How to Write a Melody: Intuitive Melody Writing Decisions You Make
By Taura Eruera

When asked how to write a melody many songwriters say that they make up little bits of melody then put them together to make a song melody.

Most songwriters say they create melody intuitively (spontaneously compose without thinking) and they assemble melody tuitively (carefully arrange with deliberate thought).

So, what decisions does your intuition make when writing melody? How do songwriters intuitively write a melody?

The Intuitive Melody Writer

The number one way is to simply sing or hum a phrase a capella. (A capella means without any musical accompaniment) If you use this approach, your intuition selects the starting note, the following notes and the final note. Your intuition decides the pitch and rhythm of each note. Your intuition decides the melody contour and rhythm. Your intuition decides how many notes there are in the phrase.

You make no conscious decisions about how to write a melody. You simply do it.

Let's say that you have just created a simple seven note melody phrase. How many decisions did your intuition make?

Decision number one was what is the starting note? In making this decision your intuition firstly scanned your vocal range (which we will assume is a diatonic ten note range) and picked a starting note from your ten note range. That is, your intuition scanned your ten notes and picked one. That's your start note.

Decision number two was how long should that note be? Long short or medium?

Should this note last for 12 beats, 8 beats, 6 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats, 2 beats, 1.5 beats, 1 beat, .5 of a beat, .3 of a beat or .25 of a beat or some other combination of these values?

How to write a melody decision number three was: should the second note be a silent note or a sounded one? If a silent one, how long should it be? If a sounded note, should that note be higher, lower or the same pitch as the second note.

Decision number four is how long should this pitch last? How long should this note be? And the previous twelve options are evaluated and a pitch length selected.

Notice that there have been four decisions made for two notes. For seven notes there will be fifteen decisions made. Fourteen of them will boil down to: what pitch is this note and how long is it?

The fifteenth decision will be how long will the rest or silence be between the end of the seventh note of this phrase and the first note of the next one? And the fifteen note length values will be evaluated and one selected.

In deciding how to write a melody, seven pitch decisions and eight rhythm decisions were made.

Your intuition scanned ten pitches every time it made a pitch decision and fifteen note lengths every time it made a rhythm decision. All in all, one hundred and ninety evaluations were made, fifteen decisions made and seven notes selected.

For every note your intuition wrote, your intuition made twenty five evaluations and two decisions.

That's a lot of decision making and evaluation going on.

Your Big Take Away

A big take away here is that in order to know how to write a melody (over and over again) your tuition or conscious mind also needs to understand your vocal range, pitch, melodic contour and melodic rhythm. Your biggest priority is to learn to talk, read and write rhythm because for any melody note, there are far more rhythm choices than there are pitch choices.

A fully informed tuition brings two powerful benefits to your melody writing. Firstly, your intuition processes information that your tuition gathers so with better information, writing melody becomes more spontaneous and easy. Quality in, quality out. Does that sounds like a great win?

Secondly, your tuition can easily describe and capture what your intuition spontaneously creates. This means you can write your ideas down like you write down a shopping list. Not being able to get out the music and songs stirring within your imagination is one of the biggest frustrations that new songwriters frequently report. Happily, with a little time and good help, you will know how to write a melody both tuitively and intuitively.

Taura Eruera is an author of several books on guitar, harmony, rhythm and melody. He is also an APRA member who receives regular cheques for songs he has long forgotten writing. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Learn more about how to write a melody and the fundamentals of melody rhythm

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