How to Write a Melody?

For a person who is learning music by himself, all of this free education makes my heart melt with gratitude, thanks a bunch.

I just learned more about music in these 33 min than I have in the previous 56 years !

So many people in this comment section seem to be regarding this as a formula that removes all creative process from writing a melody... maybe because they weren't paying attention, lack critical thinking, or just knee-jerk commented and left the video. She didn't outline ANY hard rules at all. Not once did she say "you MUST follow this or your melody will suck". And even so, the process she gave basically boils down to this: First you figure out where you want your melody to go. Then you figure out how to take your melody there. Which isn't even remotely a formula, it's just a way of writing melodies that, face it, makes perfect sense.

I write my own melodies on my guitar and on my piano and I don't know anything about reading/writing music or these formulas. I only go by what sounds/feels good. This video has shown me what I was doing. I never thought about these concepts of tension and release before. Now I can understand better what it is that I was doing without even knowing it. I think its important to know the theories behind things because I have been stumbling across melodies for years. Now I think I might be able to compose something quicker especially when I get stuck In repetition and don't know where to go from there. I constantly find myself stuck with unfinished melodies. I believe this will help. Thanks for posting the video.

As a conductor, performer, writer of music, music educator, and theorist, I found this video to be an excellent guide for folks building melodies, even as a model that can refresh the professional. Sometimes it's excellent to review things like this to learn about different approaches to the creative process. I found the class melody to be quite interesting as well as innovative as far as their use of leaps in the consequent phrase followed with appropriate stepwise motion in the opposite direction. An overall excellent video tutorial.

Look at humans. They spread knowledge around voluntarily. Teachers want to teach.

I've had to wait over seventy years to know this? Should be part of any school curriculum!!! (Thank you!)

I am retired now, but I have just started to read music and play the piano. I found your video informative. I never understood Scale Degrees ;however, this has given me a much better understanding. Thank you very much. Terry Wright.

Look at all these clueless people in the comment section, thinking that music should be written "from the heart" without "following rules". How much music have you written, played, or studied? Music theory is a FRAMEWORK; once you have internalized it, you can intuitively pick the melodies and progressions that best suit the story you're trying to convey—establishing tonality first for your emotional base, substituting a minor chord for a major or vice versa, shifting to an out-of-key chromatic chord to emphasize a certain emotion, adding tensions to... well, add tension and color, understanding the guide tones of your harmonic progression and how to employ them to create tension and release, understanding which notes in a scale lead to which, and a metric shitton more that I could just keep on going on and on about. You can even intentionally disregard it, at times. There are certain things that you don't do in music because they just sound like shit to the human ear and have been established as such, and once you understand what these are, you keep going. But you NEED theory. Pretty much EVERY famous classical composer understood theory and manipulated it to their own tastes.

Music is not the only thing I start with a tonic 😉🍸

i’ve just found this video and it’s literally everything i’ve been looking for, literally!!!, thank you for creating this video

My parents had to squeeze out extra money for me to take piano lessons back in the 60's. I started when I was 10 years old. By the time I got to lessons like this, I was paying TUITION in a 4 year University of which cost us Thousands of dollars. I can't believe my eyes when I see complained posted in some tutorials. Then I understand that anyone who has any complains are not here to learn music from the "C" scale on up. They want to be Jerry Lee Lewis in 2 weeks. lol However, with ALL the music I have been trained for, I still come back to lessons like this. I am a 65 year old Female Musician of over 50 years and here I am still learning and refreshing my knowledge. Thank You Very Much.

The "bad" example of too many leaps actually sounds quite good in a creepy, horror context. Awesome video however, thank you for the shared knowledge.

Ok I figured out who this teacher is: Jamie Henke at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. iTunes U only has this one video of practical music theory, though. The rest of the podcasts are audio-only and from a non-music majors' introductory class. Gonna keep looking though. I played guitar by ear for a good thirty-five years before I started studying music theory beyond the abbreviated piano lessons I took when I was little and hated hated hated even though I never stopped loving music itself. This is one of the clearest explanations of melody writing I have yet found, and I want to take the all-video class that Henke must have made if there is any justice in this world. Yes, one can write music by ear without a lot of music training--I did it for a long time--but it is really difficult to do efficiently even with a very good ear and obsessive listening habits. So I'm coming to this a bit late, but learning the rules that I was breaking left and right in the old days is in fact challenging and is making me a much better musician. This video is a gem.

Jamie? You are a gifted teacher, speaker and drawer. We at YouTube are blessed as your students are. Not one stumble, ummm, him or haa

Thanks for taking the time to do this lesson. I'm a guitarist who has just started venturing into the world of writing melodies (or putting proper melodies to paper) and this has been a great start. It has also helped me with my guitar theory, as your description of the intervallic relationships suddenly turned on a light bulb regarding deciding what key you are using/ writing in.

Excellent teaching, so clear and helpful. Thank you for this!

A lesson that makes perfect sense, thank you for adding some sanity to the subject...

What a wonderful teacher. I learned so much from this. Her explanations are so clear and helpful.

Wanted to Thank you for all, and everything you put in to this lesson. I would take classes from you anytime. So well done and broken down in small chunks. I played it twice. Marked it as a favorite. Hope to see more of what you have to offer. Thank you...