CHAPTER
19

Composing Your Own Music

In This Chapter

• Discovering the tools you need to compose a piece of music
• Learning how to compose using chord progressions
• Finding out how to create strong melodies

Whether you’re writing a rock, country, or folk song, or composing a longer, more serious work (not that pop music isn’t serious business), you work with the same elements. All musical compositions must include a melody and a series of chords. Now, you can write the melody first and then add chords, write the chords first and then add a melody, or write both melody and chords at the same time, but you need both of those elements.

How you put those melodies and chords together determines your final composition. And that’s what this chapter is all about: composing music.

That said, you can’t just jot down a bunch of random notes and call it a composition. (Well, you could, but nobody would want to listen to it.) A good composition has form and meaning; it tells a story, or invokes a mood, or takes you from one place to another. The best compositions create their own self-contained realities, where individual components relate to and with each other within the whole. There is a reason for each phrase and individual note, all of which combine to create a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.

I like to think of the process of writing a composition as being similar to telling a story. As you can tell many different types of stories, you can create many different types of compositions. Some stories relate a specific set of facts; others convey a general mood; still others exist merely to entertain. A good story takes you from point A to point B in a relatively efficient fashion, while containing enough extraneous elements to make the journey entertaining; there are often characters or places or other elements that provide both color and context. And, when the story is over, there’s typically a point to the whole thing, something to remember and reflect upon.

Different Approaches to Composition

As you learn how to write your own music, you’ll discover that there are several different ways to approach a composition. They all start with a blank sheet of staff paper (or virtual page in your notation software), but require you to look at your pending composition in different ways.

There is no one “correct” way to begin a composition. Some composers take one approach, some another, some work both ways—often by creating the chords and melody simultaneously. Which method you choose is a personal decision. And you’re not limited to just one approach; you can use different approaches for different pieces. Whichever way you start, the goal should be the same—to create an artistically viable piece of music. How you create each piece of music is a personal choice.

If you consider that a piece of music is typically constructed from a combination of chords and melodies (and, in the case of songwriting, lyrics), then you have a simple choice in front of you. You can start by creating a chord progression and fitting a melody to your chords, or you can start by creating a melody and then fitting chords to that melody. Consider:

Chords first: Also called harmonic composition, you start by creating a chord progression and then fit a melody to those chords. This approach is popular among many composers, especially those working within the framework of the popular song. That’s because after you’ve created a chord progression, you essentially have a harmonic road map for the entire composition that helps to guide the melodies you create. Unfortunately, some composers tend to use a chord progression as a crutch, and often create melodies that simply outline the chords rather than standing on their own.

Melody first: Also called melodic composition, you start by creating a melody and then fit the appropriate chords to that melody. When you craft a melody on its own, it isn’t subject to the harmonic constraints of an arbitrary chord progression; it’s allowed to flow wherever it needs to. This approach is very respectful of the primacy of melody, with all other aspects of the composition taking a subsidiary role. If you go this route, you have to employ your knowledge of harmony to harmonize the melody—that is, to fit a chord progression to the melody.

Chords and melody together: If you can approach composition from either a chords-first or melody-first approach, why not combine both approaches and compose everything at once? That’s the nature of holistic composition, where you progress measure-by-measure, creating the melodies and harmonies simultaneously. Since melodies and chords are intrinsically related, it makes sense to write them together—if you can. (This approach requires a thorough understanding of music theory, a very good ear, and a good feel for where you want your composition to go—and thus may not be the best way to go for beginners.)

Learning How to Write Your Own Music

To be a successful composer, you need a certain set of skills. In particular, you need to be able to manipulate the building blocks of any composition—the notes and rhythms and chords that combine to create a piece of music. To this end, you must have a thorough grounding in music theory, as well as a good ear. It also helps to have some innate sense of melody and harmony, although this can be developed with proper training.

A successful composer must also have the ability to arrange and orchestrate the music he writes. Composition is seldom as simple as a melody and accompanying chords; most full-blown compositions are ultimately orchestrated for a range of instruments, whether that’s a four-piece rock band or full symphonic orchestra. So you need to know at least a little bit about a lot of different instruments—not necessarily how to play each one, but rather how they sound and how they’re written. (Learn more about arranging and orchestration in Chapter 20.)

Assuming you have (or learn) these basic skills, learning how to compose involves fitting the various building blocks together to express your musical vision. It’s kind of like learning how to write prose or poetry; once you know the building blocks of written language, you then have to learn how to use those building blocks to tell your stories in print.

There’s also the issue of creativity. Although you can, over time, learn the necessary compositional tools and techniques, you need to supply your own creativity and inspiration. Creating a melody really is more than just arranging notes in a certain order; the best melodies come from somewhere inside of you, and reflect your personality and experiences. Music is, after all, a creative endeavor—and composing music requires all the creativity you can muster.

Composing with Chords

Let’s start with the approach that most beginning musicians and many songwriters employ—harmonic composition. That means coming up with a catchy chord progression and then fitting a melody to it.

When you’re working with harmonic composition, you can work with any number and type of chords. You don’t have to limit yourself to the natural chords within a scale or key (the diatonic chords) or with simple three-note triads, especially when you’re working in more contemporary forms. You can explore all manner of chromatic chords and extended chords and the like, even chords that don’t really look or sound like traditional chords—two-note harmonies, or note clusters with no discernable tonal center. In other words, the entire harmonic spectrum is available for your use.

That said, when you’re first starting out, it’s a good idea to work within some sort of structure, to help guide your creativity. Once you’ve learned how to compose within a traditional harmonic structure, you can begin to explore nontraditional harmonies; you use the structure to help hone your craft.

Using Chord Leading

One easy way to come up with a pleasant-sounding chord progression is to use chord leading. As you learned in Chapter 10, chord leading is the concept that certain chords naturally lead to other chords. For example, the V or dominant chord leads naturally back to I, the tonic. The IV, or subtonic, can lead naturally to the I, iii, V, or vii° chords. And so forth. (You learned about which chords lead to which in Chapter 10.)

The most common way to utilize chord leading is simply to use the chord-leading rules to move from one chord to the next. Let’s say you start with a I chord, which can lead to any other chord. You choose the iii chord as the next chord, which then leads you to (among others) the IV chord. The IV chord leads you up to the V chord, and then back to I. And there’s your chord progression:

I           iii           IV           V           I

In the key of C, that works out to:

C / / /       Em / / /        F / / /        G / / /        C / / /

And you can bend those chord-leading rules a bit too, as shown in this progression used in thousands of hit songs from “Let It Be” to “Don’t Stop Believin’” to “Hey, Soul Sister.” Start with the I, of course, but then jump up to the V. Now, the V should lead back to the I, but it can also lead in other directions, such as up one step to the vi chord. Move from the vi to the IV, then from there back home to the I. This is what you get:

I           V           vi           IV           I

Here’s how that sounds, in the key of C:

C / / /       G / / /        Am / / /      F / / /       C / / /

Establishing a Harmonic Rhythm

Working with chord-based composition brings up an interesting question: just how often should you change chords? The pace of a chord progression, or where the chords are placed within a phrase, is called harmonic rhythm. In other words, the harmonic rhythm dictates how often you change chords—and when.

Obviously, the number of beats or measures allotted to each chord isn’t set in stone. For example, you could write the I-IV-V progression with a single measure for each chord. Or you could write two measures of I and a measure each of IV and V. Or you could write three measures of I, then two beats each of IV and V in a fourth measure. Or you could write 16 measures of I, 16 measures of IV, and another 16 measures of V. It all depends on the nature of your composition and helps provide an almost infinite variety of possible chord combinations.

There are no rules for harmonic rhythm. You can extend a chord over any number of measures, or change chords frequently within a single measure. You can set your chord changes on the first beat of each measure or on any subsidiary beat. You can even change chords on the upbeat, if you want.

It’s common to change chords more often at slower tempos than at faster ones. It’s simply easier to fit two or four chords into one slower-moving measure than it is within a faster-paced tune. A fast-paced country song, for example, might have chord changes every two or four measures. A slower-tempo ballad, on the other hand, might change chords every two beats within a single measure. There’s more space for each chord when the tempo is slower.

The harmonic rhythm is one factor that establishes the sound and feel of a particular composition. A rapid harmonic rhythm will dictate, more often than not, particular types of melodies—typically faster-moving melodies. A slower harmonic rhythm will let your piece breathe a little more. And varying the harmonic rhythm will provide contrast within your piece. Use harmonic rhythm to establish the mood and pace of your compositions.

Fitting Melodies to Your Chords

When you employ a chord-based compositional approach, the chord progression you create becomes a framework on which you later construct a melody. But just how do you fit a melody to your chords? We discussed some of this back in Chapter 10, but let’s go into more detail here.

A common approach is to base your melody on the notes of the chords. That is, you use the chord tones to define the main notes of your melody. For example, if you’re holding a D minor for a few measures, you would work with the notes D, F, and A for your melody. You can then add passing and approach notes to connect these main chord tones.

A melody based on key chord tones.

You can also create a melody that utilizes the common notes in adjacent chords. For example, if you’re using the popular C-G-Am-F progression, know that the first two chords have the note G in common, and the last two have the notes A and C in common. (The G and Am chords don’t have any notes in common, sorry.) So you can base the melody in the first two bars around the note G, and in the last two bars around either A or C.

A melody based on common tones in the underlying chords.

Another approach is to use notes that emphasize the key quality of the underlying chords. For example, the dominant (V) chord gets its tension from the root, so emphasize that. Similarly, when shifting between major and minor chords, emphasize the changes by basing the melody on the thirds of each chord.

A melody that emphasizes the defining features of the underlying major and minor chords.

Whichever chord tones you use as the major notes in your melody, you can then use appropriate diatonic tones in a step-wise fashion to move from one major tone to another. For example, if the major melodic tone in measure one is a C and the major tone in the next measure is an F, use a D and E to smoothly move from one to the next. These passing tones make your melody more melodic, as opposed to just jumping from one chord tone to the next.

A melody that uses passing tones to move from one major tone to the next.

Making Memorable Melodies

Back in Chapter 8, we worked through the basics of what makes a melody a melody. As I hope you recall, a melody is a logical succession of tones and rhythms. Place the right notes in the right order, and you have yourself a melody.

A melody has to make harmonic sense—that is, the notes of the melody have to fit within the given key and the specific chords employed. Melodies can go up or down but they have to move somewhere, or else all you have is a single repeated note. The best melodies not only work within the chord structure but define and sometimes predict the song’s chord progression. And the best melodies are not only singable (or at least hummable, if you’re not a great singer) but also help tell a story or set a mood. (You learned about constructing simple melodies in Chapter 8.)

All of this brings us to the key question: how exactly can you create a memorable melody?

Center on a Pitch

You don’t want your melodies wandering around all over the place, like a dog looking for a place to do his business. What you want is more of a hunting dog of a melody, one that knows where home is and, at the end of the day, finds its way back there.

The “home” of your melody needs to be a specific pitch. When you pick a home pitch, your melody can then revolve around the pitch. You can start on that pitch (although you don’t have to), and you should end on that pitch. Equally important, the other notes in the melody can play around that pitch—and even land on it, occasionally.

Note that your home pitch doesn’t have to be the tonic of the scale. You can make the third your home, or the fifth—but probably not the second or sixth or seventh, because they’re less related to the tonic triad of 1-3-5.

For example, listen to the following melody. It’s in the key of G, but revolves around the home pitch of B—the third of the scale.

A four-measure melody in the key of G, which hovers around the third of the scale (B).

What you want to avoid is having each measure of your melody center around a different pitch. If your melody wanders around in this type of fashion, with no central core, you won’t know how to end it—you won’t know where home is.

Make Sure You End Up at Home

Many of the most memorable melodies use the home pitch to lend logic to the melodic flow. In fact, it’s good if your audience can listen to part of your melody and, based on the prominence of the home note, hum the end of the melody before they ever hear it.

When you don’t end your melody on the expected note, you create an unresolved tension that can be unsettling to listeners. Although it’s okay to insert that kind of tension in the middle of your melody, you don’t want to end with that kind of tension. You want to resolve your melody so that there’s a feeling of completion at the end.

What you want to avoid is a melody that wanders around aimlessly. Let your ear be your guide. Play over the melody and see if it holds together. It’s a little bit like writing a good paragraph or a good stanza of a poem; when you’re finished, the best thing to do is to read it aloud and see if it really works.

The wrong way to do it—you don’t want to end your melody with unresolved tension.

Go Pentatonic

You can make things even simpler by sticking to five key notes within a given major scale—the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth of the scale. (In C Major, these notes are C, D, E, G, and A.)

These notes combine for what is called the pentatonic scale. (The word “penta” means “five”; five tones equal a pentatonic scale.) By using only these five notes, you avoid the two notes in the scale (the fourth and the seventh) that sometimes create harmonic tension.

When you use the five notes in the pentatonic scale, it’s virtually impossible to insert a “wrong” note into your melody. However, you can overuse these notes and end up with a vaguely Asian-sounding tune—or even something that sounds a little bit like the theme to an old cowboy movie!

A melody based on the C pentatonic scale.

Find the Hook

For a melody to be truly memorable, there needs to be a piece of it that really reaches out and grabs the listener’s attention. In pop music this is called the hook, because it’s the part of the song that hooks the listener. In more traditional music, this piece of the song is sometimes known as the motif—and is repeated throughout the entire piece of music.

A motif is typically fairly short—a few notes (think of the five whistling notes in Sergio Leone’s theme from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) or, at longest, one or two measures. When you hit on a good motif or hook, don’t be afraid to use it—repeat it as often as you need, throughout your entire song.

A simple four-note motif, repeated throughout a longer melody.

Create Variations

You can create additional melodies in your music by varying your motif slightly, such as changing its rhythm or moving its tones up or down in the scale. You should retain enough of the main motif so that listeners can tell where it came from, but add enough variation so that you create a new—but related—melody.

How can you vary a motif? You can reverse the rhythm, simplify the rhythm, or make the rhythm more complex. You can reverse the notes (so that the melody goes up instead of down, or down instead of up), or change the middle notes in the motif, or shift the notes up or down a third or a fifth. In short, just about any variation is fair game, as long as the initial motif isn’t completely obliterated by the variations.

Take a look at the following example, in which the simple four-note motif from the previous example is run through a number of variations—both rhythmically and melodically.

The same four-note motif, with variations.

Remember that you want your variations to relate to the original motif. If you get too far away from the original motif, it isn’t a variation anymore—it’s a brand-new melody!

Make It Move

A good melody doesn’t just sit there; it goes someplace. You can propel a melody rhythmically, or tonally, through the “motion” of the tones. In this sense, motion refers to the progressive upward or downward direction of the pitches, or what some call the contour of a line of music.

A good way to think about the upward or downward motion of a melody is to look at the starting note and the ending note—while ignoring, for the time being, all the notes in between. To create an upward-moving melody, make sure the ending note is at least a third (and ideally a fifth or more) higher than the starting note. Same thing with a downward-moving melody; force the last note to be lower than the first one.

All the notes between the first and last notes help you move to that final note. The notes don’t all have to go in the same direction, but they do have to gradually move up or down to where you want to end.

A melody with upward motion.

Note that it’s okay to have a melody that starts and ends on the same note. What you can do is make the midpoint of the melody higher or lower than the starting/ending pitch. If you choose a higher midpoint, the first half of the melody will have upward movement, and the last half will use downward movement to return to the home pitch.

Take Small Steps

The most singable melodies progress in small steps, which means each note is only a step or two away from the previous note. The smaller the steps between the notes in your melody, the more lyrical your melody will sound.

When you throw large jumps—of three or more steps—into your melody, it starts sounding random, and becomes much more difficult to play or sing. It’s much better to use a series of passing notes within your chosen scale to move from one main note to another.

Obviously, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. (And every rule is meant to be broken, anyway!) Think, for example, of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or “Moon River,” or “When You Wish Upon a Star.” All of these songs feature leaps of anywhere from a fifth to an entire octave in their melodies. So it’s okay to leap, if you know what you’re doing—although small steps are better suited for less-experienced songwriters.

Small steps and large leaps in a melody—the small steps sound more lyrical and are easier to sing.

Stay in Range

You don’t want to cover too many notes in your melody. If the distance between the lowest note and the highest note is too wide, singers will have trouble singing all of your melody—and your melody will start to sound random and disjointed, without a home.

Consider, for example, America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key put his words to one whopper of a tune, one that has a rather wide melodic range. Think of how hard this song is to sing—and how many well-trained vocalists have trouble hitting all the notes. The broad range in this song doesn’t make it a bad song; it just makes it one of the more difficult songs to sing or play.

Thus, if at all possible keep the lowest and highest notes in your melody within an octave of each other (or at most, within an octave and a third). You should also consider the absolute range of the voice or instrument you’re writing for, and try to stay within that range. (To learn more about voice and instrument ranges, turn to Chapter 20.)

A melody with too wide a range—really hard to sing!

Set Up—and Resolve—Tension

One of the most common melodic techniques is to divide your melody into two parts, and set up a harmonic tension in the first part that is then resolved in the second part. This gives your melody a distinct form, and its own internal logic; it also helps to propel the melody from the first part to the second.

One way to create tension is to end the first part of your melody on something other than the tonic of the scale. (When you factor in the chord structure, you find that tension is achieved by ending the first part of the melody on a IV or V chord instead of on the tonic.) Practically, you can create tension by ending a phrase with the second, fifth, or seventh notes of the scale—which correspond to the notes in the scale’s V chord, if you’re reading ahead.

The half note in measure two creates tension; the next two bars resolve the tension.

You then have to relieve this tension by manipulating the second part of your melody back to the tonic of the scale—or to one of the notes in the tonic triad (the I chord). The notes in the tonic triad are the tonic, third, and fifth of the scale, although the tonic and the third probably work better for relieving tension. (That’s because the fifth is an ambiguous note, used both in the I chord and the V chord.)

In any case, you can hear the tension when you play a melody. Just look back to Dvořák’s New World Symphony or “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” For that matter, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” also has this type of internal tension, coming right after “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,” and resolved with “Mary had a little a lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.”

It’s a popular technique—because it works!

Follow the Words

Another factor that can drive a melody is the presence of lyrics. If you’re writing an instrumental, of course, you don’t have to worry about following the words. But if you’re writing a popular song, you have to deal with both music and words—and how they fit together.

You want your music to fit with your words. In the simplest sense, this means arranging the rhythm of the music so that it fits the natural rhythm of the words. You don’t want your singers to be forced into awkward phrasing to fit all the syllables into a given space. Most words and phrases have a natural pace, and will suggest a rhythm to you. Make sure your music’s rhythm fits this lyric rhythm—in particular, avoid putting an unaccented word or syllable on an accented part of the measure, like the downbeat.

Fitting Chords to a Melody

If you use the melodic approach to composition, you now have a melody that needs some chords. Just how do you find the right chords for a given melody? Here are a few things to try.

Try the Obvious

One quick way to add chords to an existing melody is to try to fit one or more common chord progressions to your melody. Examine the popular chord progressions presented back in Chapter 10, and see if any of them fit the melody you’ve written. You’d be surprised how many melodies fit with the I-IV-V progression!

For example, you can see how the downward progression of the following melody fits easily within the I-vi-IV-V progression. You can try other progressions (such as I-vi-ii-V), but when you find a good fit you’re home free.

A melody made to order for the I-vi-IV-V chord progression.

Use the Melodic Outline

Guessing at the right chord progression isn’t very sophisticated, even if it often gets you where you want to go. A more analytical approach is one that deconstructs your melody, looking for clues to an implied harmony. What you want to do, in essence, is strip out all the embellishing tones and create a melodic outline of the most important, or structural, tones. The structural tones of the melodic outline will quite often suggest the underlying chords.

In most cases each structural tone will be one of the notes of the underlying chord triad. You can try fitting chords around each structural tone, having that tone function as either the root, the third, or the fifth of the three possible chords.

For example, let’s say you’re in the key of C Major and one of the structural tones in your melody is a C. Working diatonically, you can fit that C into either a C Major chord (as the root), an A minor chord (as the third), or an F Major chord (as the fifth). So for any structural tone in your melodic outline, you have three possible diatonic chords that could fit. Play each of the three chords in the context of the melody, and see which one fits best.

Fitting three possible chords to a single structural tone.

Let’s work through an example, starting with a full melody. When we reduce the melody to its structural tones, you can see that they create a framework for the underlying harmony. Through a process of trial and error, we choose those chords that, first, sound best and, second, make the most harmonic sense within the framework of the composition.

Start with your complete melody …

… then extract the embellishing tones to create a melodic outline …

… and fit the proper chords to each of the structural tones.

For example, once you get to the final measure, you have to determine which chord to fit with the C note. You could choose F the IV chord), Am (the vi chord), or C (the I chord). The question you have to ask is whether it’s more likely that the preceding V chord (against the D) would lead to the IV, the vi, or the I?

If you remember your chord theory, you can be pretty sure that a V-I progression (the good old perfect cadence) makes more sense than any of the alternatives, so you harmonize that C with a C (I) chord. There’s some guesswork involved, of course, but the theory should provide at least one possible way to proceed. You can test your harmonization by playing the chords against the entire melody; if it sounds good, you made the right choices. (If not, try again!)

Your chord choices, fit against the original melody.

Work Backward

Here’s another trick for easier harmonization: work backward. That’s right, you can often figure out the proper chord progression by working backward from the final chord in a phrase, using rudimentary chord-leading theory. Remember that most traditional melodic phrases end on the tonic harmony. This means that the final chord in your melodic phrase, more often than not, will be a I chord. You then can figure out the cadence leading to the I (probably a V chord), and work backward from there using the chord leading rules you learned in Chapter 10. With this approach you can have half the harmony decoded fairly quickly.

For example, if you assume that this melody ends on the I chord, then the penultimate chord should be the V chord. What chords best lead to a V chord? Try the ii (the dominant of the V), and you’ll see that it works. Which chords lead to the ii chord? There are a few, but again try the dominate of the ii—the vi chord. This also works. And how do you get to the vi chord? There’s nothing like a I to lead to a vi, and since that I would sit on the very first beat of the phrase, you know that’s the best (if not the only) choice. By working backward, you’ve fit a I-vi-ii-V7-I progression to your melody.

Start at the end (with a V-I cadence) and use chord-leading theory to work backward from there.

Exercise 19-2

Write an eight-bar chord progression in the key of G that starts with the ii chord, ends with the I chord, and does not include the V chord.

Exercise 19-3

Compose an eight-bar melody in the key of C, using the C Major scale, in 4/4 time. Use whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes; and begin and end your melody on the C note.

Exercise 19-4

Compose an eight-bar melody in the key of G, using the G Major scale, in 4/4 time. Make this a rhythmically lively melody at a relatively fast tempo, using half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes.

Exercise 19-5

Compose a melody to fit the chord progression you wrote for Exercise 19-1.

Exercise 19-6

Compose a melody to fit the chord progression you wrote for Exercise 19-2.

Exercise 19-8

Harmonize (add chords to) the melody you wrote for Exercise 19-4.

The Least You Need to Know

• You can create a composition by writing the chord progression first and then adding a melody (harmonic composition) or writing the melody first and then adding a chord progression (melodic composition).
• Use chord leading and other harmonic techniques to create a logical chord progression.
• The best melodies feature step-wise movement, a singable range, and some degree of repetition.
• To harmonize a melody, use structural tones and try some common chord progressions.