One of the best sessions I went to at the Rocky Mountain Song School was a melody workshop with Bonnie Hayes, who has just move to Berklee to head the songwriting program there. (She hadn’t yet gotten there when we met in Colorado.) I think the actual title of the workshop was something like Seven Techniques for Great Melodies, but I’m not sure I counted accurately when I was taking notes. Before the actual techniques, she made a couple of suggestions, such as not writing all your songs in the same key, because that causes your melodies to center around the same notes (because of your vocal range), which are in the same part of the scale and thus play the same musical function. She also, as I mentioned in my post on choruses, talked about the importance of a singable chorus (which is more generally true of a melody – someone else should be able to sing it, without chords or words, without it being too simple. And there should be a contrast between the verse and the chorus in some combination of range, rhythm, and phrasing. She also mentioned the (very Berklee-like) “rule of two,” that suggests that anything (melodically) interesting you should repeat once (i.e. sing twice) – either identically or similarly. Repetition is good (but not too much of it). Oh, and one of my favorite comments from Bonnie (the other one being “It’s not rocket surgery!”) during the session was the command to “use your inner critic – that’s what it’s there for!” She was reacting to the oft-cited song-school type admonition that we need to turn off our inner critics. OK, so onto the techniques. One option is to slow down the melodic rhythm in the chorus – a long, held, note is key. (Ron Browning talked about the need for “diva notes.”) And make sure that the note that’s held is on a word that matters, because it will be emphasized by the melody. Second, start the chorus on a different note than the verse, usually higher. The chorus is the emotional center of the song, and higher notes make your voice sound more emotional. Similarly (third) make use of a melodic leap – an interval of a 4th or more within the melody you’re trying to make interesting. Even up to an octave. Remember, though, that leaps are an element of prosody (the fit between the melody and the lyrics) so leap in the direction you’re singing about. You wouldn’t want to leap melodically downwards while singing about how you’re planning to soar high. She also talked about the types of feel of the notes that you might jump to (the types of intervals) and how different notes, depending on their relationship in the scale, lead the listener to expect you to then resolve to a different note. There’s too much detail to go into in one blog post, but people familiar with general music theory (or who followed my blog posts about the Pat Pattison songwriting class) will have the basic idea. Two small points: non-chord notes create tension and movement; and half-step relationships are leading tones. Other things to make melody interesting: melisma (singing one syllable through multiple notes), sustained melodic motion in one direction (can be a pattern rather than direct movement). Patterns make melody memorable (so you can go up two notes and down one, then up two notes down one again – you’re moving up, but in a patterned way). Finally, repetition of melodic rhythm (but again, not too much – you don’t want every line to be the same) can be memorable. Melodic rhythm, to the best of my ability to explain, is the way a set of notes are played – long or short, for instance. So you can have the same notes with quite different melodic rhythm, and it feels different. There’s much more – it’s amazing how much she managed to cover in one short session – but those are the basics. Although – as I thought in the Berklee/Coursera songwriting class I took – I’m sure that most of these things are generally internalized rather than consciously invoked. But a few of them are likely to be useful from the start – I’m going to try to write some songs in keys I’ve shied away from, for instance. And others are good reminders, especially about ways to make choruses more chorus-y (or at least more use-friendly), something I’m going to be paying attention to in upcoming songwriting.