Melody is king. No other melodic element in your arrangement will ever be as important - not chords, not the bass, not pluck sounds.
So it makes sense to take a really close look at what makes a great melody and which parts it’s made up of.If you’ve read my post on how to write chord progressions that grab an audience (which I recommend you do, if you haven’t done it yet), a lot of what you’ll hear in this post will seem familiar.
To me, chords and melodies are almost the same thing anyways (and if you would like to hear about that, let me know in the comment section), so it’s no big surprise that melodies come in the same types as chords:
Color Melodies, i.e. melodies that sound pretty
Direction Melodies, i.e. melodies that go somewhere
Blends, i.e. melodies that use both color AND direction
Color Melodies
Color melodies are melodies that rely heavily on groove. They are often made up of just one or two notes, like the chorus from Taylor Swift’s Style or the “I can see your halo (halo, halo)” bit from Beyoncé’s Halo. In other words, they have a clear base pitch.
Without chords, color melodies are intrinsically boring. They are not going anywhere and they don’t provide a lot of color by themselves.
Add some chords though, and each new chord brings in a new emotion. What emotion this is depends entirely on what interval the melody represents in this new chord:
1 (root): strong, hypnotic
2: dreamy, open
b3: sad
3: happy
4 (only in minor chords): dreamy, open
5: strong, hypnotic
b6: sad, tense
6: grand
b7: funky
7: dreamy
8: see 1
Do you see the commonalities with what we talked about in the post on harmony? If not, go back and read it again, because seeing this connection is important.
Direction Melodies
Direction melodies use more different notes and don’t have a clear base pitch. The verses to Bernhoft’s Choices or C’mon Talk are great examples.
Because it doesn’t come back to the same pitch over and over again, this type of melody is quite challenging to sing. Because audiences have troubles singing along, it has mostly disappeared from pop music and can only be found in jazz or soul.
This is a shame, because as you can hear from the two Bernhoft songs, they can sound absolutely fantastic.
Blends
This is the kind of melody we hear day in, day out on the radio and it combines the two previous types.
If you’re ever struggling finding a good melody to a song, going at it with a blend approach is a pretty safe bet.
Blends are melodies that shift their base pitch every 1 or 2 bars. Take Rachel Platten’s Fight Song: It changes its base pitch from the root to the 2 to the 3 to the 4. In other words, it moves up, up, up. Or take R.City’s Locked Away (feat. Adam Levine), going from 3 to 1 to 4 to 3.
Remember these key differences:
