are the tonic, third, and fifth of the scale, although the tonic and the third probably work better for relieving tension. (That’s because the fifth is an ambiguous note, used both in the I chord and the V chord.)

  In any case, you can hear the tension when you play a melody. Just look back to Dvořák’s New World Symphony or “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” For that matter, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” also has this type of internal tension, coming right after “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,” and resolved with “Mary had a little a lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.”

  It’s a popular technique—because it works!

  NOTE

  Legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb, in his book Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting (Hyperion, 1998), says that the key to writing interesting melody is “to lead the ear on a path which is both pleasant and to some degree unexpected.” (Emphasis his.) I agree wholeheartedly. The best melodies sound familiar yet still manage to surprise us somewhere along the line; they do a good job balancing repetition and variety.

  Follow the Words

  Another factor that can drive a melody is the presence of lyrics. If you’re writing an instrumental, of course, you don’t have to worry about following the words. But if you’re writing a popular song, you have to deal with both music and words—and how they fit together.

  You want your music to fit with your words. In the simplest sense, this means arranging the rhythm of the music so that it fits the natural rhythm of the words. You don’t want your singers to be forced into awkward phrasing to fit all the syllables into a given space. Most words and phrases have a natural pace, and will suggest a rhythm to you. Make sure your music’s rhythm fits this lyric rhythm—in particular, avoid putting an unaccented word or syllable on an accented part of the measure, like the downbeat.

  Fitting Chords to a Melody

  If you use the melodic approach to composition, you now have a melody that needs some chords. Just how do you find the right chords for a given melody? Here are a few things to try.

  Try the Obvious

  One quick way to add chords to an existing melody is to try to fit one or more common chord progressions to your melody. Examine the popular chord progressions presented back in Chapter 10, and see if any of them fit the melody you’ve written. You’d be surprised how many melodies fit with the I-IV-V progression!

  For example, you can see how the downward progression of the following melody fits easily within the I-vi-IV-V progression. You can try other progressions (such as I-vi-ii-V), but when you find a good fit you’re home free.

  A melody made to order for the I-vi-IV-V chord progression.

  Use the Melodic Outline

  Guessing at the right chord progression isn’t very sophisticated, even if it often gets you where you want to go. A more analytical approach is one that deconstructs your melody, looking for clues to an implied harmony. What you want to do, in essence, is strip out all the embellishing tones and create a melodic outline of the most important, or structural, tones. The structural tones of the melodic outline will quite often suggest the underlying chords.

  In most cases each structural tone will be one of the notes of the underlying chord triad. You can try fitting chords around each structural tone, having that tone function as either the root, the third, or the fifth of the three possible chords.

  For example, let’s say you’re in the key of C Major and one of the structural tones in your melody is a C. Working diatonically, you can fit that C into either a C Major chord (as the root), an A minor chord (as the third), or an F Major chord (as the fifth). So for any structural tone in your melodic outline, you have three possible diatonic chords that could fit. Play each of the three chords in the context of the melody, and see which one fits best.

  Fitting three possible chords to a single structural tone.

  Let’s work through an example, starting with a full melody. When we reduce the melody to its structural tones, you can see that they create a framework for the underlying harmony. Through a process of trial and error, we choose those chords that, first, sound best and, second, make the most harmonic sense within the framework of the composition.

  Start with your complete melody …

  … then extract the embellishing tones to create a melodic outline …

  … and fit the proper chords to each of the structural tones.

  For example, once you get to the final measure, you have to determine which chord to fit with the C note. You could choose F the IV chord),
Am (the vi chord), or C (the I chord). The question you have to ask is whether it’s more likely that the preceding V chord (against the D) would lead to the IV, the vi, or the I?

  If you remember your chord theory, you can be pretty sure that a V-I progression (the good old perfect cadence) makes more sense than any of the alternatives, so you harmonize that C with a C (I) chord. There’s some guesswork involved, of course, but the theory should provide at least one possible way to proceed. You can test your harmonization by playing the chords against the entire melody; if it sounds good, you made the right choices. (If not, try again!)

  Your chord choices, fit against the original melody.

  Work Backward

  Here’s another trick for easier harmonization: work backward. That’s right, you can often figure out the proper chord progression by working backward from the final chord in a phrase, using rudimentary chord-leading theory. Remember that most traditional melodic phrases end on the tonic harmony. This means that the final chord in your melodic phrase, more often than not, will be a I chord. You then can figure out the cadence leading to the I (probably a V chord), and work backward from there using the chord leading rules you learned in Chapter 10. With this approach you can have half the harmony decoded fairly quickly.