writing great Melodies can feel like a mysterious art and in this video we want to break down the process of making great Melodies into a step-by-step guide that you can repeat over and over again there's no one way to write Melodies but these steps are designed to show you the Essential Elements of great Melody writing so you can write better songs sooner and faster so let's Dive In step number one figure out your scale so figuring out your scale is kind of like deciding what your ingredients are to make a recipe so some basic scales are the major scale and the minor scale so I could just decide right my song is going to be in the key of G major we play a g so that's the note G so I might just off the bat go you know the ingredients to my recipe are going to be the notes in the G Major scale I've got one two three four five six seven one those are the seven ingredients that I have to choose from in which to create the recipe of My Melody so I could start that way I could start with my G Major scale which might involve me just singing up and down the scale picking some notes from that scale combining them in different ways another way into this which is potentially more intuitive for beginner songwriters is to pick three or four chords from a key and when we put those chords together and they're all from the same key it's really easy to construct a Melody that just sounds good over those chords everything belongs together it's all in the same key it's all in the same scale so let's demonstrate this by picking a really basic chord progression or just looking at the chords that we have available in this key of G so here are the chords in the key of G G if I pick any three of these chords and play them kepi can essentially then take the seven notes from the scale and try a Melody over any of these chords and it should sound pretty good let's test this out so I'm just going to go these three chords yeah so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to sing the G scale over those chords [Music] so it's not a Melody yet but what I'm really doing is I'm gathering my Essential ingredients that I'm now going to start to draw My Melody out of so we've got these three chords that are from the G Major scale I've got my seven notes of the G Major scale now we can start to move on to actually crafting a Melody out of these basic ingredients we've also included a free PDF and a link in the show notes so that if you're not familiar with the chords that are in different Keys you can just download that PDF they're right there for you and just remember the key here is only pick three or four of those chords and put them together so step two is to come up with a four note Melody and we've just heard Kippy talk about the seven notes that are available to us in the scale we're now going to pick only four of those and experiment with different combinations of them limiting your options to four of the seven possible notes is important for two key reasons the first is that actually just imposing limitations at all is a really important part of the creative process so actually imposing those parameters forces you to be more created with the limited materials that you have the second reason we want to use only four notes and limit ourselves to those notes is if you use all seven available to you it ends up sounding like you're just running a scale or doing an exercise but the other important thing is you want to hold back some of those notes and use them in other parts of the song later on having somewhere to go in subsequent sections is actually what gives Melodies a sense of Journey and a sense of story a really important Point here is that it doesn't have to be perfect and actually in subsequent steps we're going to iterate through different versions of this melody so at the beginning what you're going to see us do is just come up with something really really simple and to be clear we haven't prepared anything here we're really working through the process of trying to come up with our own little Melodies that we think sound good and in order to do that we're going to have to play around with lots of little melodic ideas and that's really one of the secrets to Great Melody writing you've got to just play around with lots of little fragments and little ideas and see what works for you so I'm not even going to play three chords here I'm just going to hold the one chord the G chord which establishes you know the key that we're in and Kevin's going to essentially try and come up with the simplest possible Melody she can to begin with yeah at this moment Simplicity is key okay [Music] so I might not even start on that I'm going to start here [Music] foreign [Music] step three make the initial melodic idea more interesting by combining steps and leaps what does that mean so the melody that I've just created is what's called a step Melody which is to say that the notes are all next to each other in the scale so I went [Music] so each note is just one step away in the scale from the other note so a leap is just the opposite of that a leap is when you skip over at least one note to another note in the scale so if I win I have skipped a note and we can call that a leap so that particular leap is an interval of a minor third and the technical interval doesn't matter we can just think of it as you know it's skipping over one step that interval of a third is kind of the small smallest leap that we can create when we're working inside a scale now even a leap like that creates some interest and one of the secrets of beautiful Melody writing is actually combining steps and leaps inside the melodic phrase because when a Melody is constructed of just steps it's very easy to sing but it can get a little bit boring over time the inverse of that is if we construct Melodies out of all sorts of leaps it can start to feel very very chaotic the melody actually loses a sense of coherence but finding a really nice balance of steps and leaps is one of the secrets to Great Melody writing so let's give it a go okay so I'm going to take that Melody can I hit that G chord again so my original Melody so let me now iterate on that and I'm going to change that Melody to now include some kind of leap in there so all you've done there is just introduce that little leap at the beginning but the rest of the descending part of that Melody is the same exactly so we now have a instance by combining steps and leaps a really important thing to understand is that the bigger the leap the more dramatic and emotional the melody is going to sound so that's really important when it comes to thinking about the story of your Melody over the course of a song because if I started my melody with a really dramatic leap it means I'm starting the musical Journey on a very dramatic moment and I just need to think about where it is in my song form that I want the emotional Peak to occur because those big leaps create emotional Peaks so should we do it by example yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah so let me try singing that I never again [Music] [Applause] [Music] and you can really hear the energy of that first two note sequence just because of that wider leap you know that larger leap it gives us all of this excitement and this energy from the very beginning and then the melody sort of settles down into that descending pattern but you can create quite a lot of excitement just from that that widening of the leap or making the leap bigger one of the most famous examples of that is probably somewhere over the rainbow right like somewhere [Music] so that initial leap is a full octave leap and that's really appropriate in that song because that song is actually an a a b a song It's a song that doesn't have a chorus the title of that song The Hook of the song is actually the first line somewhere over the rainbow that is the biggest moment in the whole song so it makes a lot of emotional sense it makes a lot of narrative sense and it makes a lot of musical sense for the songwriter to actually include that huge leap right at the beginning and one of the biggest reasons for stone to introduce leaps into your Melodies is that that's where the memories are made we know that generally if we keep it all about stepwise motion it doesn't end up creating a very memorable Melody but if you look at some great uh examples of Melody writing some great songs we really latch on to the leap the leap is the part that sticks it's the part that gets us excited and so you want to have a nice sprinkling of leaps throughout your Melodies as you start to create them step four create some rhythmic interest and we're going to go back to the melody we had before which was just a little thirdly the little minor thirdly which was that is we're counting one two three four [Music] [Applause] you can hear it's coming in on the one and then it's falling in a particular way it's it's a particular rhythmic phrase but we could change that Rhythm we could mess with the phrasing because one little tip here is that a lot of beginner songwriters will habitually bring their Melodies in on that beat one but Melodies don't always need to start on beat one and in fact when all your melodic phrases do come in on beat one the melody ends up feeling quite cluttered it's like you're filling all the space we can think of melodic phrasing like that almost like body language and when melodies come in on beat one it's very forward-leaning body language so it feels like your whole song is very very assertive but when we actually mix up where our melodic phrases start some of them starting on beat one but some of them may be starting after beat one we actually get this dance the body movement is sometimes forward but sometimes it's leaning back and that's when a Melody really starts to breathe and dance so let's even just experiment with taking our phrase and shifting it back and forth off the downbeat and see what happens and we're not going to change the four notes the four notes are staying exactly the same in the same order three four [Music] I quite like that I do too could we now try this melody coming in on the downbeat and then coming in again off the downbeat one two three four [Music] and what you heard there was the same four note sequence with a little rhythmic variation what this allows us to do is get more value out of these four notes that we're playing around with and really use those four notes in different ways throughout the song in different sections you want to get bang for your buck from this little four note sequence you've created and rhythmically shifting it is one of the best ways to do that the other Insight that's really important to observe here longer melodic phrases are very frequently built from smaller melodic motifs that are repeated and varied in different ways to create those longer melodic phrases and we hear this done beautifully in the Billy eilish song when the party's over it's not changing rhythmically it's essentially being played the same way rhythmically but the melody just keeps getting moved up the scale and it happens four times in the verse and creates this beautiful rising of tension [Music] [Music] [Music] but the effect of that is just so beautiful because you hear this same little melodic fragment used four times and and yet it builds so much tension it's gorgeous step five is to repeat the phrase that we've just created so we're going to call our phrase the combination of that first Motif plus its rhythmic variation that's one phrase so what we're going to do is we're going to repeat that whole thing but let's take some inspiration from Billy eilish here I'm going to repeat the whole phrase but I'm actually going to repeat it up the scale [Music] day [Music] a few little comments and observations here before we move on to the next step one of the things that you will notice there is that Benny was not playing exactly the same chords that we started with that very first step was just really all about establishing the key and establishing the scale which just using any chords inside a key it's just going to help your ear get grounded inside the scale that you've chosen but now that we've actually got a melody going we're finding chords inside the key that sound nice with a Melody that's coming out as it emerges when all the ingredients are just from the same one scale it's going to be really easy to find chords that fit the melody that you're writing step number six is to introduce some variation into the second half of the melody because we actually now have quite a long melodic phrase that sort of sounds almost like a full section really important to note that it's just made from the building blocks of those first four notes that we picked creating this little melodic Motif that we have now repeated in different ways so the idea of introducing some kind of variation to the second half is all about now that we've got this kind of repetition happening where can we find some way to introduce the element of surprise and really the best way to create an element of surprise is to break the pattern that we've been using up into this point so kep is going to use the pattern we've been using and then look for an opportunity to break that pattern doing something slightly different than we've heard previously we'll talk about how to do that in more detail in a minute but let's just start with something simple [Music] um hear the melody there departing from this pattern we've been using and it was a little run of three ascending notes before we drop back down and that little break in the pattern really grabs the ear every time you establish a pattern or a sequence and keep that sequence going with little modifications but then break it the ear gets interested it's a new piece of information the secret to Great Melodies is actually all in the combination of repetition and variation the repetition that we have here is that this melodic phrase is a repetition of the same Motif we can identify we can hear that it's the same little melodic idea that's actually repeating but the secret here is that each repetition of it actually has one little thing that's different to every other time we've repeated it so remember the first Motif starts on the downbeat the variation on the second Motif is that it starts after the downbeat the variation on the third Motif is that the whole Motif is now sequenced up into higher pitches and the variation on the fourth motif is that it introduces that new note that goes up rather than down we could essentially take the exact same sequence now and play it in a way that doesn't sound as great as a Melody just to demonstrate how powerful this rhythmic variation and this phrasing is so if we just take those notes and play them all coming in on the downbeat this is what it would sound like two three four [Music] foreign [Music] it's just amazing how taking that same sequence of notes and now putting them all back on the downbeat really turns that Melody into something that's just not as interesting it's a little bit stiff and it's such a simple thing to fix when you're writing Melodies to Simply move it off the downbeat and create that rhythmic variation and you find when you listen to a lot of music that this is really what's going on with a lot of great Melody writing step seven write more Melodies we've really created what cap is described as a section or enough melodic material to certainly cover a whole section and let's pretend that's the verse in order to write a song we need to have Melodies in the chorus and possibly the pre-chorus and maybe a little melodic variation in the bridge and the easiest way to do this is to Simply look at what we've already done and then do the opposite so let's just review what we've done and look at some of the essential ingredients of the melodic material we've created so far one of the most essential signatures or characteristics of the melody that we've built so far is that initial leap up that Rising leap characterized by then the melody falling back down and landing on a note that's below the initial note that we started on and you can see that graphic here right you can see the shape and direction of the melody that we've created one of the most important tools or techniques that we can use to create contrasting Melody is the concept of Contour so this is a fancy word that is actually a really simple idea it's really all about the shape and direction of a Melody so if we understand that the initial shape and Direction was this ascending leap all we need to ask is well what's different than that and the simple answer is well instead of going up can we go down and another really important element to Great Melody writing is to not just change the direction or the Contour but to not start on exactly the same note as we've been doing so we've been hitting that note pretty hard what if we started on that note there and instead of going up we go down now foreign let's try it out and what I might even do is simplify your melodic idea there to really demonstrate the idea that it doesn't need to be lots of notes and in fact sometimes Melodies really benefit from restraint and even in our first section there are actually quite a lot of notes we use particularly once we sequenced up so let's actually bring it all in and simplify and make this section really about simplifying the melody and demonstrating how you know complexity is not the key to Great Melody writing it's really about contrast and I'm going to pick a couple of chords that we haven't used necessarily but they're still in the key of G so let's see what happens two three four [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so that felt without us even planning it like a pre-chorus foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] interestingly there keppy was really kind of taking the melody to a place that it has not been before and I think that's a really instinctive thing to do right that we've essentially had the melody quite restrained in terms of its delivery it it hasn't necessarily been low in your register but it has been sung with a level of control and restraint and that in itself creates this huge opportunity for the chorus to kind of just explode and let go and that's what we want from a course we want the chorus to to hit hard to really have all of this punch and this energy and create an impact on this now a few other little things to notice about that chorus Melody even though I was like totally improvising that Melody there are a few things that instincts really come out that when we actually look at what happened they really really learnable things one thing is the very first note that I sang that high G that's the highest note that we've heard so far a really characteristic thing that you're hearing lots of great Melodies is that the songwriters the melody writers will save the highest note for the peak emotional moment which very frequently is the chorus it doesn't have to be not all choruses need to contain the highest note but certainly thinking in terms of where is the emotional peak in the song is a really good thing to think about because it helps you decide where you're going to place those high notes so that was one little intuitive thing in that pre-chorus because it was a real build up felt like it wanted to kind of explode in that note and that g note is the one note it's the home note or we're in the key of G so it's the most stable note we to be from which again is a really common thing to hear in choruses to land on the most stable note to kind of deliver the main message of the song with with that punch but really important to notice that none of the other melodic phrases leading up to this moment start on that note and you'll also notice that cap was improvising the melody and really getting into it but again there was no Focus On lyrics there I I think really it was gibberish not to be offensive but it was it's what we commonly hear artists do when they do top lining which is essentially just to come up with Melodies on top of the chords that have been played with just some placeholder sound or lyrics you're really focused on creating these interesting Melodies and not worrying about the lyrics at this point in time so that's an important thing to remember that you know the lyrics can come later what we're really focusing on here is just finding some interesting Melodies if you want a few other really important tips on writing great Melodies please don't radio right here otherwise get cracking cracking get riding we're excited for you we'll see you next time