SONGWRITING

The first of a new series with songsmith Dave Clews

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A typical scenario is where you might find yourself with a chord progression you like the sound of, but need to come up with a melody to fit over the top. Here’s one we prepared earlier. When fitting a melody to an existing progression like this, there are certain notes that you know are going to work – but what are they? 2

The notes we know are going to work come from the ‘parent’ scale of whatever key our progression is in. So our first job is to work out the key of the song. Using our DAW’s chord analyser, we know our synth part is playing a four-chord progression made up of the following:

AbMaj7 EbMaj7.

F7sus2 > G7sus4 > > 3

Listening to the progression, when we EbMaj7 hit that fourth chord, we get the feeling of having arrived ‘home’ – if we stayed on that chord, our ears would be

Eb pretty happy! So let’s assume that is the root note, or ‘tonic’ of the key, and

EbMaj7 because the tonic chord is a major Eb chord, we’ll assume we’re in major. 4

We can test this out by playing the Eb Eb, Ab, notes of the major scale ( F, G,

Bb,

C, D) over our chords – and it works! So now we know that we can safely use the notes of this scale as a palette for creating a melody that’ll work with this progression. Let’s get on and start sketching some melody ideas! 5

With seven notes to choose from, the possibilities are endless, so let’s start simple and pick one note from the scale – let’s go for F, the 2nd note, or ‘degree’ of

Eb. the scale, one up from the tonic Staying on this note introduces an element of tension, as our ears naturally want it to

Eb. resolve back down to 6

Holding single notes isn’t that interesting though, so let’s start adding some rhythmic elements, breaking the long notes up into shorter ones. In this first example, we’ve played a rhythm in from a keyboard, still sticking to one note, but just feeling where the notes might fall nicely against the beat.

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Now we have a rhythm, we can start playing around with the notes. Still keeping things simple, we’ll stick to a three-note limit for now, using the scale

Eb tones either side of our F note – so that’s and G. To give the part a more ‘finishedoff’ sound, we’ve made the last long F note

Eb resolve to a tonic note.

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For a catchy chorus idea, let’s try another angle. We’ll start by filling the first bar with eighth-notes, starting with

Bb the fifth – – and dropping to a major

Eb third – G – then to the tonic by way of the 2nd – F. This progression down the major Ab, scale to the tonic, missing out the 4th – establishes a major feel, ideal for a chorus.

9 Bb

Next, we lose the first note to give a sense of rhythmic space, then extend into bar 2 with a finishing two-note flourish that ends on a long F note – this works with the underlying G7sus4 chord (G, C, D, F) and also creates the necessary tension required for our next step – a repetition with resolution.

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Repetition with resolution is a handy melodic device where you repeat a phrase or series of notes that doesn’t resolve to the tonic (ie what we created in the previous step), then resolve the repeated phrase to the tonic. So we copy our phrase, paste it into the next two bars

Eb. and drop that last F note down to

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Now we have a four-bar melody that uses a form of call and response between two phrases to create and resolve tension. Let’s prolong that tension by using a technique known as the overshoot. This is where you delay hitting your tonic by ‘overshooting’ it and landing on a different note – C in this case – before finally resolving a beat later.

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For a final tip, try deriving your melody notes from the uppermost notes in your chord progression. Duplicate the chord track, eliminate the unwanted lower notes, then play around with the rhythm of what’s left. This mega-simple yet hooky example has been derived from the upper notes of our chords.