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The melody
Having arrived at a nice chord progression we can begin to build our melody and as a starting point I suggest you stick with what notes make up the chord. It is permissible to have a few ‘passing’ notes in there which are not in the chord but steer clear of any notes that obviously sound discordant.
Play the chord with your left hand and look at what notes are available to you then try to fit your lyric into those notes while holding the chord for the required number of beats. Initially, stick to sections of 8 bars.
You can play around with this for hours, even days. Nothing is set in concrete so try out different versions. Record you efforts and listen carefully because this will undoubtedly suggest changes and improvements.
All we are trying to do at this point is lay down a basic melody. The final arrangement, harmonies etc. will come later.
Previously I suggested the chords Em, D, Em, D, C, G, F, Em to go with our lyric and to create a nice flow I use the first Em and D in their first inversions then the rest are played in the root position.
So in our example we have the notes in Em for the words ‘It’s raining now so’
Then we might change to D for the words ‘heavily a’
Then back to Em for ‘cold wind shakes the’
Then finish this section with D in its root position for ‘trees – old’
C ‘Winter has re’
G ‘fused to go he’
F ‘drives Spring to her’
Em ‘knees’
I haven’t listed the available notes in each chord as I am sure you know them well enough and you are encouraged to find your own chord progressions and create your own lyric. This is just a starter to motivate you.
Bear in mind that initially you only need to play the individual notes in a regular time without any regard for a nice flow, that will come later once you have decided on the basic tune and you might be amazed to find how the tune will just suggest itself once you have laid down the basic idea.
If you simply can’t find the notes you want because they are not in the chord remember that you have 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 13ths etc. to choose from as well as augmented and diminished chords. Perhaps you are looking for a diminished seventh or a Maj7.
Sevenths are very useful to take you back to the tonic chord such as a G7 leading to C or try a Bdim leading back to C.
The written score.
So finally you can play a nice tune with some nice chords but have you written any music yet? You can’t really say that you have written a song unless you can give the music to somebody else to play. When the day arrives when you hand somebody else your printed score and they play it exactly as you imagined you will be filled with pride and delight.
Surprisingly it is not that easy for the untrained to actually WRITE the music. The problem is getting the note values and timing correct. You will be able to sing your song but you might have trouble getting it down on paper. Even great singers employ somebody else to write the music down.
What will save you here and speed your learning is something called ‘Notation Software’. There are a number of programs available and some will set you back many hundreds of dollars or even thousands but unless you are planning to turn professional you don’t need them.
There are inexpensive programs out there that allow you to simply record the song and import the midi file directly into the software which produces the score. It is not that straight forward as humans cannot play with the accuracy of a computer so you end up with a lot of funny notes like 32nds and odd little rests worth a 16th so you have to spend an hour or two cleaning things up.
You quickly learn that you do not have to play the entire orchestration into this software because you end up with 16 tracks when all you wanted was perhaps the melody and chords so just consider what you actually want printed before you begin otherwise you end up deleting a lot of unwanted stuff.
I highly recommend these learning tools because they teach the structure of the music, correct timing and a hundred other things. Some will also print out a very nice score for you complete with chord symbols and lyrics. Oh! and of course you need the printed music so that you can remember how to play it later after you have written 200 songs.
If you can’t simply record your midi file into it then you place each note on the stave manually which is a good learning tool in itself. Software of this type usually provides you with a handy little play back so that you can correct errors as you go.
In my next article we will look at The Hook and embellishments.
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Source by Steve Parry