I recommend (if you're not adverse to a smidge of remedial music theory that is) that you learn the "do ray me ..etc." diatonic scale, and really familiarize yourself with how the intervals within this scale sound- i.e. where the half-step & whole-steps are respectively - and how they change per different key signature. If you want to study even further you can study how these half-steps & whole-steps change per different scale or mode!


It may not seem like much, but you really are training your ear on an esoteric & subconscious level & familiarizing yourself with tones & how they are arranged. For me and many of my students this has been a great foundation for the basics of constructing songs.

Well, back to James original comment, if you have a wee bit of music training (and believe me, mine is minimal) knowing your scales and some kind of instrument helps a ton. When I get stuck or cannot figure out what to do with a melody, I'll sit down at my keyboard (again, very limited skill here on my part) and figure out what key the song is in, and then just fiddle around with the scale for that key. Go up and down the scale first then start jumping around from note to note. Not only does this help me work through to get an idea, but when it comes time to sing it I can practice with the keyboard and really clean up my notes vocally (I've polished up my pitch a lot over the years, but I still need a little help sometimes with a new melody). This may not be a quick fix, but it's what I do. Another thing I've had to learn to do is not worry about sounding like crap when I'm trying to work things out, I know sometimes when it doesn't happen right away I've had the tendency to get a bit frustrated but that's all ego and really gets in the way of being creative. I used to worry about it a lot, then my husband said he saw a video of Sting in the studio and he was freaking out and crying, saying he was going to quit music because he totally couldn't figure out what to do and he sounded really off (even more so as he got more agitated). Anyway, my point is, it's not always easy to start writing a melody and it sometimes seems downright impossible, but it WILL happen if you stick with it. Good Luck!

These are all really good suggestions. When I write a melody for an original chord progression, I sit down at the piano, play the starting chord and just sing around it. Sometimes I don't even have a progression, just lyrics, so I almost randomly pick a note to start with based on what feels good to sing. (Usually something in the mid to lower end of my range to give me somewhere to go later.) So what I mean by "sing around" the chord is that I'll start by singing the root and then jump to different intervals, again based on what feels good and what makes sense for the momentum of the song... Hmm... this is harder to explain than I thought... Playing and singing the scale of your key is a GREAT idea, because then you know what notes are available to you.

If you have a chord progression already, your melody can always stay around the root and third, but a lot of times singing the fifth is really nice too. One of my teachers described the top note of each chord as the melody note. So if your chord progression is D, G, C, then your melody is A, D, G. That is simplified and of course only one option of thousands. In that chord progression, actually, which is Angel from Montgomery, the melody note actually starts on the third of the first chord.

Your melody can always just stick to the notes that are in the accompanying chords. Then once you get comfortable with creating simple lyrical phrases, you can start incorporating other scale tones (or chromatic passing tones). Just remember to fit your melody to the instrument. If it's for a vocalist, you'd treat it like a melody for a brass instrument, where you don't want a lot of big intervallic leaps unless you're at the climax of the song. It's just hard for wind instruments to make those leaps. If your melody is for guitar, then you have a lot more leeway in the range and athleticism of your melody.

And there is the phrasing -- the "shape" of the line. It can be a gentle curve, it can be a repeated riff, etc. But that really depends on the style of music you're playing.

I don't know if that helped at all. Maybe if you described more what you are working with I could be more specific. It would appear that you are a guitar player, so you probably know how to solo? Then you already know how to pick notes that work with the progression, and you likely understand rhythm and phrasing. Are you writing a melody for guitar or voice?

But above all, what has really worked for me is to just sing to myself. (I always have to be alone to do this.) With no accompaniment, just start humming or lalalalala'ing whatever comes up. Make up experimental melodies. Try to resolve them. Or don't. That way, you start to get a natural sense of where a scale is (by ear), where the intervals are, what works and what doesn't, and what sounds good to you (or not). Because ultimately I don't write a melody with my head, I write it with my voice.

P.S. Oh, yeah, and hi from one Scorpio to another! =)