Writing melodies that work

Two questions decide a melody note: is it in the current chord? and is it on a strong beat? Chord tones on strong beats (rows 0, 4, 8, 12 of a 16-row bar) make the melody sound anchored; non-chord scale notes are passing or neighbour tones — put them between chord tones on weak beats (source: s-037-lab).

Rules of thumb#

• Steps beat leaps. Move mostly by 1–2 scale steps; save a big leap for the emotional peak, then step back down.
• Phrases are sentences. 2- or 4-bar phrases with a breath (rest) at the end. Classic shape: question (ends off the root) → answer (ends on the root).
• Repeat, then change one thing. Play a phrase again with a different ending or shifted to the next chord; listeners love recognising and being surprised at once.
• One peak per section. A single highest note per phrase/section reads as the emotional target.
• Land the last note. Root = closure, 5th = "to be continued", 3rd = bittersweet.

Does any of this matter? (the 1996 argument)#

The scene had this argument out in traxweekly #39–40, and it is worth reading before the rules above harden into law. basehead, who had been misquoted as dismissing chords, said his claim was narrower — "knowing music theory doesn't help you write good music" — while he, necros and Aahz all held that theory "can give you a lot of backing" in any style, and that most of the scene writes chord-based music for which it is "a valuable asset". maelcum: "Chords are a valid and valuable tool available to the composer", necessary only for certain types of music, and no knowledge of "the antique western musical system" is required to write something good. trixter rejected the framing entirely — "A chord isn't a 'thing', it's any combination of notes"; every piece has chords, ambient is "one long, ever-changing chord", and over 99 % of the world's music is chord-based, so both camps were naive. Take the rules on this page the way that argument ends: as backing, not as a gate (source: s-tw039-chord-theory-debate).

From the scene's theory course (Greg Heo, 1996)#

"Most of the melodies you hear are in steps … 80 % of the pitch movement is like this." A phrase is half a line of "Twinkle Twinkle"; two or more phrases make a period ending in a cadence — perfect (a full stop), imperfect (a comma), deceptive ("a period that turns into an ugly semicolon at the last minute"). Dynamics: swells up to 64 and drops to 10 "make the listener lean forward"; articulation is written with note cuts (SCx) — short choppy vs long held notes (source: s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory).

Variation devices: retrograde, inversion, guide line#

Two borrowings from serial-composition work on any phrase: retrograde — copy the block and reverse its rows — and inversion — keep the rhythm, negate every step (a rise of 4 becomes a fall of 4); combined they give a retrograde inversion, and each can start on any note (source: s-tw046-serial-composition). The Modsquad's satirical 1997 series contains one sketching trick worth keeping: track a slow "lead progression" guide line that the lead circles around "never straying more than three half-notes" from it, then delete that channel before release (source: s-tw087-music-theory-a-modern-approach).

Sing it first, rhythm section first (Necros and Hartrell, 1995)#

necros's test: sing the melody "like your life depended on it" — if it is not catchy hummed, "it sure as heck isn't going to sound good" played with "the FC-SINER.SMP sound you stole from Second Reality"; playing an instrument helps enormously (source: s-tw015-advanced-tracking-tips-ii). Hartrell's order of work: track the drums, then a bass, so the downbeats are visible, and only then the melody; never place melody notes at a fixed interval of rows ("that shows little rhythm"); choose the scale for the genre first, then write the run (scales-and-modes); and give the line a player's articulation — D0F staccato, G90 bends on reeds and pipes, SD1 grace notes, swung speeds (source: s-tw021-tracking-tips; the full articulation kit is on lead-articulation).

On three voices#

A chip melody is written against a channel count, and the C64 composers say so in almost the same words.

• Leave the holes on purpose. rob-hubbard's brief was "a strong bass line and a strong melodic line" (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews) — and the melody channel is also the fill channel: "If the lead line has two beats rest, put a fill or some effect in there" (source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip). A phrase with no rests in it leaves the arrangement nowhere to breathe, because on three voices the rests are the percussion (channel-interleaving).
• The melody can be worth more than the drums. Matt Gray on Galway's Rambo loader: "Martin obviously sacrificed drums for more channels, but it didn't matter because he knew the power was in the melody, chords and sounds rather than the beat" (source: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview). Deciding that early changes what the other two voices are for.
• The chord is a fast arpeggio, so the melody has to carry the harmony's edges. rob-hubbard, translated in a Dutch interview: "If you would compose one chord, you run out of channels. So you have to be creative. By quickly switching between three notes on one channel, you saved two channels" (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise). Against a blurred arp, the melody's non-chord tones are what the ear reads as harmony (chord-arpeggio).
• The target sound, stated as a checklist. jeroen-tel on what he likes in C64 music: "Funky basslines in combination with snappy drums, good chord progressions and playful, jazzy melodies" (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel). chris-huelsbeck reduces it further: "The basics of a good song remain the same: good melody, accompaniment and a strong and interesting arrangement. All other elements like sounds and recording technique are exchangeable" (source: s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview).

Write more than four bars#

Sir Nick's 1996 complaint is about melody as much as about form: a beautiful four-bar idea repeated for a whole song is the default output of pattern-block editing. "The patterns were absolutely magnificent, yet I couldn't get the song in whole work." If a four-bar phrase is good, write the next four bars before looping it, and sketch the structure before entering notes (source: s-tw072-composing-whole-modules; the arc it produces is catalogued on arrangement).

What the tools let a melody do#

The rules above are tool-independent; what differs is how much of the phrasing the pattern holds and how much the instrument does.

• impulse-tracker: notes C-0–B-9, middle C at C-5; 1 types a note cut ^^^ and ` a note off === — the two ways a phrase can end. Articulation is in the effect column: SCx cut after x frames, SDx delay, Gxx portamento to note, Hxy vibrato, Jxy arpeggio ("an effect similar to old C-64 chords"). Two editing features are melody tools in disguise: Alt-I templates stamp a copied block, transposed, every time you enter a note — octave doublings, stereo pairs or a fixed effect sequence applied to a whole line as you type it — and Alt-Q/Alt-A transpose a marked block, which is how the retrograde and inversion above are actually performed. At instrument level, a sustain loop loops only until note off and then plays the rest of the sample ("fingers lifting off guitar strings"), and the NNA continue lets the previous note finish underneath the new one — a legato that costs a virtual channel rather than a real one (source: s-it-manual; new-note-actions, lead-articulation).
• lsdj: a melody is written into 16-step phrases, chains carry an optional transpose, and phrases and chains are shared between channels — so a good phrase is entered once and re-pitched per chain instead of retyped, and doubling it onto the second pulse channel is a reference, not a copy. L slides to a note over a duration, P bends, V takes a vibrato depth in semitones, H hops out of a phrase early (source: s-lsdj-manual; orderlist).
• goattracker: the top of the range is G#7 — A-7…B-7 exist only via transpose — and there are three special notes: ... rest, --- key off, +++ key on. But the real gate bit is the key mask AND the wavetable's gate bit, so +++ cannot re-open a gate the instrument's table has cleared. On the C64 a phrase's articulation is negotiated with the instrument; it is not decided by the note column alone (source: s-goattracker-readme).
• sid-wizard: the arp column accepts absolute pitches ($81–$DF = C-1…A-8), so an entire melodic figure can live inside an instrument and be fired by a single note — the far end of "the instrument carries the phrasing". $3F in the instrument column ties a note, and Shift+P sets auto-portamento (source: s-sid-wizard-charts-and-tables; instrument-tables).
• What a SID lead is made of, before any of that: the pulse waveform 41 is "the only waveform that can be modulated. Great for leaders", and 51 (triangle + pulse) is "the most used combined waveform since it's clearly audible on both" chip revisions — a lead that has to survive on a 6581 and an 8580 is usually one of those two (chordian for sid-factory-ii; source: s-chordian-sf2-instruments; the rest is on instrument-design).

Tracker-flavoured extras#

Slide into the peak note and down out of the phrase (pitch-slide-and-portamento); let long notes have delayed vibrato; fill the gaps with a fake-echo; give every note its own velocity (lead-articulation). 037-lab's Melody Lab generates raw material following exactly these rules (A B A B′ form, chord tones on strong rows) for you to edit.

Melodies with words in them (Tel, 1996)#

jeroen-tel's account of why his C64 melodies feel sung: "I think I brought some kind of SONG feeling to the c64-music, since I always made up melodies with lyrics in my head, which gave the melodies a non-instrumental touch" — imagined lyrics as a melody-shaping tool (source: s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview).

Related#

rhythm-and-groove · chord-progressions · scales-and-modes · arrangement · serial-composition · lead-articulation · channel-interleaving · chord-arpeggio · instrument-design · new-note-actions · traxweekly

Sources#

s-037-lab · s-tw074-intro-to-musical-theory · s-tw046-serial-composition · s-tw087-music-theory-a-modern-approach · s-tw015-advanced-tracking-tips-ii · s-tw021-tracking-tips · s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview · s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip · s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews · s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview · s-remix64-huelsbeck-interview · s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-tw072-composing-whole-modules · s-tw039-chord-theory-debate · s-it-manual · s-lsdj-manual · s-goattracker-readme · s-sid-wizard-charts-and-tables · s-chordian-sf2-instruments