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    Melody: How to Write Great Tunes
    Melody: How to Write Great Tunes
    Melody: How to Write Great Tunes
    Ebook283 pages2 hours

    Melody: How to Write Great Tunes

    By Rikky Rooksby

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    About this ebook

    Melody is the true heart of music, often inspired by nothing more than the songwriter's muse. Yet melody can be learned. This book teaches the art of melody and how to write effective tunes. Starting from basics, it covers the essentials – rhythm, intervals, scales, and harmony – and builds to offer a wealth of advanced techniques and tricks. Every musical example in the book has an audio track, allowing musicians to increase their awareness of melody through both sight and sound.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowmanLittlefield
    Release dateNov 1, 2004
    ISBN9781476852799
    Melody: How to Write Great Tunes
    Author

    Rikky Rooksby

    Rikky Rooksby is a guitar teacher, songwriter/composer, and writer on popular music. He is the author of How to Write Songs on Guitar (2000, revised edition 2009), Inside Classic Rock Tracks (2001), Riffs (2002, revised edition 2010), The Songwriting Sourcebook (2003, revised edition 2011), Chord Master (2004, revised edition 2016), Melody (2004), Songwriting Secrets: Bruce Springsteen (2005), How to Write Songs on Keyboards (2005), Lyrics (2006), Arranging Songs (2007), How to Write Songs in Altered Guitar Tunings (2010), and Songs and Solos (2014). He has also written fourteen Fastforward guitar tutors and arranged over three dozen chord songbooks, including The Complete Beatles. He has written entries on rock musicians for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and published interviews, reviews, and transcriptions in many UK music magazines. He is a member of the Society of Authors, Sibelius One, and the Vaughan Williams Society

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      Melody - Rikky Rooksby

      www.rikkyrooksby.com.

      SECTION 1

      Insiders – the notes that belong

      The melodies you’ll hear on the Audio files are each laid out in standard notation, as you’ll see over the page. In case you’re not familiar with this format, the five lines on the stave (from lowest line to highest) represent the notes EGBDF, and the four spaces in-between the lines are FACE. We’ll only be using the treble clef for these examples – signified by the squiggly line at the start of the stave on the left. This marks the note G, where its line passes through the centre of the spiral.

      ) signs indicating the note and scale around which the music is organised. Putting them at the start is a shorthand way of telling the musician always to alter those specific notes throughout the piece (unless told otherwise for individual notes) so to get the right scale and chords.

      After the key signature comes the time signature – here 4/4, meaning four quarter-notes (also called crotchets) to a bar, or measure. The third note in bar 1 is a quarter-note, if you’re unsure what one looks like.

      The stave has thin, vertical lines separating some notes from others – these are bar-lines, measuring out each measure of four beats. Above the stave are chord names labelling the harmony, which is played on the piano on the Audio files underneath the melody. The long curved lines are phrase-marks: these indicate where a melody divides into significant groups of notes.

      In this section of Melody . There aren’t many phrase marks either, because there aren’t many proper phrases to indicate.

      Underneath the stave are the six lines of guitar Tab so you can play the melody on guitar if you wish. Remember that the Tab puts the melody one octave below the pitch it sounds on the Audio files. This is to keep the melodies at or around first position on the guitar.

      Each track in Sections 1-9 will also have a Melody Tip in the page margin. This highlights a useful technique or piece of information drawn from the discussion of the particular example.

      TRACK 1

      THE FIRST TRACK ON THE AUDIO is a prime example of a simple melody. It’s a little 16-bar tune over a chord sequence in the key of C major. As you listen to it, you can follow the notes on the page opposite.

      It’s not necessary to recognise the name of each passing note (for instance C-B-C-B-A in bars 1-2), just watch the shape of the tune as it plays.

      The fact that there are no sharps or flats at the start here indicates the key is probably C major. The scale of C major has no sharps or flats, because the note sequence C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C fits the required pattern of intervals for all major scales, namely tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone. (Start on any note other than C, and sharps or flats have to be added to make the intervals fit this pattern.)

      Note: If you’re not sure about the meaning of any term used, check the glossary at the back of the book.

      Track 1’s melody could be a verse, chorus or bridge - the three sections of most popular songs. It exhibits many of the usual features of a melody. It has:

      Variety of rhythm and pitch.

      Contour (in terms of the curve of the phrases).

      Notes that ‘agree’ or blend with the chords.

      There are four two-bar phrases, but there is an underlying eight-bar chord progression which is repeated. Melodies are often written in eight-bar lengths. During the repeat (bars 9-16) there are subtle changes in the melody to add interest. Such variations – especially where a note is repeated at the same pitch in a shorter rhythm – arise naturally when a lyric is set to music. Some lyric lines have more syllables or words that need to be sung in the same amount of time, which leads to the splitting of notes into shorter ones. This melody, plus its chords, will return in later tracks on the audio files, with many variations.

      1

      Melody Tip

      To understand what goes on in a melody like this, we need to take things back to basics and construct our knowledge of melody from fundamental elements. Like answering the simple question: which notes sound good sung over a given chord?

      Audio element not supported

      TRACK 2

      LET’S TAKE THE FIRST FOUR BARS of the chord sequence from Track 1 – C, F, G, and C. These chords fit together as the three major chords in the key of C major. Songwriters call a song written with the three major chords in a major key a ‘three-chord trick’.

      Track 2 repeats a four-bar sequence: in bars 1-4 it has the ‘safest’ of all melody notes - the root notes of the chords themselves (C, F, and G). The root note is the note from which the chord gets its name.

      Any simple major or minor chord has three different notes:

      C = C-E-G

      F = F-A-C

      G = G-B-D

      In bars 5-6 the melody starts with a root note C, and then stays on C even when the chord changes to F – which it can do comfortably because the C note is common to both chords. In bars 7-8 the melody note moves to a G, which it holds even when the chord changes back to C – again because the G is a common note in those two chords. But in each case, even though the note is held for two bars, it sounds different – its character alters – because its relationship 10 the chord underneath has changed.

      To sum all this up:

      A root note is a strong melody note, good for beginnings and endings.

      The melody does not have to change note just because the underlying chord does – there can be a common tone which two or more chords share.

      2

      Melody Tip

      The melodic character of a single note changes over different chords. This means you can sometimes continue singing the same note across a chord change.

      Audio element not supported

      TRACK 3

      USING JUST THE NOTES FROM the same three basic chords (C, F, G), there are many directions a melody can take. On Track 3 the tune starts on the C root note and then either stays on a common tone or ascends to the nearest note in the next chord.

      The C in har stays still in bar 2 (it’s a common tone in C and F).

      It rises to D in bar and K in bar T

      It stays on Kin bar 5 because the C chord hasn’t changed.

      It rises to the root F in bar 6 and root G in bar 7.

      G remains as a common tone in bar 8.

      As you can see/hear, this melody has a constantly rising line – its pitch ascends all the way from bar 1 to bar 8.

      In general the root note fits more smoothly with the chord than the other two notes from that chord. these other two notes are called the 3rd and the 5th – names that are derived from the major scale, by counting from the root note.

      Here are the major scales of C, F and G (with the three chord notes shown in italics:

      In a major chord, the 3rd is always two tones away from the root; the 5th is always 3½ tones away from the root.

      In a minor chord, the 3rd is always 1½ tones away from the root; the 5th remains 3½ tones away from the root.

      3

      Melody Tip

      A melody line can always use a root or 3rd or 5th in a chord. A melody can move from any of the notes of one chord to any of the notes of the next.

      Audio element not supported

      TRACK 4

      FOLLOWING ON FROM TRACK 3, here is a 16-bar melody with a descending line over bars 1-4 and a line that goes down-up-down in bars 5-8.

      Bars 1 and 3 feature a root note sung over the chord.

      In bars 5-8 only the first C bar uses the root note of the chord. The other bars use the 3rdsof F and G and the 5th of G.

      In bars 9-12 the phrase commences on G, which is the 5th ol C, and then ascends one note at a time until it reaches C in bar 12. This step movement creates the last four notes of the scale of C major.

      Finally, bars 13-16 descend from the high 3rd of E down to G in bar 16.

      Notice also the one-beat rests that appear in bars 8. 12 and 15. Rests are essential in melodies. They divide phrases, break up rhythms, and give a singer the chance lo take a breath.

      The final bar introduces a new note, the half-note (or minim), each one of which lasts two beats.

      4

      Melody Tip

      A melody can start with the root or 3rd or 5th of the first chord. A melody can reproduce part of a scale.

      Audio element not supported

      TRACK 5

      SO FAR THE MELODY EXAMPLES have used common chord tones or made small steps up or down to the next note. This is easy to sing, but not very interesting. So what can be done to improve this?

      Melodies, of course, can either move by small steps or longer leaps. Even though we’re temporarily restricted to using just the notes of a major chord in these early examples, we can still write a tune that moves up or down in bigger intervals, so it’s less predictable.

      In Track 5, notice the jump down from E to A between bars 1 and 2, and the jump up between bars 3-4, 5-6 and 6-8.

      Audio element not supported

      5

      Melody Tip

      A melody can use small steps or large steps to move to the next note.

      TRACK 6

      TRACKS 2-5 LIMITED THEMSELVES to one melody note per bar, albeit repeated. But if a chord has three component notes that sound good over the chord, any of them could be sung in a single bar and they would fit with that chord.

      Notice with the melody of Track 6:

      It has two different notes to each bar.

      There’s an alternating down/up pattern – the odd-numbered bars have a change of note downward; the even-numbered bars have a change of note upward.

      When the four-bar progression repeats, the melody goes to different notes within the chords than it did first time through,

      Audio element not supported

      6

      Melody Tip

      Any of a chord’s notes can feature in a melody within the bar (or bars) occupied by that chord.

      TRACK 7

      THIS TRACK DEVELOPS THE IDEA in the previous Melody Tip. It’s a 12-bar melody in which all three notes of each chord are heard in a single bar. The four-bar phrase goes around three times, with varying melody ideas, though bars 3-4 stay on G instead of changing to C.

      When played one after another (instead of all al once) the notes of a chord are known as an arpeggio. The identity of the chord is more obvious if the melody notes go

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