The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Definition

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Part 3:
Tunes
Obviously, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. (And every rule is meant to be broken,
anyway!) Think, for example, of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or “Moon
River,” or “When You Wish Upon a Star.” All of these songs feature leaps of
anywhere from a fifth to an entire octave in their melodies. So it’s okay to leap,
if you know what you’re doing—although small steps are better suited for less-
experienced songwriters.
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Small steps and large leaps in a melody—the small steps sound more lyrical and are easier to sing.
Stay in Range
You don’t want to cover too many notes in your melody. If the distance between
the lowest note and the highest note is too wide, singers will have trouble
singing all of your melody—and your melody will start to sound random and
disjointed, without a home.
Consider, for example, America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled
Banner.” Francis Scott Key put his words to one whopper of a tune—one that
had a rather wide melodic range. Think of how hard this song is to sing—and
how many well-trained vocalists have trouble hitting all the notes. The broad
range in this song doesn’t make it a bad song; it just makes it one of the more
difficult songs to sing or play.
Thus, if at all possible keep the lowest and highest notes in your melody within
an octave of each other. (Or, at most, within an octave and a third.) You should
also consider the absolute range of the voice or instrument you’re writing for,
and try to stay within that range. (To learn more about voice and instrument
ranges, turn to Chapter 19.)
Ironically, the melody of
“The Star-Spangled
Banner” comes from an
English drinking song
called “Anacreon in
Heaven.” Maybe the high
notes are easier to hit after
a few pints of British ale!
Note
A melody with too wide a range—really hard to sing!
Avoid Unsingable Intervals
While we’re on the topic of singability, certain intervals are easier to sing than
others. Half steps and whole steps are easy to sing, as are seconds, thirds, and
fifths. Some fourths, for some reason, are a little more difficult to sing, and
sixths and sevenths are particularly problematic.
Octaves aren’t by nature difficult—a C is a C is a C, whether it’s high or low—
although the shear distance between the notes adds a degree of difficulty for
singers. Along the same lines, any interval over an octave should probably be
avoided, just because it’s such a big jump.

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Chapter 8:
Melodies
Chromatic intervals—notes that aren’t in the underlying scale—are very diffi-
cult for most singers to sing. For example, if you’re in the key of C and your
melody jumps from an E to a G
, a lot of singers won’t be able to hit that sec-
ond note. They’ll want to sing either an F or G, both of which are in the scale;
the G
takes a lot of concentration to hit, out of the blue.
There’s another chromatic interval you should avoid at all costs, called a 
tritone;
it’s (depending on how you look at it) a raised (augmented) fourth or a flatted
(diminished) fifth. The tritone just plain sounds wrong; some early music theo-
rists considered this the “Devil’s interval,” and the musical equivalent of evil.
(Go ahead, play a tritone—F to B, for example—and see how difficult it is to
sing.)
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As with all things
musical, the real test
is in the singing.
Whatever intervals
you use, try to sing them,
and then check what you
sing against the piano. If
you have trouble singing a