Best alternative rock wedding songs first dancengs: Songwriting

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Let's look at a few ways to come up with a melody for your song.

1. Simple repetition

This one's easy. You just repeat the same note over and over. It's actually a great way to experiment with different potential rhythms to use in your melody, because if you only have one note in your melody, the only variable becomes the rhythm.

If you use this approach, it usually works best to make a slight note change at the very end of a melody line. Katy Perry's "Part of Me" are a good example of this. The first few lines of melody in the song are all sung on one note, until the very last note of the line. Then there's a change.

2. An Ascending Pattern

Using an ascending scale pattern can be an easy way to come up with a melodic motif. You can experiment with different ascending patterns in addition to your rhythms. For example, you can try using the first, second, third and fifth notes of your scale. I'll denote that like this: 1 - 2 - 3 - 5. Or You can try the 1 - 3 - 5 notes of your scale. You can even try repeating notes on your way up. Maybe the notes of your melody will do something like this, based 1 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 3.

3. A Descending Pattern

If we can have a ascending pattern as our motif, then we could also use a descending pattern instead. You can use the notes of your song's scale to create patterns like: 5 - 5 - 1, or 3 - 2 - 1.

4. A Zig Zagging Pattern

Zig zagging the notes of a scale is another way to come up with "shapes" for the pitches in your melody. To create a pattern like this, you would simply jump up and then back down, and then back up again. Something like: 1 - 5 - 3 - 8.

When you're experimenting of any of these different ways to organize the pitches of a scale to create a melody, you should also mess with the rhythm of your notes. You can try playing all the notes as eight notes, but then holding out the last note as a half note. Or reversing that order. Changing the rhythm can give you a wide variety of sounds to come up with.

Another way to modify your melody when it repeats itself, is to keep the rhythm the same, but to raise it in pitch the second time you hear it. For example, if the notes you've established in one line of your melody are E - F - G, you can change them to F - G - A the second time they're sung. If you do this, you can keep the rhythm the same as it was in the first line, but you're modifying your motif based solely on the pitches being presented.

To learn more, download my free EBook here:
http://www.SuccessForYourSongs.com/freeoffer/

Anthony Ceseri is the owner of http://www.successforyoursongs.com/, a website dedicated to the growth and development of songwriters of all skill levels. Anthony's writings appear as examples in the book "Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises For Finding Your Voice" by Pat Pattison, an acclaimed lyric writing professor at Berklee College of Music.