*Melody Music Composition - Unrestrained

An unrestrained approach to melody music composition gives you access to the entire keyboard or piano. The entire range of notes is at your disposal to shape and form. However, plucking random notes won’t result in a memorable musical melody, generally not anyhow. The notes you choose fulfill a role in the phrase. They can either add tension or be predictable. The notes can ascend to the climax, or trifle down during the music composition. They always have a purpose. How do you form that purpose?

Many online sites for composing musical melody during a music composition speak of arches, inverted arches, and ramps. This is to say that the musical melody either goes up, then down, or down, then up. Or the musical melody can keep going down, or keep going up… No kidding? A musical melody either goes up or down? …………. While this is obvious, it does bring up a point. A musical melody must have movement within the music composition. A good melody goes someplace and tells a story. If you’re stuck trying to compose a melody, try making your notes move from one place to another. Granted, you will want to keep this movement somewhat confined (within an octave, or an octave and a half), but make your phrase go somewhere.

The Mountain of Music

The musical melody either goes up or goes down...

When we speak of creating a memorable musical melody within a music composition, what exactly do we mean? Well, it means that the audience remembers the melody; they might even be humming it in their heads the next day. So, when we asking how to create a memorable melody, what we are really asking is, why do people remember things?

Unexpected Melodic Notes

Here’s why I think people remember things. It is unique and stands out, it’s bizarre, it has never been done before, it’s innovative, or it’s funny (this could be tricky with music). On the other end of the spectrum, people remember things because, they’ve seen/heard it before, and it’s predictable. Hence, a powerful melody must encompass two diverse elements to be memorable. It must be unique (unexpected, catches the audiences attention, surprising) and it must be predictable (familiar, expected). Therefore, we must ask which notes are expected and which notes are unexpected?

Let’s take a look at a normal C major scale.

C	Expected
D	Unexpected
E	Expected
F	Unexpected
G	Expected
A	Unexpected
B	Unexpected

From the table, we can see that the tonic note (C), the third (E), and the fifth (G), are all expected notes, while the rest of the tones are unexpected. Remember, to create a memorable musical melody, we want to mix the expected with the unexpected. Now you might be saying, “This leaves us with many, many options!” Yes, it does. There are numerous ways to create a melody.

In addition, neighboring notes are expected, and non-neighboring notes are unexpected. This is to say, if you are playing an F, then an E or G are expected to follow, while any of the other notes are unexpected.

Combining familiar tones with unexpected non-neighboring notes and unexpected tones with neighboring notes is essential for creating a memorable musical melody for music composition.