Tips for Stickier Melodies?

[zenophilix]

Whenever I sit down to write an EDM track(of which I have few. generally I just wander between various genres that catch my interest, which I find enjoyable.), the bit I always seem to get stuck on is the melody. I'm far from having a perfect understanding of music theory, but I have a basic one. I always make sure that everything is in key, and generally I can get a good collection of chords that sound good to me. That's where I hit a wall, though. From there, I can never seem to put said chords together into something that I'd be satisfied to use in a song. The melodies I come up with always seem somehow awkward, and tweaking them tends to just make things worse... I've tried downloading some MIDIs of common EDM melodies, but anything I do to them seems to ruin them, and I'm not about to just use a melody made by someone else. I can make fairly good beats, and I've been complimented on my song structure on multiple occasions, but I can never get the melody right. What can I do?

[HolisticSongwriting]

Hey zenophilix,

Here's a biggie that's often underestimated:

Start thinking in short phrases and group them in one of these ways:
A A A A
A A A B
A A B B
A B A B

This would be 4 bars each. Take Sia's "Chandelier" as an example:
It's AABB.

I wanna (A)
swing (A)
from the chandelier (B)
from the chandelier (B)

So there's built-in repetition and no more than 2 phrases, which is very common
in Pop music.

I'm working on a program on Hook Writing at the moment which will cover a lot more
ways of creating commercial hooks, this is just a very short idea of the kind of stuff
we'll be covering. If this sounds interesting to you you can join my mailing list here and
I'll notify you as soon as the program releases early next month.

http://blog.holistic-songwriting.com/14 ... gressions/

I've been a songwriter for 11+ years and I've learned a ton about melody writing and I
would love to show you all that I've learned from working with people like Erwin Steijlen
(Pink, Shakira) or Rene Merkelbach (Within Temptation). And I write quite a bit of electronic
music as well. You can listen to my show reel here if you're interested:



Best,
Friedemann

[nineofkings]

Motives are important. You can spin out small melodic ideas into longer phrases. This can avoid actual repetitiveness, but still gives a sense of familiarity to hang onto.

Beethoven has some great examples in the classical realm: see the opening of his 9th symphony.

Weezer has some great examples in the pop/rock realm: see Only In Dreams, and Do You Wanna Get High

I'm not comparing Weezer to Beethoven, but they both have a keen sense of motive.

Additionally, try to make your melodies "singable." Avoid huge melodic leaps (an octave or more), and if you're going to use them, make it a point. They should be climactic or special in some way.

[zenophilix]

Hey zenophilix,

Here's a biggie that's often underestimated:

Start thinking in short phrases and group them in one of these ways:
A A A A
A A A B
A A B B
A B A B

This would be 4 bars each. Take Sia's "Chandelier" as an example:
It's AABB.

I wanna (A)
swing (A)
from the chandelier (B)
from the chandelier (B)

So there's built-in repetition and no more than 2 phrases, which is very common
in Pop music.

I'm working on a program on Hook Writing at the moment which will cover a lot more
ways of creating commercial hooks, this is just a very short idea of the kind of stuff
we'll be covering. If this sounds interesting to you you can join my mailing list here and
I'll notify you as soon as the program releases early next month.

http://blog.holistic-songwriting.com/14 ... gressions/

I've been a songwriter for 11+ years and I've learned a ton about melody writing and I
would love to show you all that I've learned from working with people like Erwin Steijlen
(Pink, Shakira) or Rene Merkelbach (Within Temptation). And I write quite a bit of electronic
music as well. You can listen to my show reel here if you're interested:



Best,
Friedemann

Very cool, thank you! I hadn't thought to draw inspiration from pop music, I can't stand most of it these days, everything seems to be autotuned in one place or another... I'll definitely check out your mailing list!

Motives are important. You can spin out small melodic ideas into longer phrases. This can avoid actual repetitiveness, but still gives a sense of familiarity to hang onto.

Beethoven has some great examples in the classical realm: see the opening of his 9th symphony.

Weezer has some great examples in the pop/rock realm: see Only In Dreams, and Do You Wanna Get High

I'm not comparing Weezer to Beethoven, but they both have a keen sense of motive.

Additionally, try to make your melodies "singable." Avoid huge melodic leaps (an octave or more), and if you're going to use them, make it a point. They should be climactic or special in some way.

That helps a lot. Most of the time I'm only trying to get it to a point where it sounds pleasing to my ear, without paying attention to how danceable or singable it may be.

[tieb]

Melody's is one of my biggest roadblocks as well.

[zenophilix]

Melody's is one of my biggest roadblocks as well.

Not to be alienating or anything, but honestly, what was the point of bumping the thread just to say you agree?

[thecontrolcentre]

Bumping multiple threads purely to advertise your own plugin is pretty spammy behaviour. Couldn't you have simply bumped your own thread about the above mentioned plugin?

[edit] I see the posts have now been deleted.

[Stamped Records]

Similar to looking at a pop song, you can think of music as rhyming like poetry. The music itself can rhyme, if that makes sense.

Say you have a basic motif that is 3 notes playing at some point over the course of a bar. For the second bar you could edit those 3 notes slightly, then for the 3rd bar, repeat the first bar, for the 4th bar, another edit. The rhyming scheme here would be ABAC. I find that a poetic rhymic scheme is really functional when dealing with music.

Melodies are intimately related to the harmonic structure of your song. Just like the harmony wants to land on the tonic to go home, so does the melody. A good melody will land on notes of the chord you are currently using, often.

A melody will usually have at least two different note lengths.

How I've often written melodies, is by splitting the process in 2 - rhythm, followed by note selection. I find that this approach takes the pressure off the mind, allowing you to drop any thoughts you have for one thing, to focus on another.

It's also worth mentioning that playing an instrument, even a tiny bit, will probably have a drastic impact on your input. Personally, it makes sense to me that a lot of what music is, is because of the playing itself. What is ridiculously simple to play, can, and often is, completely out of reach of the thought process of the piano roll musician.

If you study harmony, another step forward for you might be to internalise your chord structure in terms of scale degrees, and proceed to play your chosen scale "melodically" while adhering to the chord changes, thinking about which scale degree of which chord your melody is landing on. I'm not saying that the particular chord or the particular scale degree you choose are of any real importance, but the awareness is useful as the chords and melody are attached. I practised in this way and I came to realise that the melody often plays the more colourful notes of a chord, making 7ths, 9ths and 11ths etc. out of basic triadic progressions.

Arpeggios are another good way to study melody in a stepwise fashion. Arpeggios generally follow the notes of a chord but the arpeggio vst devices do this in a very linear fashion - at least, those that I use. Try writing an arpeggio by hand and breaking the linear pattern, jumping octaves, switching movement from up to down, adding notes that aren't in the chord and so on.....

[jancivil]

"The melodies I come up with always seem somehow awkward, and tweaking them tends to just make things worse"

Have you played, sung, etc melodies by other people, in life? Have you looked at melodies in music that isn't EDM, I mean studied music and done music as a way of life in any way?

The expectation that one is going to "write" melodies in the piano roll, absent this experience is unrealistic and is going to frustrate. I may be wrong but I get the sense from the word in the original post this is what is happening.

All the talk of form places the cart before the horse. Yes, we can get a technical sense in the abstract of song form and motif but without having done it and internalized it, experienced it in the flow as realtime, and gained experience with melody - in the body, through the voice, through instruments in the hands and from the mouth vibrating - this is a fool's errand basically.

[jancivil]

Of course this is from 2016 and bumped for some purposes moderation deemed inappropriate but in general we've seen this for years here, probably from the early days of the forum.

It's not going to happen out of tips and tricks or from reading words on a comments box. It's a knack which comes from time, and probably from talent. Now, one may even kind of invent talent in themselves by immersion and discipline, it's a type of intelligence and intelligence may grow. But not everyone can reasonably expect to be creative in a given way.

[vurt]

easy!
use uhe hive.

[Deep Purple]

easy!
use uhe hive.

Is that a brand of glue?

[vurt]

easy!
use uhe hive.

Is that a brand of glue?

or is it a synthesiser!

[jancivil]

stickier, brand of glue

nudge nudge

[deastman]

Another old thread getting bumped? What is going on today?

Oh well, in response to the original post, I find it perplexing. Like Jan said, have you ever played an instrument or sung before? I can’t even comprehend how it can be difficult to come up with a melody. If I play a chord progression, I just naturally want to hum along. And if I jam along on a lead instrument for twenty minutes or to, I can usually narrow my ideas down to a single one which works well. Melody is like language, or as Hans Zimmer likes to tell us over and over in that Masterclass promo, it’s a conversation. The first bit asks a question, and the next bit answers. String them together into a paragraph and you’ve got a full melodic progression. How can that be so difficult?