Subject: Melody
Posted by: snabbu |
Just following on from Dan's comment about the importance of melody I would like to comment specifically on melody punctuation in a non technical way.
Quite often you hear songs from beginning writers where the melody just seems one long sentence which detracts from the song.
The main tools for punctuating a melody are Cadences which can either be a full cadence or a half cadence the full cadence being the full stop the half cadence being a comma.
Just as there are words and sentences in lyrics there are motives and phrases in music.
Typically a motive will be four or five bars long.
So to write an effectively punctuated tune for say your verse where the motive is four bars long with the motive repeated twice. The first step is to put a comma (half cadence) at the end of the first four bars. A half cadence is achieved by using a note of the chord but not the root note as that would sound too final, and having the note sound longer than the previous notes. So if the chord was G you could use a D note and if the previous notes was one beat sound it for two beats.
You would now repeat the motive but this time the last note would be the root of the chord G and sounded even longer say three or four beats.
So what you have now is piece of melody that is punctuated but it will probably sound boring repetitious and too predictable so the next step is to add some variation to the second four bars by say changing the odd note length or pitch, replacing one held note of two beats with four half notes. etc. Another thing you can do as a variation technique is to shift the whole melody pattern up or down one or two whole tones using different chords to harmonize the second set of four bars.
Now you should have a melody that sounds reasonably OK and well punctuated,
the next thing is to put some light and shade into it tension and release this is done with the chords you are using but that is another subject.
Cheers
Gary |
Subject: Re:Melody
Posted by: Michael |
Hi Snabbu,Perhaps you could also explain what makes a song sing well so that people without little or any musical training will understand that sometimes what looks good on a page(poetry for example)might not lend itself to a melody.
Michael. |
Subject: Re:Melody
Posted by: snabbu |
Hi Michael
Ignoring rhyme schemes and lyric content and just concentrating on the actual rhythm and sound aspect of the lyric it is down to meter and stress. The best way to determine stress is to chant the lyric out loud beating time on the desk with your pencil. If the stress is falling an the wrong words then you need to edit to correct this.
If you are writing lyrics first music second and are learning it is a good practice to be a syllable counter if it is a four line verse for example the first two lines will use the first four bars of the melody, the second two will use the variation if you for instance put a three syllable word in the same place as a single syllable word in the first stanza of the verse you will have an automatic variation but the stresses on the words around that variation must be the same as the first line otherwise instead of a variation it wanders off to be something completely different and the pattern is lost.
If you keep your syllable counts constant in the two sets of two lines then most times your meter and stress will be OK as you progress and get the feel of lyric meter you can stop concerning your self with syllable counting.
eg
Line one 8 syllables
Line two 10 syllables
Line three 8 syllables
Line four 10 syllables
The disadvantage being you have now locked the melody variation into being either a shift of the melody up or down or the odd different note rather than the example of four eigth notes relacing one two beat note.
The other aspect of lyrics as just sounds is consonants hard consonants interrupt the flow
of a lyric and usually need a pause before or after them this will effect the rhythm of the lyric and will be obvious when chanting and tapping, if it’s hard to sing it may be a bit of a tongue twister try changing a hard consonant to a soft one any old word will do if that makes the chant smoother then you know that is the problem so you can then go looking for an appropriate substitute word.
The easiest exercise to get stress and meter right is to write different lyrics to tunes you know and sing them to those tunes you will then immediately be able to tell if there is anything wrong.
Cheers
Gary
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Subject: Re:Melody
Posted by: jamesbmitchell |
Wow, Gary. What an excellent summary of the key points in improving lyric rhythm and stress. You should save this for publication somewhere - seriously!
Another problem I see a lot is the use of an important word in an unstressed portion of the melody. If the melody's a mixture of short and long notes, finding a major word that's key to the song's story on a short note is usually a red flag. These words don't stick in the listener's ear as easily the first time through, but get lost in the rush to the next sustained note.
Finding a weak word ("and", "the", "but", "if", etc.) on a long, sustained note is another red flag. They draw attention to themselves and detract from the message.
One helpful technique I picked up somewhere is to drop out all the words but those on key beats and on sustained tones, and sing "la-la-la" for all the other words. It sounds a bit silly, but people actually do it naturally. They'll half-remember a song, and the words they remember are the key words, like "la-la-la-for-EV-er!"  It's actually a great test to see what the song will communicate if someone's only half-listening to it.
-- James |
Subject: Re:Melody
Posted by: snabbu |
Hi James
Thanks for your kind comments The point you bring up is very important in regard to stress on unimportant words and I think the “La la” advice is good. Sometimes lyric writing advice can seem a bit complicated looking at it this morning first you have to get all your stresses and meter happing plus you can’t stress unimportant words then you have to make sense and rhyme at the same time, even to me that looks daunting it must make a beginning writer’s head spin. The point is that all these things just happen without thinking after a while and you only need to know all this stuff when something sounds not quite right, so you can fix it or if you can’t fix it make an educated decision to leave it as it is. A lot of the time there are compromises in song writing I have a song “ Don’t get Mad get even” with a stress problem on the word “Ransacked” with the stress ending up on the wrong syllable but I left it in because I had to have that word to create the image I wanted and if I recorded it again I think I could fix it in the performance by singing with more attitude. The point being that a technically perfect song is not always possible. So after you learn all the rules you then go out and bend them.
You can also use stress manipulation as a bit of a hook thing so you have two words following each other that are stressed and use an internal rhyme to accentuate the first stressed word I have only done this once an it was a deliberate contrived thing.
For example
“She said we’re out of time
There’s a line drawn now in forever”
With the words “line” and “drawn” both being stressed in the second line and the stress on “line” being reinforced by rhyming with line one. I pinched the idea for this technique off Paul MacCartney’s “Hey Jude”
So I think the biggest thing for beginners is to listen to and analyze what successful writers do, then do it themselves.
Cheers
Gary
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