Tips on writing melodies

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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Create harmonic background, follow with melody using rhythmic and melodic motifs.
Rhythmic motif: musical idea based in time.
Melodic motif: musical idea based in pitch.
Use harmonic motion for decisions of cadences.
Maybe good also to avoid minor 9ths sometimes...

So much is maybe too complex to describe here, but this is mostly very simple I promise. Requires much practice to learn this, and must be learned of practice - no books will teach this!


Listen critically to music with good melodies, it is possible to deconstruct into phrase and fragments.
Steal this fragments and rearrange into new phrases to be more familiar! Use fragments on top of new harmonies also. Play!

Composing music requires listening of music. Not passively tho. Must hear the parts and pieces; take and play with the pieces like Legos. Some parts fit, some do not. You will learn this.

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tap it out atonal first. percussive, rhythmic ...then make it tonal if you want.
Sincerely,
Zethus, twin son of Zeus

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EliteRezk wrote:Hey all so I'm just wondering if there's any tips for writing better melodies, I know I should stay on scale but I've been told bar 3 should revert to a note that the chord is apart of ? Is that true?
I think the best thing is to increase your knowledge. It's hard to write a novel if you've never read novels, it's hard to write music if you don't know how music you've heard is written.

I think too many people try to compose melodies without knowing really well many many melodies, and it doesn't work well. If you know a lot of melodies (knowing all the notes, structure, all that) then you will be able to infer the dos and don'ts more naturally. If you don't you'll try composing without really feeling like you know what you're doing because your points of comparison will be very few.

If you know a lot of melodies from different sources you can think of so many examples where something specific has been used, and to what effect, so that really helps you know what you're doing. Don't mind the written "rules" so much, you don't master a language by memorising a bunch of rules, you master a language after reading it/hearing it spoken and then practicing it yourself. Music is the same, you learn what others did, then you try your own, enriched with the knowledge of what was done by others.
Developer of Photosounder (a spectral editor/synth), SplineEQ and Spiral

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'Write' your melodies by singing them. Get away from your studio, take your backing tracksa away with you on a phone, ipod etc., and just sing along till you have a catchy line

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