Melody Writing 101

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my class on Melody Writing one oh one. The point of this class is to make sure that you have plenty of devices so that when you're creating melodies, you have lots of options to choose from that you know are standard melodic options. I'll be providing you with plenty of melodic examples, and towards the end, we'll even be writing out some of these melodic examples in a PDF and identifying the melodic techniques straight on the page so that you can really see how things are broken down. So we're going to talk about neighbor tones, passing tones, chromatic neighbor tones, chromatic passing tones, ornaments like mordants, turns, and trills. We're going to talk about enclosures, arpeggios, and we're going to see how it all gets put together. This class can be useful for producers, composers and performers of just about any genre. And because genres can vastly differ between if they swing or if they don't swing, I'll also cover a small class talking about swing and straight rhythms and how they apply to melody writing. Now, you do have a project for this course, and you're going to have two options. If you're comfortable writing out music, you're going to be doing some writing, and if you're comfortable performing, you're going to be doing some performing. I want you to create a four chord chord progression. It can be very simple. You can keep it on the white keys, and you're going to create some sort of a melody that uses at least two of the melodic devices that we cover within this course. If you are notating out your melody, it would be great if you could identify on the page. Where you're using those specific techniques. Although it's not necessary because I'll be able to see it. I think it might help you out just to really see how you can start to break this stuff down and go about your melody writing in a bit of a formulaic way while also using a bit of the intuitive nature that we bring to our melody writing. So you'll either be supplying a PDF or a picture of your sheet music or supplying a video or audio recording of you playing through the melody. I'm going to go through all the details of this project within the class dedicated to the project details, so make sure you check that out. At this point, I've supplied plenty of courses about harmony because it's what I'm super passionate about. But harmony and melody relate to one another so much that I had to put this course out for any of you that are waiting to see what are some tips that Josh has towards melody writing. This is the class for you. We keep it simple. We go to the basics, and from there, you can permutate and put this stuff together in so many different ways that it becomes almost endless possibilities. So if you're looking to not only improve your melody writing, but also better understand what you're doing within your melody writing, this is the class for you. So I hope you have fun in this course. I'm sure you'll learn something new, and I'm excited to share with you some of the techniques that I most often use in my own melody writing. Let's start to dig into it. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: Alright, so for this course project, you're going to have a few different options that all sort of revolve around the same idea. You're going to create a four chord chord progression, and over that chord progression, you're going to create some sort of a melody. If you're a pianist, that might mean the chords are in your left hand and the melody is in your right hand. If you're a guitarist and you're not a jazz or flamenco guitarist and unable to play chords and melody at the same time, which I understand is very difficult, you can always just record multiple layers, record yourself playing the chords, and then record yourself playing the melody, and you can submit your project that way. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself because you can either do a recording project or you can write out your melody and chords in sheet music form. Let's talk about both. So for the sheet music project, you won't have to do any playing at all. You can either have chord symbols floating up above the staff like you would see in a jazz or a pop chart, or you can do treble clef and bass clef, and the chords can be down in the bass clef. You're going to write out your melody in the treble clef. And if you want to go that extra mile, you'll identify the neighbor tones, passing tones, enclosures, all the melodic techniques that you've incorporated into your melody. I want you to find a way to pencil in some sort of identifier for those. Again, you don't have to, but I think you'll get more out of the project if you do that. Now, you can supply the material to me two different ways. You can either write it out by hand, take a picture and submit that picture, or preferably, you could write it out in some sort of sheet music program like Sebelius or MuseScore, or Dorico or whatever you happen to be using. From there, you'll export it from the software and supply me with a PDF. Now the other option is you can supply a recording of yourself either audio or video playing the chords and melody together. For pianists, this is pretty clear cut, left hands chords, right hand's melody. For a guitarist, you might need a backing track for the chords or a loop pedal or something to that effect. But you can feel free to get creative. I want to hear the chords, and I want to hear that melody. Now, if you want to submit an audio recording, I'd recommend doing the recording, uploading it to SoundCloud, you can just use a free account and then supplying a public link of that uploaded file within the project description of this project submission. Similarly, if you're doing a video recording of yourself, upload it to YouTube, and in that case, you'll still supply a public link within the course description for this project submission. From there, I'll either have an audio recording, video recording or some sort of a file showing the sheet music of this project. I'll evaluate it and let you know what I think you did best and maybe some areas of improvement. I know there's a lot of options for this course project, but I can't assume that everyone taking this course is a pianist. So I want to make sure that the options are available. So that way, whether you're a singer, guitarist, pianist, there's something available to you so that you can supply a course project for this course. And also, it's just kind of fun to have some options. Ultimately, also, if you want to notate things out and then do a recording of yourself, that's perfectly fine, as well. You will be going the extra mile if you do that and kudos to you. So that's an option as well, too. But for now, it doesn't have to be that complex. Make sure you're either polishing your sheet music or practicing the material that you're going to be supplying within your video or audio recording. I want to make sure that you're doing this on a day that feels comfortable. The project should not feel forced, so make sure that you're feeling in the zone. Any other questions that you have, feel free to reach out to me, and I'm happy to answer them. That's it for this course project. I'll catch you in the next class. 3. What Makes a Good Melody: So what makes for a good melody? Simply put, I think the more singable a melody is, the more it's going to stick with your listener. Now, what makes a melody singable? We don't want to be leaping around too much. The idea is not to be jumping an octave multiple times, and then fifths and fourths and tritones. You can get away with the odd leap, but for the most part, you want to make sure that it's singable within a nice, narrow range, mostly steps, skips and repeats. Also, choosing notes that are from a diatonic collection, like a major scale or a minor scale. Going to be pretty important, especially for music in the West because we're so used to hearing these scales that whether or not we're fantastic singers or musicians, we're still able to hear the collection of notes sort of subconsciously. So as we're singing along, we're familiar with the set of notes. And also, quite often, we can kind of anticipate where a melody might be going. We want our audience to feel smart, so this sort of idea of setting up a note within a melody that the audience might be able to guess is a really important thing. Like, if I play something like Do you hear the last note wants to resolve back? So it is possible to kind of cue the listener a bit so that they're ready for the note that you're about to play. They feel special and smart. You've supplied a melody that they enjoy, everyone wins. Also, the melody should interact well with the harmony. For example, if I have a C major chord in my left hand, it's very possible that C Es or Gs are going to be found in the melody. We're going to be talking a lot more about this later in the course, but as a general overview for now, whatever notes are in the harmony tend to feel very safe within the melody. And if you're choosing a note not in the harmony, but still from the overall scale, you're going to get a more colorful result. So in this case of a C major chord, if we're in the key of C major, Ds, Fs, As and Bs will all feel a little bit more colorful. So when you're using a diatonic collection of notes, relating it well to harmony, not leaping all over the place and giving the audience something that they can anticipate a little bit, but also giving them some fun surprises along the way, I think that's a great formula for supplying your listener with a melody that they're going to enjoy. One other thing I want to say about a melody being singable is you have to consider the speed at which you're navigating through the melody. If it happens to be, no one's going to be able to sing that, okay? So even half speed, No one's going to be able to sing that, so how much do you have to dial something back so that it's easy enough that the general public can either sing it or sing it in their head. So between not giving them too many leaps and keeping the speed manageable, you're essentially giving them a simple melody. And quite often, simple melodies are the most effective. Now, I'm not saying that any part of your melody can't have some complexity, but if it's too complex, then it tends to be for a very niche set of listeners. But if you want to keep your melody engaging for a larger group of listeners, keep it simple, make sure that you're keeping things diatonic or true to a key or scale and relating things to your harmony so that your left hand and right hand are working with each other. If you can do all of that, you're in really good shape. Another thing that could be worth mentioning is something called melodic complexity, and I think it's best that we actually navigate that in its own full class. So let's dive into the next class where we're going to be talking about melodic complexity. 4. Melodic Complexity: The way members of a band or an orchestra communicate with one another through their music is very important. If every single player is playing something super complex or super simple, then it tends to just sort of flat line. It doesn't have the nice juxtaposition of, I can choose to tune my ear to listen to the simple element or to listen to the more complex element. We don't have enough on the palette to give us a variety. Even though everything sort of interlocks together when you have complex and non complex elements, we can still choose to separate and listen to different elements. But if everything is complex, everything's harder to listen to. And if everything's super simple, then it's just kind of boring. So my guide for you for now is listen to the rhythm section, especially the drums. Are the drums doing something super complex? If they are, keep a melody a little bit more simple and singable. I mean, think about metal. You have really heavy drum, da da gut. And what's the singer doing over top? Almost operatic style, what you could call bell canto vocals, a beautiful voice happening over top. But it's not like rap and metal fused. Am I saying rap and metal fuse is a bad thing or you shouldn't do it? Not necessarily. I'm just saying there's a lot of complex elements, the complexity of the rhythm of the voice, the complexity of the density of the drums, and then likely many other instruments overtop. If the drums are doing something more complex and your voice is sort of floating over top, there's a nice juxtaposition, and everything kind of feels like it's fitting into place. It's like if you had a pizza and you had one topping that was really adventurous, that could be fun. But if every topping is really adventurous and really sort of extreme on the palette, then you can't really differ all the flavors very well, and it becomes a little bit overwhelming. So when you're coming up with your melody, just ask yourself, how complex is the instrumentation overall, especially the rhythm section. And if that changes section to section, then so can you. Maybe the verse is very complex instrumentally, but your voice is floating over top in that bell Canto style. Maybe the chorus, everything breaks down quite a bit, and it gives you the opportunity to be a little bit more nimble and dense with your vocal rhythms. Rhythms aside, if the pitched instruments are moving wide leaps all over the place, you're probably best to keep your melody a little bit more grounded through repetition, small steps, and skips. But if you have instrumentation that's just sort of chugging around in one spot, then maybe you can get more adventurous with the leaps that you take and the sort of breadth or width of your vocal range. Now, we're not always trying to do the exact opposite. Complex drums, simple rhythm. Complex guitar, simple motion with your melody. It tends to be an easy formula to work with, but at the same time, there's going to be moments where you might want to perfectly match a guitar riff that is complex. Maybe the if is playing and you're singing that same riff. So it really depends on what you're going for the stylistic aesthetics are and also when and how to break the rules. The longer you do this, the more you're going to have a good idea as to how you want to break the rules and what rules you want to break. Now, if you're thinking, Josh, I'm a beginner musician. I don't want to have to learn this over the next ten years of band practice. I mean, you don't have to. Just a lot of listening to whatever style you're enthusiastic about is really going to help. So because the voice doesn't really supply harmony outside of maybe outlining chord shapes through a broken fashion, you're really listening to the band's rhythm and what the motion is of the pitched instruments. We're not going to call it a melody, but it could be a counter melody or the motion of those chord progressions. So rhythm, and then the width or leaps of the pitched instruments and trying to juxtapose those in a nice, easy way. I think if you're doing that more than you're not, then you're good. And if you want to do complex with complex sometimes or really simple with really simple, that's fine, too. But as a general starting point, especially for beginners, make sure that you're sort of challenging what the rest of the band is doing to make sure that you're fitting into your pocket. I'm not saying challenging with bad notes or bad rhythms. I'm just saying if the band is complex, lay it back a little bit. If they're simple, you can bring it up a little bit in terms of that complexity. It's a simple concept, but I think it's really important. So make sure that you're considering the overall band and what they're doing and how your role fits in as a let's say singer, but at the same time, it might be first chair violinist, a synthesizer player on an electronic track, et cetera. If you're in charge of the melody, listen to what the band is doing and fit your melody in around that. Now, we've zoomed out quite a bit and taken a look at melodies from a more broad perspective. But if you're still not sure how to create a melody, in the next class, we're going to talk about some approaches that you can take something a little more zoomed in, but we're not going to be digging into the weeds of the theory quite yet. So after the next class, we'll dig into some but in this next class, we'll be talking about melodic approaches. I'll see you there. 5. Melodic Approaches: The so what are some approaches for creating melodies? Why do we start off nice and simple and talk about simple melodies? Let's say I have a chord progression. C minor, E flat major, A flat major, B flat major. In terms of a simple melody, we could find one note that's pretty common between those chords. E flat is in the first chord. E flat is in the second chord. E flat is in the third chord, and we can sidestep to a note very close, in this case, D for the last chord, which does not have an E flat. So now if we do a very simple rhythm over top, using those notes, we could have something like this. So you can see it doesn't have to be too complex, and we can even start dancing around that note a little bit. Like, if that's too repetitious for you, what about something like this? Okay. So you're already starting to kind of pick up a really key concept which we'll dive into more later, which is that the melody should relate to the harmony. Whether you're trying to challenge the harmony or agree with the harmony, that's up to you. But I've chosen notes that are specifically within my chords, and we're going to dive into that a little bit more later, but just wanted to show you that's a very safe way to get started. Next up, you could have some sort of a theme. Let's say your theme is three notes, and then you move down to another note. Well, you might be Beethoven if that's the case, because we'd have something like Okay, so he moved that theme three notes down a skip in this case, and then he shifted it down. We call this a sequence. That's sort of the initial breath into his fifth symphony. From there, we're going to take that theme and start slowly moving it up sometimes with steps, but it's three notes and then down a step or a skip. So you could call this theme and variation. We're taking a little nugget of an idea. We're moving it around. You could flip it upside down. You could play around with the rhythm. There's plenty you can do with it. But if we're talking about a longer theme, let's say the theme is Okay, so that's our theme one more time. Okay, so if I'm putting this in the context of something like cinema, I might get something like. But it doesn't have to be so minor. Innately, this line does sound minor, but what if I put it in F major something like? Now all of a sudden it takes on a bit more of a major characteristic. So you'll hear this a lot in like Star Wars and Harry Potter and all these John Williams scores, where a main melody will come back, but in a completely different context, to talk Harry Potter, maybe the dementors have a theme, and we're used to hearing that. But then when you defeat the dementors, you hear the theme, but in a lighter sort of fashion. That's not actually true to the movie, but I'm just saying you can take a theme and initially have it be very dark, but you could also have it be a little bit more happy, and you can also change the ending as well, too. So if we have something like at the very end, we could have but we could also deceive the audience a bit with So even deceptive cadences, which we can talk about out of the context of this course, but basically moving to a chord that is not anticipated can be a great way to sort of shift a theme, so it has a very different feel. So for smaller themes, you can variate them, move them around, and play around with the theme. And for larger themes, you can change the harmony or even subtle shifts within the theme itself to give a completely different emotion to the listener. Now, taking Leah's theme, which I was just playing, let's talk a little bit about how there is a journey involved within this melody. And this is the next concept is creating a melody that takes a listener on a bit of a journey. This is something I've sort of conceptualized for this particular melody. I don't know that John Williams felt this way exactly, but let's talk a bit about it. He likes to start his melodies with a five of whatever key he's in. If he's in C minor, he'll start with the fifth note of C minor and he'll bring us into the first note of C minor. Now, you can kind of hear some military influence in his music sometimes, and I think this is kind of similar to a bugle call. The sort of fifths and fourths and the so to do Leiden or five to one Leden. He does it with Lea's theme. But also Harry Potter and a lot of other themes as well. So it's like he's starting with so. Not just the Soulfg so, but he's like a sentence. He's like, So, there's this guy named Luke, and he has a little bit of trouble, which we hear on this minor sound here. But don't worry. He has some friends that are going to help him out, which we hear on this major chord here. It's like, Oh, there's a little bit of hope. But ultimately, the death star is nothing to be trifled with, right? So it's, like, very triumphant. We're getting up to the top. It's minor. So there's some sort of conflict. There's some sadness, there's some epicness. But at the same time, there's a journey. This is us trying to destroy the death star, whatever it might be. And then we have. This little phrase at the end, which is still ultimately quite minor. Is the first movie done? No, it's a trilogy, and it's going to continue to be tumultuous for the main heroes. So we have to make sure that we're kind of suspending a melody that doesn't feel happy and resolved too soon. So, again, we have this so lead in. And then right here on this E flat, now we hear it's minor, because up to that point, it could be And maybe that would be a good variation of the theme for a more triumphant or glorious scene later in the movie. But we don't get that. Now, the harmony is also a bit of a giveaway right away we hear this minor chord, so we know it's minor. But I'm just showing you that the melody itself is giving away little clues to what we could picture as part of the bigger story or the journey. And if you take anything from these notes about the melody being a journey, I think it's really this part here. Where we get to the height of the story, the height of the melody. That's what you want is you want to have this sort of climactic point in your melody. Doesn't have to be for every section of a song, but at some point you should really catch their ear with something you've done in your melody. One more thing I'll mention, and it's a little bit more abstract, but we do it quite a bit is mimicking nature. Now, one of the most simple ways that we can mimic nature is in echos. And echos in music would be simply repetition. Now, is an echo louder than its initial statement? No, it's gonna be quieter. So if we have something like That repetition of the same three notes down the octave is quieter. This is even true in classical music when you're playing a piano piece and there's a system or a line of music that does an exact repeat, and there's no dynamic markings. In other words, they're not telling you how loud to play the line the first time and the second time. As a general rule, the second time you just play slightly quieter. It's going to make the line a little bit more interesting. It's going to give some sort of variation, and it's also mimicking nature. So we're used to hearing this idea of something being a bit louder and then a bit quieter. So while that's just one example of how we can use nature to mimic within our melodies, you can get more adventurous, maybe listen to some birds, listen to the wind, whatever it might be, and you can try to mimic that feeling in nature. It's going to give a very natural approach to your melody and might get you thinking a little bit outside the box. So while those are some great approaches to creating melodies, we still have to dig into the inner workings of the theory. We're going to start to dive into that within the next class. I'll see you there. 6. Magnets and Metal: I'm going to start with one of my favorite approaches to melody writing. Straight out of the gate, we're going to be relating our melody to our harmony because at the end of the day, that's going to be super important. Now, if you're singing a melody and you have no other pitched instruments, no chord instruments, no harmonic foundation, then this class has a little bit less relevance. But most people in today's modern music, we're combining melody, harmony, and rhythm together in new and exciting ways. So melody and harmony together is a very important thing to be thinking about. And in this class, we're going to talk about how harmony kind of acts like magnets. Now I think of melody as little pieces of scrap metal, and I think of harmony like magnets. The melody wants to pull to the harmony. The scrap metal wants to pull to the magnets. Now, if my left hand is down on this C major chord and my melody is up on this C, I'm kind of thinking about this chord as being in every spot of the piano. Yes, I'm playing it down here, but I'm also thinking that all the Cs, Es and Gs in that moment have now lit up like magnets. So whatever I'm playing in my left hand, those are the magnets across the whole piano. Let's listen to when the scrap metal sort of pulls itself to the magnet. So if I play C, E or G notes from my harmony, it should sound resolved and quite consonant or pleasant. Here we go. Here's C. No issues very resolved. Here's E. Resolved and sort of highlighting the most major quality of the chord. It's a very major sort of sound and still very resolved. And then our G, this one is still resolved, it's still consonant, but it's a little bit more open ended. It's not foundational like the C. It's not going to give the tonality major or minor, like the E. It's just kind of a filler note. But it's really great if you want to sort of leave a bit of a question or not have something so strongly resolved or strongly happy and sad, but just straight up consonant, something that sounds pleasant with the harmony. That leaves us with D, F, A and B. Now we can say that this piece of scrap metal, D, wants to pull to the two closest magnets, C or E because those notes in my left hand are currently lighting up all of the Cs in E's and Gs on the piano as magnets. So D wants to pull to C or to E. Now, I've come to find that a little bit more often than not, the resolution will be downward. My best guess has to do with the fact that sometimes humans are kind of lazy and like lightning, we take the path of least resistance. So if I'm in a choir, it's easier for me to sing down, and it's a little bit easier to settle down onto a pitch in tune. Pulling up is a little bit trickier. If you don't believe me, try vocal runs. If you could do a vocal run, try something like as opposed to going up higher can be a little bit more difficult in terms of the agility that's needed vocally. Now, I'm not saying always resolve down to magnets. I'm just saying I've come to find that by a small hair, I'll see these resolutions downward a little bit more than upward. So D wants to pull to C or E. Those are the resolutions. F wants to pull to E or G. Those are the resolutions based on what's closest in terms of the magnets. A wants to pull down to G. It could sort of pull to C. It's not too far away. But if I did have a magnet sitting here and sitting here, you could see the scrap metal would pull to the closer magnet. And then lastly, B is going to want to pull to that C. After all, it's called the leading tone. It leads our ear up to C. But again, it could also pull down to G as a backup plan. But like I mentioned, if these are the two magnets and here is the piece of scrap metal, it's going to want to more often than not pull to the C. Now, I mentioned this idea of the magnets being a bit closer to the melody, and whichever magnet is closer, the melody will more likely want to pull to that magnet. Here's a great example. F was one of the notes we had played. It's beside E and G by a step, but the steps aren't equal. F to E is a semitone, and F to G is a tone. We'll hear both of these resolutions and melodies, but F to E, you'll hear a little bit more. After all, it's the foundation for Amen at the end of a church hymn. So we have F pulling to E because technically this magnet is a little bit closer. It's a semitone away from the scrap metal, whereas G is a tone away or two semitones away from the scrap metal. Now, this is a loose set of rules. I'm not saying F has to resolve to E every time, and it can never resolve to G. But if you can start to frame things in this way of making sense, as like, why does this not sound good? Why does this F sound weird? Well, think about it. If I have a magnet here and I put a little piece of metal right here, it doesn't move to the magnet. That's tense. There's some tension there. It's like if I hold an apple and then let go, and it just floats there, we've come to expect certain things like gravity pulling the apple or magnetism pulling that piece of scrap metal. So when I'm on this F and lingering on this F, that's why we're hearing that tension because it really wants to pull to the magnet. Now, as you get writing melodies more and more, you'll be comfortable with color and eventually even some dissonance or tension. Color, for the sake of this course, is going to be a tone. So when I'm playing a C major chord and playing D, D is a tone away from C, one of the magnets, and D is a tone away from E, the other magnet. So because there's only tones on either side, it floats around as being quite colorful. In the case of F, now there's a semitone clashing between this E, where we could really bring the E up here. Again, they're all magnets, all the E's. Now we can see that semitone. So that's more dissonant or kind of crunchy. And you can learn to lean into that, but you want to start writing your melodies quite safe and then add some color and then learn to lean into that dissonance over time. So if I have something like, that resolved, but that lingering on that F is temporarily tense, so you have to learn how to deal with it, and that's mostly going to come from just plenty of melody writing. So the same way this F wants to pull to E, we also get the same conflict with B. B is a semitone away from C, currently one of our magnets, so it really wants to pull to that C, and the other option is for it to go down to G, a full skip away. So you can see, in that case, the B is very often going to pull to the C. And again, in classical music, this is why we call it a leading tone. It's leading our ear back to do in this case. So pulling to the magnetic notes of the harmony is safe. If a note is floating a tone away from all the magnets, it's going to be colorful, and it has some great options as to where it can pull. If a note is clashing by a semitone with one of the magnets, it's most likely going to want to pull in the direction of that semitone to resolve at some point. Again, these are all loose rules, but it's a great way to start. Now, here's the thing. Your harmony is going to change. You're not going to play a whole song on C major. You might play C major, A minor, F major G, one of the most common sort of heart and soul chord progressions. So if we take that chord progression, and we consider that these are the magnets currently CE and G. When I move down to A minor, the magnets have changed. I get some students thinking that CE and G are always the magnets when you're in the key of C major. It's not true. The magnets change based on what the harmony is doing. And this is why jazz musicians, if we have a really complex chord like G dominant seven, flat 13, flat nine, you don't need to know this chord, but it's adventurous. And the notes that make it adventurous, this E flat and A flat are often highlighted in the melody. It's like a unique opportunity to temporarily play one of those notes. I think, and this might be a weird analogy, but I think it's when a parent says to a kid, Okay, you can use swear words for the next 30 seconds. The kids go to use some swear words. They're gonna go for it, right? It's a unique opportunity that they don't usually have to lean into the dissonance of the swear words or in this case, the dissonance of the notes from that chord. So jazz musicians and classical and rock all across the board, but specifically jazz quite often when they have the opportunity to play a unique note that's in the harmony, well, that magnet is now available. Or the melody. So why not highlight that unique opportunity? So going through slowly, I'm going to play some of these magnets as the chords change, and I'll show you my frames of thought as I'm going through. I'm going to start on E. And I'm not going to do anything too fancy because we still have to develop a lot more techniques, but we're just going to kind of hold some notes. So we have E. Moving down to my A minor chord. E is actually in my A minor chord, so let's play it again. Now I'm moving down to an F major chord. Is E in my F major chord? It is not. So I'm going to pull to a note that's close within this new set of magnets. F is available right here. And then I'm going to a Gchord. I could go down to a D, which is available in my G Cord, but G is even closer, so let's go with that. Now we have and those notes work so well because they're always being supported by the notes within the harmony. In other words, the scrap metal is pulling to the magnets of each new chord. Now, if you're someone who prefers to view things through sheet music and you're more coming from a traditional approach, like, let's say you're a classical pianist and you want to know how everything that I'm explaining verbally and showing you on the keys looks on the page, I'm going to supply you a small PDF showing you the three main ways that the melody can interact with harmony. Either the metal is on the magnet, it's resolved or consonant. The melody is beside the magnet in a colorful way. In other words, we're only hearing tones and skips clashing or tones and thirds or the other way where we have a semitone clash somewhere, things feel more dissonant and a little bit more unsettled. Within the PDF, I'll be giving you some different chords and different melody notes and how they relate to those chords, but on the page. So if you are someone that prefers learning off the page, I got you covered, make sure you check out that PDF. So as we go through the rest of this course, I want you to be thinking of harmony as magnets, melody as pieces of metal that are either attracted to the magnet and sitting nice and stable or floating very close with a lot of tension, wanting to pull or kind of floating, let's say, between two magnets. Like, if you two magnets and you had a little piece of metal floating in between. That's a nice little phenomenon. That's kind of when we're getting color when we are a tone or a skip away from one of the magnets. It's not enough to really pull the metal, so it kind of floats in a way that's not resolved, but still sounds quite pleasant. So that's it for this class on extracting our melody from harmony, I'll catch you in the next class. 7. Neighbor and Passing Tones: Next up, we're going to talk about neighbor tones and passing tones. This class is going to be a little bit more simple and a little bit shorter because the concept is not super complex. Once you understand from the last class, the concept of attracting melody notes to harmony notes or metal attracting to magnets, this class is pretty easy to grasp. So let's say my chord is friendly old C major, and my melody note is, again, starting on E. We know that there's two other magnets or destinations fairly close by. There's C and E, the other two notes of our C major chord. Now, before we try to venture from E to one of those two other notes, let's see if we can linger a little bit on this E. I want you to imagine that the Scrap metal is touching the magnet, and I pull it away just a little bit, and then I snap it back. Okay, so this is called a neighbor tone where we're sidestepping to another note and then returning back to this safe harmonic choice. So if we have E, I could have an upper neighbor tone, stepping up one note and then coming back to the E. I say up one note. I don't mean always one semitone. It's up one note in whatever key you're in or scale you're in. And right now we're in C major. So if I'm on my A minor chord or F major chord, in this case, I'm still in the key of C major. I'm just playing around with different chords. Available within that key. So we have to consider what key we're in. In this case, it's C major. So our main set of notes would be CDE FGABC. Back to our example, my chord is C major. My melody note is E, one of my harmonic options. I've stepped up one note in the key of C major, and I've come back. That's an upper neighbor tone. Same deal if I go down one note in C major and come back, that is a lower neighbor tone. Now if we do want to move to one of those other notes, let's say G or C from our initial starting point E, I can pass through this F on my way to G. Again, staying diatonic, staying true to the key of C major. I can also move down through a D to a C. These are called passing tones. I've passed through a non chord note to arrive to the next chord note. I could have upper passing tones, lower passing tones, upper neighbor tones or lower neighbor tones. Let's try out an example where I'll play C major, A minor, F major and G major chords like the last class, and I'll talk my way through. It's going to be a little patchy and slow. We're not too worried about the rhythm, but I'm going to talk my way through what I'm doing with these neighbor tones and passing tones. Let's go for it. So I'm going to start on E again, and we're going to start with an upper neighbor tone. And then I'm going to move down to the next chord, which still has an E in it. So this time, let's do a lower neighbor tone, just to variate it a little bit. Now I'm on F major. F is very close. It's my closest magnet of the next chord. So I'll start here. Let's do a passing tone up to A, and then I'm going to move to a G. No, I'll move to a B next, which is very close to this A, and I'm going to do a lower passing tone. So we've done upper neighbor, lower neighbor, and we've done upper passing tone, lower passing tone. Here it is without me talking. Now, the rhythm is kind of boring, but the melody speaks for itself. It's very simple. It works really well in terms of being singable to the listener. It's somewhat capable of being anticipated this. And then the listener, once they hear these first couple of notes, they can anticipate that sort of call and response. Here's the call and here's the response. So it's all following simple rules. I'm not doing any of the approaches we talked about before, thinking about the journey or thinking about theme and variation. That stuff comes later. It's a little bit more sort of on top of the theory. But just digging into the theory itself, you can see we are supplied with really capable melodies, something that could really work well within a song. Now, I'm going to supply a PDF that shows a few chords. We're going to be on some chord tones, working with neighbor tones and passing tones so you can see how this all looks in the context of sheet music. So like I mentioned, the concept is simple. Neighbor tones, we're on a stable tone, up and down or down and up back to our starting point and passing tones, starting on a note and moving up to or down to to get to the next chord note. Now, it is possible to have something that you might call a double passing tone, where we have a C major chord, and G is our melody note. Sure, I can come down to E through a passing tone, F. But what if I wanted to move up to this high C? Maybe now I'm moving through two notes to get up to that high C. So in context, that might sound something like this. See, I had to add a bit more rhythmic density to get through that extra note, but it still sounded great. No issues, and we're just following rules. So that's it on the basics of neighbor tones and passing tones. The last class and this one, if you were just a specialist in these two classes, you could get tons of mileage as a melody writer. So don't think that this is all going to come within watching the video and practicing it for 10 minutes. You want to really keep applying this stuff over and over to get the most out of it. So make sure you're practicing it. Have some fun, and I'll catch you in the next class. 8. Stability - Color - Dissonance: Up to this point, within the choruse, we've been dancing around the idea of stability, color, and dissonance. Let's break those down a little bit more and start to talk about how you can conceptualize how your melody feels in any given moment. Whatever your chord might be, let's switch it up this time to A minor. If you're playing one of the notes from that A minor chord, it's going to innately sound very stable. In other words, consonant, the opposite of dissonance or bad sounds. So if we have this A or C or E, working with our A minor chord, I think the question that some students have is, well, why is it working? It's in a different spot at the piano. But consider this. If I just play an A minor chord in both hands, that would sound fine, or if I did it here, it would sound fine, or if I did it with a bit more of a space between, it would sound fine. Now, all I'm doing is with my right hand, instead of playing the full chord, I'm maybe just choosing one note from that chord. So whenever we're playing a chord, as pianists, to some extent, it's almost like our mind lights up all of the notes of that chord across the entire keybd. Now, if I'm playing a chord with that chord or a melody note from that chord with my chord, I know it's going to sound perfectly fine and stable. So is an A going to sound bad with an A? No, they're the same note. Is an A going to sound bad with a C? No, it's a skip away, and after all, skips are really fundamental in harmony. And if I go the other direction, it's a sixth away. And sixth sound super nice as well, too. And then we have E. Is A going to clash with E? No, it's a perfect fourth away from one E and a perfect fifth away from another E. So there's nothing in this chord saying that this note can't work. So, stability is take your chord, whatever it might be, and play one of those notes within your melody. Color, in this case, would be taking one of the notes that is not in your chord that does not have a semitone conflict. In other words, this B, the next note available, is clashing with this C by a displaced semitone. In other words, if I move this down a couple octaves, I can see that semitone. But again, don't forget, we're thinking of these chords all across the piano. So when I'm playing this B, I'm thinking of it as clashing with my C from this sort of imaginary chord up here. But what about D? D is a tone away from C, and it's a tone away from E two of my chord tones. So this is a great example of where things might sound a bit more colorful. It's sort of a floating sound, and it can be used quite a bit in, like, jazzy chords. I have a whole course that's adding color to chords, and it's a similar concept to this of, like, what colors work well and why do they work well? A big part of it is, is it the colorfulness of a tone rubbing against something or the dissonance and harshness of a semitone rubbing against something? In this case, we have a tone to C and a tone to E. So it just floats around as being very colorful. Now, if we continue to go up, we have F and G as our final two notes. F is a semitone away from E, and again, we're imagining a chord up here, so that F is going to be a little bit more dissonant. And then if I move up higher, we end up getting our G. Now, G is a tone away from A, which is colorful and safe, and it's a skip away from E, which is even more safe. Our chords are made on skips. So there's nothing really saying that this is going to sound bad. And I think that's why one of the first colors that we learn as jazz pianists or pianists in general are seventh chords. Because we know the seventh isn't conflicting with the fifth of the chord, in other words, the third note, in this case, E, because it's a skip away, and we're staying true to our scale at this point. And it's a tone away from this other note, in this case, A. So it's a bit colorful and a bit stable. It's a great way to introduce ourselves to some color on chords. Now the two notes that were clashing with my A minor chord that sounded dissonant or unpleasant were B and F. And again, the reason for that is B is clashing with C from my chord, by a semitone, and F is clashing with E from my chord, also by a semitone. But how do they sound? Let's just listen for a moment. That sounds half decent. Let's try landing on the F this time. That's weird. The F sounds worse than the B. So even when we're in this dissonant territory, there's levels of dissonance. And because we're staying true to our scale, we are diatonic, let's talk a little bit about that diatonic dissonance. Why does the B sound slightly better than the F? Well, it has to do with semitones, and when we start to displace them by octaves, the two options that we have. For example, if I have a B to a C and I bring the B up one octave, I have a major seventh, the first note of a major scale to the seventh. And most people we agree that sounds dissonant, but it's not terrible. Now, if I had C to C sharp and I brought the C sharp up an octave, now I have something called a minor ninth, a semitone more than an octave. And this is much more unpleasant to most people. So when we go back to our A minor chord, and we ask ourselves, Okay, this B is clashing with what? It's clashing with C. Okay, so that clash that we're hearing, yes, it's a displaced semitone, but it's taking on the characteristic of a major seventh, whereas the F is clashing with E, and that is our minor ninth, arguably, a little worse sound. So when we're talking about these semitones being dissonant, there's sort of two levels to the dissonance. If it represents a major seventh conflicting with a note in the left hand, it's dissonant but passable. And if it's conflicting with the left hand's note by a minor ninth, it's dissonant and most likely not so passable for most ears. Now, there's actually a third way that we can get dissonance with a semitone or with tones, and that is venturing outside of our scale. So if I'm on A minor, and I play an E flat, that is conflicting with my E by a major seventh. Now, you might be thinking, Josh, you said major seventh aren't so bad. It's the minor ninth that we have to watch out for. Yes, but this note is not part of our scale. So there's something grounding about A minor, where we sort of superimpose in our mind the collection of notes available that will sound nice with it. And when we have this sound from outside of the scale, it seems unsettled. Now, can I play this note? Sure. I'm in A minor, and I'm playing a lot of this D sharp or E flat. But again, it's all what you do with it. And jazz musicians will be one of the first to tell you all the notes are available. You're never more than a semitone away from a right note. If I'm playing this B flat, sounds bad, but you can find a way to resolve it to a note that makes sense. And again, I'm pulling from this B flat to this A, thinking of the scrap metal pulling to the closest magnet. But I just took a little bit of a longer approach to get there. I think I played it slightly different, but same sort of idea. This is still resolving to this, but with a little bit of a dance around to resolve. So there's stability. The note within our melody is represented within our chord. There's color. The note in our melody is conflicted with the chord, but only by tones. So it doesn't sound so dissonant. It sounds just a little bit more colorful. And then there's dissonance. The melody is conflicting with the harmony by some sort of a semitone rub. If when you've sort of moved things around and you've determined, is it a major seventh or a minor ninth conflict, you can then put that dissonance into sort of two categories of being kind of dissonant or very dissonant. Then, of course, we open Pandora's box by saying we can also play notes from outside of the scale. It's a bit outside of the context of this course, but pretty much all of them are going to sound kind of bad unless you resolve them the right way. Then they sound totally fine. But there's just a lot more room for error, so be cautious if you're choosing notes from outside of your key. Now, remember, every time I change chords magnets on the piano change all across. So we have to consider that the rules I've given you from this class do apply to every type of major chord, every type of minor chord, also true for colored chords like seventh chords and nine chords, whatever's in the harmony, consider how that is interacting with the melody, and anytime your chord changes, everything shifts, and you're now thinking of a new set of magnets. You can see why a lot of practice is required at the instrument because to light up the brain and think new magnets, new magnets, and how is the melody interacting quite a bit of work, but it's actually a lot of fun when you get it to the point where it's intuitive and it's totally possible. It just takes some time and practice. Again, I'll supply a PDF showing you this stability, color, and dissonance in action on the page. So make sure that you check it out if you're someone that prefers to read sheet music. So there it is, stability, color, and dissonance, a bit of a deeper dive because we've already kind of mentioned it up to this point, but I wanted to kind of go a few layers deeper so you have a deeper understanding of how these three sort of main functions of the melody interact with harmony and how you're going to be able to at any point when you're playing your melody, understand the function of that note in relation to your harmony. So that's it for this class? I'll catch you in the next one. 9. Chromatic Passing & Neighbor Tones: Alright, let's get talking about chromatic passing tones and chromatic neighbor tones. Chromatic passing tones can happen in a few different ways, but based on the context of what I've given you within this course, up to this point, I'm going to give you some chords with a little bit more color so that we can still use this magnet and scrap metal analogy. Let's say my chord is C major, add two. I now have a D within my chord. So the magnets on the piano now become CD E and G all across the board. What that means is my passing tone from E down to C isn't really a passing tone anymore. This is now considered a more stable tone because it's within our harmony, and it becomes a magnet. But what if I wanted to move between D and C? There's only one note in between. Or D and E. There's only one note in between. Also works C to D or E to D. Any of these tones are going to have one little semitone or a chromatic note in between, something that's not within our key or our main scale. So if I'm on E and I want to move to a D, another stable tone, I can move through a chromatic passing tone. I can also pull down from D to C the same way. So C to D or D to E, it all works. But as you can see, once you start to do too many of these, it just feels swirly and kind of squirly. So we want to make sure we're using these only a little bit here and there. So let's say I have G, neighbor tone, passing tone to E, and then I have E, chromatic passing tone to D, and then a bit of a leap to a chord tone G, and then back to C. There's a case where a leap could be okay because I was doing so much tones and semitone work up here that by the time I came down to this G, a leap was actually kind of welcomed. So as practice, it could be worth playing your chord, starting on the root, and then doing all the available passing tones. So chromatic passing tone, C to D, chromatic passing tone, D to E, diatonic passing tone, E to G, diatonic meaning true to a key. G with a double passing tone all the way up to C. C, double passing tone down. Passing tone down to the E, chromatic passing tone, chromatic passing tone, you can reverse the process as well. You're going to hear chromatic passing tones and chromatic neighbor tones, a little bit more in later classical music and a lot of jazz and modern music. If you go really far back, you'll see a bit of it within, like, Baroque, for example, works by Bach, but it's something that got a little bit more adventurous as our ears expanded into enjoying chromaticism a little bit more. So speaking of chromatic neighbor tones, let's dig into those. Now, I needed to supply this chord to show you these little passing tones, but chromatic neighbor tones can work on literally any chord. You play any of the notes from that chord, and you move semitone to a non diatonic note. In this case, if I move a semitone up, that's F, which is in my C major scale. But if I move a semitone down, now I'm on E flat. So we've neighbor toned it, so to speak, where we are moving back to the E after this E flat. Now, again, there's only a chromatic neighbor tone on one side of this E. But what if my note was G? Now, if I go down a semitone, I'm outside of the key of C major. If I go up a semitone, same idea. This is, again, a little bit more of an adventurous sound, but there's nothing technically wrong with it if you're going for that sound. I'm gonna throw in one chromatic neighbor tone within a short melody and see if you can catch it. It sounds like this. Did you catch that G sharp? Okay, we'll do one more example, maybe. Now we have this F Sharp, for example. So one of my favorite spots to put chromatic neighbor tones is around the fifth. And Chopin did this quite a bit, especially in his minor music. Really dancing around that fifth. It's a very sinister sort of colorful sound. So something you can play around with. Now, that being said, if you want to do a chromatic neighbor tone to your root or third or seventh or ninth, all of that is acceptable, as well, depending on what you have in your harmony at that time. So simply put, chromatic passing tones and chromatic neighbor tones are the same as passing tones and neighbor tones, but we're not staying diatonic. We're not staying true to a scale. We are sidestepping a semitone to a note from outside of our scale, either to return back or to eventually move to another note available within our harmony. As usual, within this course, I will give you a PDF that outlines some of what we've talked about in case you're someone that prefers to learn off the page. So make sure that you do look out for that PDF. That's it for this class on chromatic passing tones and neighbor tones, and I'll catch you in the next class. 10. Ornaments: If you're looking to add a little bit more flare and complexity to your melodies, then ornaments might just be the way to go. We're going to talk about three of the most popular ornaments that you can add. They work particularly well on pitched instruments like piano and guitar. While some of them you can sing, they're actually quite fast. So I think these translate a little bit better towards instruments. We're going to be talking about mordents, turns, and trills, so let's dig into it. Mordint is basically the same as a neighbor tone. For the most part, you're going to be keeping these diatonic or true to a scale. So let's say I have a C major chord, and my melody note is an E. An upper neighbor tone, if I'm saying true to C major, would be up to F and back to E, or a lower neighbor tone would be down to D and back to E. Mordents work the same way. They're just much faster. It's more of just sort of a quick grace towards the second note. And really, I would recommend using your quickest fingers like mordens between fingers four and five are going to be a whole lot tougher than between fingers two and three. So we have upper mordens visiting an upper neighbor tone and coming back really quickly. Lower mordens visiting a lower neighbor tone and coming back really quickly. And those are your two basic mordents. So if we put those in context of a melody, it might sound something like this. Okay, so there's an upper and then a lower from A down to G, in that case. So same thing applies where as your harmony changes, you have to reconsider sort of all the different magnets available and where the melody notes want to attract towards those magnets or in other words, the harmonic tones of whatever chord you're playing at that time. Most of your ornaments are going to work best on chord tones. So in other words, you'll notice for the C major chord, I gave E as an example. G would be a great example, as well as C. You can technically do a mordant into color or into tension, but just be aware of the different roles within your scale and how it's going to sound when you apply that mordant. If you're leaning into color like let's say D, or then you might want to consider where you want to go after that. And if you're comfortable lingering within color, that's fine. But something like F, Ooh, quite tense. So maybe some other ornament to pull you into a place of resolution. So that's upper Mortens and lower Mortens Now let's talk about turns. Turns if there's a note, for example, C, and there's this squiggly line up above it, you got your turn happening on C. You actually don't start on C. You would start one note above diatonically, so true to the scale. Pull down to your C, then go below diatonically and come back. Now, it's possible to do ornaments that are not diatonic, that are chromatic. I think it's getting outside of the context of this course. For now, I want to give you the basics. But there's a whole lot of ornaments out there. They've changed based on, is it the Morden from the Baroque classical or romantic era? Is it lined up with the note? Is it in between the notes? They're treated slightly differently, and I do believe you could do a full class just on ornamentation. And I very well may in the future. But for now, I just wanted to let you know, we're sticking with diatonic ornaments, where we're always staying true to our scale, but you can feel free to exper notes outside of the scale and see how that sounds to you. So in reference to the C with the turn above it, let's say our chord is A minor, which has a C in it. I would be above my C, play the C. Below the C, play the C. It sounds like this or to the E or to the A. Three, two, one, two will be your quickest fingers available, but I'd recommend trying it with other fingers. You would get sounds like 43, two, three or 5434. It's important to make sure we don't ignore these weaker fingers, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we can highlight our quickest fingers for what they're good for, which is being quick. Same thing applies. If I do a turn on a D, I'm going to get some color or on an F. I'm going to get some tension on A and B, I'm going to get a little more color as well, too. So consider where am I within the scale in terms of where I'm landing on this ornament? And is it going to give me a resolved sound, a colorful sound or a dissonant sound? The more dissonant it is, the more you need to deal with it. Once you've finished the ornament, you need to probably resolve it. The colorful resolution is going to allow you to linger a bit longer, but probably still wants to resolve. And where you should start with these ornaments is with stability or consonance. In other words, something that sounds nice, one of the partons available at that time. Lastly, let's talk about trills. Trills are like turns in that they start above a note. So if the note is a C and we're seeing this TR with a squiggly line up above it, that's our trill. We're going to start one note above diatonically. So if I have a C major chord and I'm supposed to be trilling on C, I'll start on D and then resolve to the C. Doesn't have to be an exact speed. You can trill slower, or you can troll quickly. As quick as you can. Quite often, they'll last quite a while. You don't usually see a trill last, for example, for, like, an eighth note or a quarter note because at that point, it feels a little bit more like a mordant. So trills do last a little bit longer, and certain instruments will have them quite a bit more frequently. I think the instrument that first comes to mind is flute. We hear flutes trilling a lot within orchestras. So do keep in mind that instrument selection can be important when you're applying these ornaments to a specific instrument. So in the case of an A minor chord, we could trill on A, starting on B. We could trill on C, starting on D, or we could trill on E starting on S. You can even trill between chords. Let's say I have something like. Okay, maybe a little heavy handed. I'm being a little bit loud with this so you can really hear the trill. But that's the basic idea a trill doesn't have to only last on one chord. They're long enough that they can last over multiple chords. So let's put those three ornaments together in a small melody with a bit of a chord progression in the left hand. I'm gonna be playing A minor, D minor, and E major in that order, and we'll go through the order of the ornaments in the way that I've presented them to you. I'm going to give you an upper mordent, a lower mordant, a turn, and a trill. Let's go for it. It would sound something like this. There you have it. So don't forget to check the PDF for this class where I'm going to be showing you the symbols for these particular ornaments straight on the page in case that's the way that you prefer to learn. I hope you had fun in this class, learning about mordants, turns, and trills, and I'll catch you in the next class. 11. Enclosures: Next up, we're going to talk about enclosures. To enclose a note is to basically surround it and then land upon it. And there's lots of different ways that we can do this. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of enclosures. You're going to see enclosures the most within jazz. You might find them in classical and romantic music as well, too, but I don't know that they were called enclosures at that point. Enclosures are very popular within jazz solos in jazz melody writing. And any style that sort of branched off from jazz, whether it be Nosol or R&B or whatever it might be, you're going to be able to find some enclosures there as well, too. So I'm going to give you four different enclosure examples. If this is our note, we could play above it, below it, and then arrive at it. And there's two ways that we can do that to get started. I'll show you. So let's say I'm playing a C major seven chord so that things sound a little bit innately jazzy. You can take any note from your C major seven chord and surround it by a semitone above the note, a semitone below the note and then arrive. At the note. So it might sound like that little enclosure at the end, I was enclosing a G, semitone above, semitone below, and then arriving at it. Now, if there is a tone below the note available diatonically, in other words, I'm in C major right now. I'm trying to enclose a G, and one tone below G, I have an F, then what we can do is start a semitone above, go to this note, a tone below, and then pull up semitones until I get to my note that I'm trying to arrive at. That would sound something like this. Super jazzy sounding, right? So I'm just coming down the main triad, C major seven, one extra seven. And then doing our enclosure, semitone above, tone below, and then filling. The other two types of enclosures are just opposite. So I could have a semitone below, semitone above, and then arrive at the note. Now, I don't know that I hear that enclosure as much, but it's still used very frequently. And the same rule applies. If there is a tone above our destination note available diatonically true to our scale. In this case, I'm in C major, and so G has an A above it, one tone above. So I can start a semitone below the G go a tone above and then fall by semitones until I reach the note that I'm trying to get to or the note that I'm enclosing. So starting with just semitones on either side of the enclosure, that would sound like this. Or if I do the tone above this time, so semitone below and tone above, it would sound like this. Still sounds fine, but this is a little less common then. You'll just hear it a whole lot. This particular enclosure is one of the ones that I think I hear the most. So we have, of all the enclosures available, semitone above, semitone below, hit it, semitone above, tone below, fill in semitone below, semitone above, hit it. Semitone below, tone above, fill in. While the semitones surrounding the note that we're trying to enclose can always work. This semitone on one side and then a tone on the other doesn't always work, because, for example, if I'm trying to enclose my note E, and I'm starting a semitone below my E, a tone above my E is F sharp. Now, I really like playing C Lydian over C major seven chord. But let's just say we're trying to stay in C major. You can see I'd be breaking that pretty quickly here. I have semitone below. We're thinking of this as chromatic, and then a tone above. Well, this note here F Sharp is not in C major. Can try it out. Let's see how it sounds. Still sounds pretty jazzy, but as a starting point, I would say try to keep the tone when you're moving a tone away from your destination note. Try to keep that diatonic to start, and then you can get more adventurous with time. Here's another example even more adventurous. If I wanted to enclose the C, semitone above, and tone below, here's a big conflict. Now I have a flat seven while I'm playing a major seven chord, so I have major seven and dominant seven happening at the same time. It can still kind of work because of how fast these enclosures happen. Check it out, but again, I would not recommend starting with this sort of enclosure. Let's give it a go. It's a little more out there, right? We have And then this flat two flat seven. Wow. It's pretty adventurous. So it still kind of works as long as you're resolving to a note that is resolved with the cord. If I was to do that same sort of thing, but on a note that is not resolved within the cord, you'd get some really stinky results. So let's say my cord is G dominant seven and I do that same sort of enclosure, landing on a C, that's not a very good destination. It would sound like this. Kind of sounds wrong, right? So for now, what I would say is similar to ornaments, enclosures want to be finalized on a note that makes sense. So one of the chord notes that you have would be a great note to enclose. Or if you're anticipating a chord coming up, this is really, really common with enclosures. Like, let's say, I have a minor 251 chord progression in C minor, you might get something like this. So what I did was played around with some scales that are readily available for the two and the five chord. Now, my one chord, C minor seven is about to come up, so I'm enclosing a G as a way of finishing that particular phrase. So you can enclose notes on a single chord if you're vamping on it for a while. So something like So I'm on A minor for a while, and I finish with a little enclosure, or you can use enclosures as a way of sort of anticipating a chord change that's coming up, like in that 251 example I gave you. So like our other classes, there's going to be a PDF available to you that shows you the basics of these four different types of enclosures. So if you're the type of student that likes to learn off the page, don't worry. I've got you covered. I should mention there are more types of enclosures than the ones that have given to you. But at some point, if I just throw every type of enclosure at you, it's like, too much information, information overload. So I would say, start with these chromatic clusters, just surrounding a note by semitones and work into having a tone on either side and filling that in. Part of it has to do with the way timing works, and this is going to be only acquired through listening to tons of jazz and just practice practice practice. So if I'm playing on Beats four and and I want to arrive to a note on beat one, then I would use the chromatic approach, semitone on one side, semitone on the other. As a really basic example, one and two, and three and four, and one. So I had four and those two halves of beat four I'm using as my enclosure, and then I'm arriving on a note on beat one. Now if I want to do the tone on one side, I have to start my enclosure on the end of beat three. This is if I want to arrive to my note on beat one. You can arrive to your note on beats one, two, three, or four as a good starting point or even on an and, but you have to find a way to kind of make it make sense, and this all comes from starting with the basics and working your way through. So if I want to be on this G on beat one, I'll have to be playing my A flat on the end of beat three. It would sound like this one and two, and three and four, and one. So you have to say, Okay, I either have two half beats or three half beats before my enclosure fully finalizes. Where am I within the bar? And how can I get to my destination note, either on beat one, two, three, or four, let's say, appropriately based on the type of enclosure that I use. Again, you're not going to think of all this on the fly. So for now, you can isolate it within your practice, kind of similar to what I just said. Take a chord like C major seven, take a scale, and just work your way up through it, and then ask yourself, Okay, when do I need to start my enclosure? One and two and three, and just go up through the scale and then ask, Where do I want to enclose? Maybe it's an E four and one. That would be one and two and three, and four and one. Or, again, if you need to start it on the end of beat three in this particular example, it would be one and two, and three and four, and one. They all sound really jazzy and really calculated, but it's hard to calculate on the fly, so you're gonna have to put in some practice. And again, just listen to lots of jazz if you really like the sound of these enclosures. I'd recommend starting off with some saxophonists, like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, because these guys were using enclosures a whole lot, especially Charlie Parker. So feel free to check them out. I hope you enjoyed this class on enclosures, and I'll catch you in the next class. 12. Arpeggios: Alright, let's get talking about arpeggios. They're timeless. They span over just about every possible genre, and they're really great within your melody writing because they can help you navigate from one register of your instrument to another. So, for example, if I'm playing a G major chord and I'm in the key of G major, and my melody is in G major, maybe I'm down here in the middle of the piano, but I want to eventually work to this climactic note B up here. Well, I could just run a scale all the way up to B or sort of inch my way up there until eventually it gets up to a B, and there's nothing wrong with either of those. But let's say I need to do it in short order. I might have something like So that's an example of an arpeggio. Arpeggios in the more traditional sense, like in classical music, would be practiced more like And then you can play versions of those and do the same thing with seventh chords. But for now, we're mostly just concerned with our right hand because that is the hand that's sort of navigating through these melodies. And we don't have to get through multiple octaves with these arpeggios. It becomes very unsingable at some point. So it really depends on what note you're starting on and what note you're trying to get to. But what I would recommend for now is with your right hand, just try some root position arpeggios with me. We're just going to go one octave. Let's start on C with our thumb, and we're just going to play it broken with fingers one, two, three, and then we can play our pinky up on a high C. Now, if you want to continue going through our piggios, there's usually a large cross involved. For example, crossing from G with finger three up to C with our thumb. And a lot of mistakes beginners make is either looking under their hand, so I'm sort of lifting my hand and looking under to see the fingers this way so that I can see this cross. But, in fact, usually the cross should be blind. You can see from the camera above, if I cross my thumb, you can't see it right now, and nor can I, but you learn to sort of judge and gauge what that distance feels like. So if you want to continue going, there's usually a large cross involved. But for now, let's just say we're working up CE G, and then up to a high C. It might also be the case where you're working up through some sort of inversion of the ord, and at some point, it just becomes too loaded to give you a full PDF on every inversion of every arpeggio and then seventh chords. It's like almost a whole class at that point. So what I'm going to do is show you right now some of the most basic arpeggios in root position, and you can play all of these with fingers one, two, three, five. These are not multiple octave arpeggios, again, where you're playing up like two octaves, but that's kind of outside of the context of melody writing anyways. So every single chord in root position in your right hand, you can get away with playing one, two, three, and then the pinky up one octave. So now let's talk about, again, this one octave arpeggio root to root. We're going to assume, in this case, that our destination is a root up above, and we're going to start in the middle of the piano, work our way down a little bit so that we have an excuse to say to ourselves, I want to get up higher, but I don't want to be up in this extreme range. So the chord progression might be C minor seven, E flat minor seven, F minus seven, A flat, major seven. On the F, I'm going to play one, two, three, five up to this high F here. Let's try it out. It sounds something like this. Did you hear it there, the F working its way up to the next F. So really, we're sort of jumping on lily pads on all of the magnets or all of the chord tones that are available in the F minor seven chord, working up an F minor chord. Sure, you could work up through the extra note of the seventh. That's kind of up to you, but I want you to make sure that you're comfortable doing this in a basic root position. You can try it with sevenths, first inversion with seven, first inversion regular. Second inversion with seven, second inversion regular. Like I said, this becomes really loaded really quickly. So for now, one, two, three, five in root position. Whatever your chord is a flat minor, E flat major, G major, that fingering will work for you. So I've given you all the fingerings for the right hand arpeggios, but I haven't included seventh chords because that is, I think, a little bit too loaded for this class. So for now, we're just going to work with basic major and basic minor shapes, and you can find those shapes available within the PDF for this class. Lastly, we can use these arpeggios sort of inverse where we found ourself too high up and we need to work our way down. Maybe we don't want to run through a scale or a sort of cluster of notes is zagging their way down. We want to get there quickly and efficiently, and we want to know that all the notes on the way make sense. While you won't see the descending arpeggio used quite as much in melodies for whatever reason, we're still going to try it out, but just keep in mind, you will generally see these used a little bit more ascending rather than descending. Same chords as before, C minor seven, E flat major seven, F minor seven, A flat major seven. And on the F minor seven chord, I'm going to come down through an F minor triad, but plus the octave. So a four note version of an F minor chord. Maybe I'll try it on this part of the piano. So we're going to work our way up to this F and then find our way back down. It would sound something like this. Okay, so there it is. Coming down that F minor chord, even though my chord is F minor seven, I don't have to play all the notes of the seventh chord. F minor works just as well. So there you have it right handed arpeggios to take your melody from one register to another in a way that makes sense with some safe notes along the way. I hope you enjoyed this class on Arpeggios and I'll catch you in the next class. 13. Rhythmic Density: Et's talk about rhythmic density. Rhythmic density is something you could be talking about outside of the context of melodies. It might be about the arrangement of an orchestra or a rock band, but it even works in the case of analyzing melodies or just generally taking an approach that makes the most sense. Melodies can be fast and scrambly or slow like a ballad melody. But if we play too much on either one of those ends of the spectrum, they either become overwhelming or a little bit boring. As an example, here's a really quick melody that is relentless, something like this. And I just keeps rambling on like a sentence with no break. The inverse of that would be a melody that is slow and never really picks up the pace like a ballad that's just really meant to be super reflective. It works, but it can be a little bit boring. Check it out, something like this. And we can keep going like that, but I haven't really caught your interest. It's like, This is great if you're trying to put someone to sleep, or maybe it's meant to be an underscore in cinema. But generally, melodies work best with a bit of rhythmic balance. So rhythmic density is how dense is the rhythm? Is it a lot of 16th notes very clustered together, or are they widespread half notes or whole notes? That's what I'm referring to when I say rhythmic density. And the ebb and flow of rhythmic density is really important to make sure that you're telling a story that makes sense. Even just that sentence, to make sure that you're telling a story, that makes sense. Bitty bi dei bi dei bi Bibi B. We do this in English and I'm sure plenty of other languages, where we have quick bursts of information, and then to really emphasize a point, we slow down, right? We can do the same thing in our melodies. So to take that first example where I'm really fast and scrambly, let's take some moments to be reflective and see how it draws us into the fast parts a little bit more. It's like the sweet isn't as sweet without the sour. Let's check it out. Something like? So a lot of it's very fast, but now there's some moments that are broken up to be a bit slower. Or the inverse, going back to our balled example, something like throwing in a little ornament, throwing in some eighth notes and quarter notes to juxtapose, all these longer notes that could end up being a little bit boring. So again, whether you're playing a melody that's fast or slow, try to sort of counter react to this idea of It's slow music, so the melody should be slow or it's fast music, so the melody should always be fast. Make sure you're putting in a little bit of that juxta position, so it's not just fast or just slow. This way, you give your listener some variety, and you can really hone into some moments when you're trying to catch their attention. Whether your melody is always really fast material or really slow material, you still get this line that levels out. Terms of attention span, we might be caught right at the beginning of some really fast material going, Whoa, this is crazy, complex and fun to listen to. But eventually, it just sort of flat lines of like, it's just the same stuff. Or if it's really slow, we might go, Oh, you've caught my interest. This is slow and reflective. I feel like I'm in a particular mood based on what you're playing. But again, if it doesn't budge and it just stays slow the whole time, it flat lines, and you end up sort of losing the listener's interest. But if something is slow and it peaks up a little bit, it's like, Okay, it's a palette cleanser. Ooh, that was interesting. Oh, now we're back to the slow stuff, and the slow stuff feels fresh again. It's sort of like hitting a bit of a reset button on your melody in terms of its rhythm. So I'll give you a basic PDF for this class showing you some rhythmic density where it is always fast, always slow, and then juxtaposed. So the faster material is met with some slower material as a palate cleanser, and the slower material is met with some faster material as a palate cleanser. But ultimately, this one will be a small PDF because there's an infinite amount of ways that you can do something like this in terms of the rhythmic density. So I'll break it down in a simple way. That makes sense for you. So while this class was a little bit more philosophical in terms of your melodic approach, I feel it's best to leave no rock left unturned. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 14. To Swing, or NOT to Swing?: To swing or not to swing, you really have to consider what sort of genre you're writing your melody for. Is it jazz, soul, hip hop? In which case, yeah, you'll want to swing. Is it something a bit more straight ahead? Like, even disco and funk, you might assume swing, but quite often, the rhythm is straight. Same with Latin music. You can still really groove without necessarily having a swung rhythm. So this is kind of a quick class, but I want you to consider when you're writing your melody, should I be writing it with a straight rhythm or a swung rhythm? And we're also going to go over the basics of what both of those rhythmic approaches are. First, let's talk about a straight rhythm. When we talk about straight versus swung, we're talking about eighth notes. Like, for example, quarter notes, if you're swinging sound the same as quarter notes if you're straight, two, three, four. It's going to be the same either way. But what are you doing with the beats in between the main beats or the s, you could say, one and two. Is it equal? In other words, is everything cut nice and straight on the grid or is it swung? Is the eighth note a little bit later kind of representing like a two thirds and one third value for your one or the downbeat and the upbeat? So to play straight, you'd want to make sure you just have a simple one and two, and three and four with accents on the numbers one and two, and three and four end. So give it a try. Again, it's one and two, and three and four. There's an example of a straight melody, and we're going to follow that up with talking about how to clap, swing, and then how to translate it to your instrument. So with swing, we're still counting one, two, and three and four end, but our end is going to feel a bit late. One and two, and three and four, just like a horse galloping. But this isn't what makes swing tough. I have a lot of students that can do that on day one, but the accenting the and, in other words, playing the and a little bit louder, that's the tough part. Everything is really backwards from the straight rhythm. It's not equal, it's sort of clumpy. It's not accenting the downbeat, it's accenting the upbeat. It's sort of like the concept of swing, took the classical straight rhythm and just sort of turned it on its head. So with those accents, you end up getting one and two, and three and four and. And instead of focusing on being loud on the end, focus on starting quiet and then being loud on the end. What'll probably happen is you'll flip it. You'll go one and two, and three and four. So you'll have an and that's loud and then a downbeat, like three that's loud, and then the whole thing is flipped. So practice it a bunch with counting first. You can even practice it with scales, one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. Then you can apply it to your song. A melody swung might sound something kind of like this. Hear those little accents. And what I'll do, and most musicians will, as well, too, is accent some of the downbeats so that you sort of have your main swing that's happening on the accenting of the upbeats. But sometimes it just really works well to accent a downbeat, as well, too. There's nothing saying you can't, but the general accent should remain on the offbeat. So I'll supply a PDF that goes over these basics, but really it's all about what you do with your practicing to inch your way towards being comfortable playing with a swung rhythm. I'm assuming most of you can already play with a straight rhythm, as it tends to be a little bit more recurrent within most genres of music. But either way, I'll help you out with that PDF, and that's it for this class on to swing or not to swing. I'll see you in the next class. 15. Putting it All Together: Alright, so let's put it all together. We're going to do four examples where I'm going to explain my way through how I'm creating a melody with a four chord chord progression. These melodies will be supplied as a PDF, so make sure you're checking that out. And the enclosures and the passing tones and the neighbor tones and all that stuff is going to be identified on the page for you so you can see it nice and clear cut. Let's dig into the first one. We're going to start our first two examples with straight rhythms, and we're going to be on the white keys. For most of these examples. The last one I'll give you in C minor. But to start with these first two, we're just on the white keys. We're going to do one in C major. We're going to do one in C minor. The first one in C major is going to use neighbor tones and passing tones only just to keep it nice and simple, and it sounds something like this. Our chords are C major, F major, A minor, G major, or let's go G dominant seven. It sounds something like this. Okay, so there it is. Our next one is going to be A minor, F major, D minor, E dominant seven, a 1645 chord progression in A minor. Still, we're doing a straight rhythm. It sounds like this. Okay, so we put some upper mordens, lower mortens and shrills into that example. Next up, we're gonna be doing some chromatic passing tones and chromatic neighbor tones as well as some enclosures. Be we're swinging now, enclosures are a little bit more appropriate. So we're going to throw in a lot of stuff. So this next example is going to have C major seven, E minor seven, D minor seven, and G dominant seven as our main chord progression. I can give you chromatic passing tones, chromatic neighbor tones. And because now we're swinging, I'm going to be able to give you enclosures which are a little bit more appropriate at this point. So we are swinging. We're in C major. That's the chord progression. Let's go for it. It sounds something like this. Okay, so you can see there's a lot of chromaticism in there. And our last example is going to give you arpeggios. I'm going to take an arpeggio up and then later, I'll take an arpeggio down. And, of course, it's almost impossible to avoid the basics like passing tones and neighbor tones. So we're going to get some of those in the mix, as well, too. It sounds like this. Really starting to come together. Now, make sure that you are checking out the PDF that I've supplied. The melodies should be simple enough to play through. With some practice, you can get them up to speed. But most importantly, you'll be able to see all these melodic devices really clearly within the melodies as they are identified within the PDF. So the point of this class is to show you that when you put it all together, you're not just using one of these melodic devices or even just a couple. You're going to use a lot of them. Keep things interesting and mixed up enough that your listener is intrigued as you're playing through your melody. I wanted to make sure you had clear cut examples of each of the devices that we've talked about, so I think this PDF is going to supply you with that. I hope you had fun in this class. This one is going to require quite a bit of practice off the page. So make sure that you're putting in that time. I'll see you in the next class. 16. Outro: Congratulations on getting through this course on Melody writing one oh one. By now, you should have plenty of ideas that you can work with to help improve your melody writing and to better understand what you're doing within your melody writing. It's advised that you take note of what some of your favorite tricks were and try to use them a bunch within your own writing. Ultimately, I feel like this is part of what helps us narrow down our style as a composer or as a performer. Take preference on some of the techniques and really overdo them to the point where they become second nature to you. Don't forget there is going to be a class project for this course where you're going to be either writing out or performing a four bar chord progression with a melody over top, using at least two of the techniques that we covered within this course. Again, if you've breezed over the class that goes through the project details, make sure you check it out again because all the details that you need for that project are within that class. My hope is that whatever style of music you play or compose for, there's something in this course that will be able to help you heighten your melody writing to that next level. But it is going to take a lot of practice on your end. So as usual, I'd highly recommend that you practice this material thoroughly and feel free to go through the course material as many times as you need to to properly absorb the information. Now, if you want to learn more about me, you can head over to Cook hyphenmusic.ca. That's my personal website where you can check out my portfolio, but there's also links to my store and the music school that I run. So whether you're looking for virtual lessons with a teacher, and we offer lessons in, like, violin, mixing and mastering Piano, we really do have a wide breadth of teachers. Or if you're looking to purchase some sheet music from the store of original compositions that I've composed, Cook hyphenmusic.ca will get you all the resources that you need to learn more about me and what I'm doing within my own musical journey. You'll also be able to get links to my YouTube channel where I do supply some supplementary lessons that aren't available within my courses. And, of course, you'll be able to find my social media handles there as well. But for a quick reference, you can find me on Instagram at Let's Cook Music. So thank you for taking this course. If you did enjoy it, please do give a review. Those reviews do go along to help my courses, reach other individuals like yourself. I'm always trying to improve the quality of these courses, and I'm always open to course ideas from my students. And something I want to mention is I'm trying to get to 100 courses. I already have 140 course ideas, and I've broken the class structure down for each of those courses. But today marks me finishing my 25th course, which was a big landmark for me in this process. So pad on my own back, I suppose, pad on your back for finishing this course. I do hope that you'll engage with me. Even on the other side of the Internet. It's always great to hear from new musicians. If you have some questions along the way, make sure you reach out. I really hope you enjoyed that course, and I'll catch you in the next one.