Chapter 12 - Excerpt (pages 5-8 of 12)

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Working on a Melody

As mentioned in the last chapter, the best melodic hooks seem to come out of thin air, though you sometimes will stumble on one while noodling on an instrument.  The large part of your song's melody may arrive through divine inspiration, though more often you have to do some actual work to devise the other melodic elements.  So the logical side of your brain has to kick in, if the creative side of your brain has apparently gone on holiday.  Most often for me, the choruses tend to come out more through inspiration, and verses I have to work on more consciously.  Of course the reverse is also true.

Motifs and Repetition Patterns

One of the ways to start your mental process is to build your melody mathematically.  Say you have a 1-2 bar musical phrase.  Try repeating it, or varying it.  Then you can take that slightly larger building block and work with that.

The SPMT (Smarty Pants Musical Term) for a short repeated melody is called a "motif".  Laypeople might call it a "pattern".   If you analyze melodies you'll see how songwriters have used motifs as their building blocks of many verses and choruses.  I'll stick with using "motif" (rather than "pattern"), as it might help me sell this book to those institutions of higher learning.  You know who you are.  I will try to use the word "phrase" to describe a longer bit that is comprised of motifs.

Its primary advantage is to provide a unifying element to a melody.

Of course you could write a totally free-form melody for a verse with no repeats and no motifs (it's been done successfully on occasion).  But presenting too many musical ideas without any structure can confuse a listener - at least in most popular music.

The use of motifs gives your song cohesiveness, without it becoming boring by only using exact repetition.  In other words: it provides a middle-ground between tiresome repetition and melodic anarchy.  "Melodic Anarchy" would be a good name for a band.

Here's a simple one:

The simplest idea is just to repeat it (some exact repetition is fine)

Another common use of a motif is to repeat the pattern up (or down) a note.

 

Of course, you don't have to raise or lower the motif by just one step.  Say you want a repeating G chord structure or a riff in G played through these 4 bars - in this case the melody will fit better if you step the motif up two notes rather than one:

Longer Motif or One-Line Melody

This type of melody would usually match one "line" of your lyrics.

Here's a 4-bar phrase - Let's call it "A"

Note how we used just the rhythmic part of the motif in bars 1-2 in bars 3-4; where in the earlier examples we used both melodic intervals and the same rhythm pattern.  This is legal - heck most anything's legal.

Here's a second 4 bar phrase - Let's call it "B".  Maybe they'll be friends…..

Notice how in this line the 3rd bar is a repeat of the 1st bar motif (lowered a step).

Putting them together
Putting a couple of phrases together is somewhat like a rhyme scheme (which we will get to later).  But your rhyming pattern does not have to follow your melodic pattern. 

Many verses use an AABA pattern - so we'd have

Another popular pattern is AAAB

Also frequently used are AABB* and ABAB*
Ziggy Marley in his song "True to Myself" uses this second pattern in his chorus.

* With either of these the second "B" line may have the last measure or two modified as needed to lead into the Chorus better.

There are many songs that use just one motif/one melody repeated identically 4 times for a verse.  It seems that this is used more often in the last two decades than in the times before - so I guess AAAA is acceptable. 

The motifs and phrase above would likely be more suited to a slower ballad or maybe mid-tempo song - as most of the motifs are mostly single step intervals - with no successive repetition of notes.

A 4-bar phrase for a verse in a faster song or more modern rock would usually have some successive repetition of notes:

You could develop a "B" phrase that would go with this - or just repeat this 4 times.  After all - "rock & roll" means "repetition.  Right?

Another example:

Here's an example of a melody in a minor key (A minor of course).   I consider this more of a chorus melody.  It's a little hooky, it's got a little slower movement (using dotted-quarters, instead of eighth notes), and it has the opportunity to repeat a 5-syllable lyric hook 3 times at the end.

I threw in some chords against it, just for your reference.  As you'll see in a later chapter, you have quite a few chord options when assigning a chord to a melodic bit.  Note: I will use this melody in the song I will construct through the course off this book – so the one above is not really "free" for your use. – all the others are.

Getting Trickier? - More Fun with Motifs

Start with a Motif:

Repeat it
Repeat a step up or down
Combination of the two

1. Inversion - (invert the "shape" of the motif)

2. Retrograde (SPMT - write motif backwards)

3. Change the original motif for more dynamic rhythms

4. Keep the original motif melody & rhythm, but follow with alternate rhythm variations

5. Alter it slightly

6. Just use the rhythm of a motif

The first 3 tricks, we demonstrated above. Let's look at the next 6.

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