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The basics of songwriting can be categorized into 4 sections. Song structure, chord progression, lyrics, and melody. This order is not a set in stone way of writing a song. For me, each song has come about in different ways, some processes more than others. Sometimes I get a melody stuck in my head. Sometimes I think of a lyric line that leads the way to becoming a whole song.
So if you don’t know where to start, here’s the first basic of songwriting.
Melody
I would go as far to say that the melody is the most important part of songwriting, especially if you’re writing pop songs. This isn’t saying that if you write a great melody that you automatically have a great song. You can have the greatest melody and still have a bad song. But the melody acts like a gate into your song.
Think about a time you were humming a tune you heard on the radio or on your ipod playlist, and you caught yourself doing it. You weren’t even consciously telling yourself “I’m going to hum that tune”, but it just flowed naturally. Why were you humming it? Probably because the evil hooky melody latched onto your brain like a leech and it started making you do crazy things without your conscious approval. Haha. After you catch yourself singing the melody, then you might start thinking about the lyrics. But what came first? The melody!
Or think about a time you were singing part of the chorus to a song, but you couldn’t remember the rest of the lyrics. But what did you keep singing even though the song wasn’t being sung by words but was being sung with sounds that cannot be categorized such as “na” and “la” and “mm”? The melody!
Most people remember the melody more often than any other part of a song.
How To Come Up With A Melody
This is how you can come up with a melody. Play a chord progression and try to hum a made up tune along with it. If you don’t like it, try coming up with something else. Write the melody through trial and error. If you already have a set of lyrics, play your chords and sing the lyrics. Keep doing it until you find a melody you like. Always remember to have something to record yourself with because you are bound to forget what you wrote melodically. It’s definitely not a good feeling when you thought you wrote an awesome melody but couldn’t remember the melody 2 minutes later. And every time you tried to sing it again, it just wouldn’t feel right. So have something to record with at all times. Most cell phones these days have an audio recorder that comes with it, so you don’t have to worry about carrying a cassette recorder around. Wait. What’s a cassette?
That being said, here are two songwriting tips you can use to increase your melody’s potency.
Starting Your Melody Outside Of The First Down Beat
One thing you can do is start your melody off on a beat other than the first down beat. By first down beat, I mean that the melody doesn’t start right when the first chord of the section hits. If you already do this, then that’s great, but for those of you who don’t, start doing this and it will change the way your song sounds.
There are two ways to do this. You can have your melody start before the first down beat chord or after. An example of a melody that starts before the first down beat chord is the prechorus from “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch. When Michelle sings “Cause every time I look you’re never there”, the melody starts before she hits the Eb chord which is the first chord that starts the chord progression for the prechorus. She also starts the chorus off before the first down beat of the chorus with “Cause you’re”. These are called pick up melody lines.
Adversely, you can start a section’s melody after the first down beat. The song “Everywhere” does this in the verses. Another example is Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone”. You can hear how the song never starts on the first beat of each section. You can probably turn your radio on right now and hear this happening with the song being played as you’re reading this article.
Having A Different Note Range For Each Song Section
Another songwriting technique you can use to help your melody is to have your sections live in a different melodic space from each other. In other words, you want your chorus to be either higher or lower melodically from the verse. Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you’re writing a song in the key of C Major and your verse’s melody uses notes between D and A. Then you want your chorus to use notes outside of the notes between D and A. So I could choose the notes between A and E. This doesn’t mean you absolutely have to use only the notes between A and E, but that it is using a range or notes outside of the notes that are generally used by the melody of the verse.
The trend for most pop songs is for the chorus to have a range higher than the verse. Let’s go back to “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch. The chorus jumps high melodically right when she sings the word “everywhere”. It is apparent that the first note when she sings “everywhere” is a higher note than any of the notes used in the melody of the verse.
in conclusion, I gave four basic parts to writing a song: song structure, chord progression, lyrics, and melody. Although I wrote this series in this order, there really is no order that you have to absolutely follow when writing songs. You can start off with a set of lyrics and set up a song structure around it. You can be driving to work or to your friend’s place and find yourself humming a tune you made up. That can turn into your next song. Maybe you’re experimenting with a few chord progressions and melodies and plan to add the lyrics later. Do what process works best for you. Lastly, sometimes it helps to stretch yourself by writing a song using a different process than the one you’re comfortable with, so stretch yourself and see yourself growing as songwriter .