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Try this little experiment. Take your latest song and sing the first few notes of the verse. Then immediately sing the first few notes of your chorus. And if your song has a bridge, sing that as well. If you find that your melodies all seem to sit in the same basic vocal range, you’ve probably got problems. It means that you’re likely giving the listener those same notes over and over again, and it can quickly create a kind of tonal boredom that chases audiences away.
As we all know, chorus melodies tend to sit higher in pitch than verse melodies. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to do that when you’re creating a melody from scratch. But I’d recommend giving Stone Sour’s chart-topping hit, “Say You’ll Haunt Me,” a good listen, because it shows very clearly how this can be done, by taking one melody and moving its basic ideas to a new tonal plane.
The song is in B minor. Rather of thinking so much about the actual notes used in the verse and chorus melodies, think instead about the basic range that the melodies sit in, and the kind of musical “gestures” they are comprised of.
The verse melody features downward moving gestures from the lower 3rd of the key: from D down to B, with occasional dips below. Then there’s a little pre-chorus-type of scale passage that helps the verse connect to the chorus by building energy.
The chorus melody actually resembles the verse melody, still presenting downward moving gestures, except that it dwells on a higher part of the scale: from F# down to D.
In a sense, they haven’t really given us much of a different melody, just situated the chorus melody on a higher pitch plateau. And a lot of the melodic motifs are the same. But the whole thing works so well because once the chorus starts, the melody is now sitting at a higher pitch level, and generating melodic energy because of it.
So when we talk about chorus melodies needing to be higher than verse melodies, it’s really simpler than you might think. You might even want to try taking your verse melody and simply shifting it up to a higher range within your chosen key, and call it your chorus. It generates energy and will pull your audience in.
And because it’s sitting at a different level, you’ve been able to make it sound fresh and new, when in fact much of what you’re hearing in the chorus is actually similar (or maybe even identical) to what you’ve given in the verse.
The benefit of duplicating a melody at a higher level is that the listener will hear similar rhythms and melodic shapes, just enough to make a musical connection that will act like glue that pulls everything together.
Give it a try. One other piece of advice: the simpler your verse melody is, the better this replication method works.
Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website.
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