How To Write A Melody: Tones and Scales

This week (and next) on Tunehoney, we'll be working our way to learning how to write a melody.

The melody is one of the most important parts of a song. Melody gives the listener something to follow and something to sing along to. The melody is the part of a song that you find yourself humming hours after hearing it.

Since the melody of a song is so important, it follows that one way to write a song is to begin with a melody. Before we can do that, we need to learn what a components make up a melody. 

To understand melody at its most basic, we'll be examining the simple, iconic song Eight Melodies (one melody, really) from Mother (NES):

fig. 1: Eight Melodies, lovingly transcribed by me in Photoshop

Get to know this melody as best you can, because we'll be picking it apart next time. But for now, let's learn the very basic components of a melody.

Tones and Scales

To understand how to write an effective melody, we must first understand the relationship between tones.

        A tone is a sound that is played or sung at a specific         pitch. (Miller, p. 4)

Pretty simple. 12 tones make up the foundation of Western music, and you've probably heard of them. As a quick note, '#' stands for sharp, which raises a tone, and 'b' stands for flat, which lowers a tone. The 12 tones are:

A  A#  B  C C#  D  D#  E  F  F#  G  G#

or

A  Bb  B  C  Db  D  Eb  E  F  Gb  G  Ab

The space between one tone to the adjacent tone is called a half-step (B to C, or F to F#), and the space between one tone and the tone after the adjacent tone is called a whole-step (B to C#, F to G). Half-steps and whole-steps are important because they allow us to construct musical scales when we stack them in different ways.

A scale is a series of eight successive tones placed in alphabetical order. A C-major scale, for example:

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

And a D-major scale, which Eight Melodies is composed in:

D  E  F#  G  A  B  C#  D

Scales dictate which tones we're 'allowed' to use when writing music -- tones that fall outside of the scale (called accidentals) sound dissonant when played on top of tones within the scale. 

As you become more experienced with composing, you'll be able to effectively use tones outside of the scale you're writing in, but for now we're going to stick to the notes in the scale.

Notice both example scales, C-major and D-major, are major scales, despite containing different tones. What makes them major is their identical arrangement of half-steps and whole-steps. Take a look.

Our 12 tones:

C C#  D  D#  E  F  F#  G  G#  A  A#  B

Our C-major scale:

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

Now both on top of each other (exclude tones in parentheses):

C (C#)  D  (D#)  E  F  (F#)  G  (G#)  A  (A#)  B  C

If there is a tone in parentheses between two adjacent letters of the alphabet, that's a whole-step (C to D), and if there isn't, that's a half-step (E to F). In other words, a major scale really looks like this (W is a whole-step, H is a half-step):

W  W  H  W  W  W  H

Try measuring the whole and half-steps between the tones of the D-major scale provided above. By applying that pattern of whole and half-steps to any the twelve tones, you can find out which tones make up each musical scale.

A few tips about scales:

• Beyond major scales, there are also other scales such as minor scales and the chromatic scale
• Scales must not skip a letter of the alphabet. This determines which scales use #s and which use b's
• A single scale cannot contain both #s and b's
• The pattern of whole and half-steps for a natural minor scale is: W  H  W  W  H  W  W

How important, then, is choosing a scale for your song?

At this stage, not very. Since we're composing chiptunes and not writing for vocalists or instruments, and since we've only learned the major scale, whichever major scale we choose to work with is going to sound pretty much the same.

But tune in next time, when we get into the meat of melodies and use all of theory we just learned to understand Eight Melodies and why it's so effective.

Works Cited and Additional Reading.

Miller, M. (Year of publication). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory: Second Edition. New York, New York: Penguin Group.

Tanaka, H., Suzuki, K. (1989). Eight Melodies. On Mother Original Soundtrack [NSF File]. (n.d.).