The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

particular interval, so will
others—and the best melo-
dies are the easiest to sing.
Tip
Don’t put tritones in your melodies!
Keep the Rhythm Simple
At least when you’re starting out, it helps to keep the rhythm of your melody
relative simple. That means sticking to quarter notes and half notes, and using
sixteenth notes sparingly.
It also means avoiding, for the time being, what we call 
syncopation.
Syncopation
makes for a jumpy melody, and is hard for some singers to sing.
Syncopation
means there’s an emphasis in a place you’re not expecting
it—or when there 
isn’t 
an emphasis where you 
were
expecting it. You
can create a syncopated rhythm by accenting something other than the
downbeat—or by putting a rest on the downbeat. This type of change-up creates
rhythmic patterns that might sound “off” to some listeners but often have kind of a
funky or jazzy feel.
Definition
Syncopated rhythms may be created by using a short rest on the downbeat or
other strong beats. If you find yourself writing a melody that sounds just a little
too “jerky,” consider simplifying the rhythm and using more straight eighth and
quarter notes—on the beat.

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Part 3:
Tunes
Simplifying a rhythmically complex melody.
Stay in Time
It’s also possible, especially when you’re first starting out, to create a melody that
doesn’t strictly follow the pattern of your chosen time signature. For example,
you could create a six-beat melody, which doesn’t fit well in a four-beat 4/4 world.
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A melody that doesn’t follow the normal bar-line breaks.
You want to pace your melody so that it fits within your chosen time signature.
That means creating a melody that can easily be divided into measures, without
having extra beats left over. In fact, it’s a good exercise to write out your melody
without bar lines, and then make sure you can easily figure out where to draw
the bars to create your measures. If you can’t easily fit your melody into meas-
ures, think about rephrasing your rhythms, or changing the rest periods between
sections of your melody.
Along the same lines, make sure you can easily tell where the first beat of the
measure is throughout your melody—especially in the first and last measures.
You don’t want your melody to feel “offbeat,” in the strictest sense of the
phrase. You want your melody to end on a beat that feels right; otherwise your
listeners will find themselves stumbling in place when “one” isn’t where it’s sup-
posed to be.
Set Up—and Resolve—Tension
One of the most common melodic techniques is to divide your melody into two
parts, and set up a harmonic tension in the first part that is then resolved in the
second part. This gives your melody a distinct form, and its own internal logic;
it also helps to propel the melody from the first part to the second.
One way to create tension is to end the first part of your melody on something
other than the tonic of the scale. (When you’re factoring in the chord structure—
which you’ll learn in Chapter 10—you’ll find that tension is achieved by ending
the first part of the melody on a IV or V chord.) Practically, you can create ten-
sion by ending a phrase with the second, fifth, or seventh notes of the scale—
which correspond to the notes in the scale’s V chord, if you’re reading ahead.
More-experienced com-
posers are capable of
changing time signatures
within a melody, thus
accommodating lines that
don’t fit within a steady
time signature flow.
Note

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Chapter 8:
Melodies
The half note in measure two creates tension; the next two bars resolve the tension.
You then have to relieve this tension by manipulating the second part of your
melody back to the tonic of the scale—or to one of the notes in the tonic triad
(the I chord). The notes in the tonic triad are the tonic, third, and fifth of the
scale, although the tonic and the third probably work better for relieving ten-
sion. (That’s because the fifth is an ambiguous note, used both in the I chord
and the V chord; again, read ahead to Chapter 10 to learn all about chord pro-
gressions.)
In any case, you can hear the tension when you play a melody. Just look back to
Dvorˇák’s 
New World Symphony
or “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” For that
matter, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” also has this type of internal tension, coming
right after “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,” and resolved with
“Mary had a little a lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.”
It’s a popular technique—because it works!
Set Up a Call and Response
Another effective technique to employ in your melodies is that of 
call and response.
This is where you set up a phrase in the first part of your melody, and then
“answer” that phrase in the second part. This is slightly different from the tech-
nique of tension and release, although the call does set up a certain tension that
demands a tension-relieving answer. The answering phrase serves as a “part
two” to the original phrase; the first phrase takes you in one direction, and the
second phrase brings you back home.
To create a call-and-response type of melody, it helps to think of a question—
and its answer. For example, you might think of the question, “Where is my
car?” and the answer, “It’s in the street.” When you put this call and response to
music, you might get something like this:
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A simple call-and-response melody.
Establish Symmetry
A technique that is somewhat implied in both the tension-and-relief and call-
and-response techniques is that of symmetry. By this I mean that the second