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The best melodies are kept simple, so they're singable. The main ingredient of melodic simplicity is repetition. But the key is to be repetitious, without being overly repetitious. That's where the idea of a melodic motif comes in.
A motif is a part of a melody that's repeated throughout your song. It helps to define your song. It makes it memorable. A good motif is not a line of melody that's simply repeated over and over again, but rather one that's repeated and modified. That makes for a melody that's both memorable, and not too repetitious.
If you listen to the four lines in the chorus of "Firework" by Katy Perry, you'll see what I mean. All four lines start with the same melody, the each of those four melodic lines ends differently. It keeps the chorus familiar and singable, without being overly repetitious.
Now that you have a better understanding for what a motif is, let's look at some techniques for changing up a motif.
1. Repeat and Add to the Motif
An example of adding to a motif can be heard in the Beatles song "She Loves You." The song starts on a motif that happens when they sing "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah." That motif gets repeated two times in the exact same way. The third time they, that motif is changed, slightly, by adding an extra "yeah" at the end of the original motif.
For our example, let's say we were looking at the melody below. It's a four note melody, where each note is two beats long:
Eb---Db--C----Bb
That's our motif, so now we can try adding to it, to change it up as it moves forward. We'll assume this is a verse. Again, assume all the notes listed below are half notes. You can play along on your guitar or piano, if it helps. Let's do this:
Melody Line 1
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Melody Line 2
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Melody Line 3
Eb---Db--C----Bb---Ab
All we did was repeat our motif three times, but at the end of the third repetition, we just added a half note Ab, which made the melody sound different and closes it off at the end. That's how adding to a motif works. You don't have to keep the piece you add as simple as we did here, but you can see how it works with this example.
2. Shortening the Motif and Adding Spacing
Another way we can change the current motif is by keeping the melody the same, but truncating it, and adding space where the old melody continued. This is a cool trick for making a melody sound original fairly quickly and easily.
Let's go back to our original four note motif:
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Now let's try subtracting from that melody and making our new melody do this. Again, do everything here on half notes:
Melody Line 1
Eb---Db--C----(2 beat rest)
Melody Line 2
Eb---Db--C----(2 beat rest)
Melody Line 3
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Here we truncated our melody the first two times around and then kept our original idea as a lengthened third melody line.
We could apply this idea of shortening the motif and adding spacing in a different way too. We could make the last line the one that gets shortened. Like this:
Melody Line 1
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Melody Line 2
Eb---Db--C----Bb
Melody Line 3
Eb---Db--C----(2 beat rest)
You're probably starting to get the idea of how we can chop up our motifs to make memorable melodies. Take advantage of these techniques when you write your melodies. It can only make them more memorable.
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.
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