The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Part 3:
Tunes
100
Create Variations
You can create additional melodies in your music by varying your motif slightly,
such as changing its rhythm or moving its tones up or down in the scale. You
should retain enough of the main motif so that listeners can tell where it came
from, but add enough variation so that you create a new—but related—melody.
How can you vary a motif ? You can reverse the rhythm, simplify the rhythm,
or make the rhythm more complex. You can reverse the notes (so that the
melody goes up instead of down, or down instead of up), or change the middle
notes in the motif, or shift the notes up or down a third or a fifth. In short, just
about any variation is fair game, as long as the initial motif isn’t completely
obliterated by the variations.
Take a look at the following example, in which the simple four-note motif from
the previous example is run through a number of variations—both rhythmically
and melodically.
A simple four-note motif, repeated throughout a longer melody.
The same four-note motif, with variations.
Remember that you want your variations to relate to the original motif. If you
get too far away from the original motif, it isn’t a variation anymore—it’s a
brand-new melody!
Write in Four—or Eight, or Sixteen
When you’re composing a melody, it helps to keep the lengths of the parts of
the melody (the motifs and phrases) relatively simple. In most Western music—
popular music, especially—most melodies can be divisible by two. That means
you probably want your melody to be two, four, eight, or sixteen measures long.
You probably don’t want to write a three- or five-measure melody; writing to an
odd number of measures may feel wrong to some of your listeners.
When you write a longer melody, you can divide it up into two- or four- or
eight-measure chunks. For example, the following sixteen-measure melody is
constructed from four four-measure parts.
One notable exception to
this 2/4/8/16 rule is the
genre we call the blues.
Most blues music uses a
twelve-measure form, with
twelve-measure melodies.
(To learn more about the
blues form, see Chapter
11.)
Note

---

Chapter 8:
Melodies
101
A sixteen-measure melody, consisting of four four-measure phrases.
Make It Move
A good melody doesn’t just sit there; it goes someplace. You can propel a melody
rhythmically, or tonally, through the “motion” of the tones. In this sense, motion
refers to the progressive upward or downward direction of the pitches, or what
some call the 
contour
of a line of music.
A good way to think about the upward or downward motion of a melody is to
look at the starting note and the ending note—while ignoring, for the time
being, all the notes in between. To create an upward-moving melody, make sure
the ending note is at least a third (and ideally a fifth or more) higher than the
starting note. Same thing with a downward-moving melody; force the last note
to be lower than the first one.
All the notes between the first and last notes help you move to that final note.
The notes don’t all have to go in the same direction, but they do have to gradu-
ally move up or down to where you want to end.
A melody with upward motion.
Note that it’s okay to have a melody that starts and ends on the same note.
What you can do is make the midpoint of the melody higher or lower than the
starting/ending pitch. If you choose a higher midpoint, the first half of the
melody will have upward movement, and the last half will use downward
movement to return to the home pitch.
Take Small Steps
The most singable melodies progress in small steps, which means each note is
only a step or two away from the previous note. The smaller the steps between
the notes in your melody, the more lyrical your melody will sound.
When you throw large jumps—of three or more steps—into your melody, it
starts sounding random, and becomes much more difficult to play or sing. It’s
much better to use a series of passing notes within your chosen scale to move
from one main note to another.
A melody that pro-
gresses in half or whole
steps uses what is called
step-wise
or
conjunct
motion. Melodies that
progress by leaps larger
than a whole step use
what is called 
skip-wise
or
disjunct
motion.