Writing One Song Melody That Works With Several Chord Progressions

Melodic repetition is a good thing, but works best if the chords are different with each repetition. Here’s an idea for achieving that.

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Recently I wrote about creating chords and melodies in the dorian mode. It got me thinking about another great melody-writing idea, which is to use the pentatonic scale to create melodies. There is a good reason for using the pentatonic scale, and it has to do with an important aspect of songwriting: repetition of a musical idea. The pentatonic scale can make that easy.

Repetition is something that happens in most songs, especially in the chorus. It’s common to hear a short melodic snippet that gets repeated over and over again. So it’s interesting to note that some of our favourite melodies are actually just one or two bars of material that get repeated constantly. And even if they aren’t repeated note-for-note, the basic shape is presented to us many times. Good recent examples of this are “Somebody that I Used To Know” (Gotye), “Titanium” (David Guetta/Sia), and a great tune by Freelance Whales, “Dig Into Waves“, from their album “Diluvia.”

It’s “Dig Into Waves” that I want to talk about here, because the topic of this post is how to write a short melodic idea that has the possibility of being repeated with different chord harmonizations. “Dig Into Waves” achieves this by creating a melody using notes from the pentatonic scale.

A pentatonic scale is one which uses only 5 notes within an octave. Technically they can be any 5 notes, but in our common usage of the term pentatonic, we usually mean notes 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 from a major scale.

The melodies for “Dig Into Waves” all use notes from the C pentatonic scale: C D E G A. Short melodic ideas are created and then repeated. Using the pentatonic scale makes this easy, and here’s why.

The 4th and 7th notes of the major scales are the two that don’t belong in the traditional pentatonic scale. When you take out those two notes, most melodic ideas can be harmonized satisfactorily with almost any typical chord progression that pop music uses.

So if you create a melody that uses, let’s say, a melodic shape like this: C-D-E-G, and repeats it over and over again, that melodic shape can be harmonized quite easily with any of the following chords: C, Am, Fmaj7, Fmaj9, Dm7, Dm9, etc.

And that’s a good thing, because repeating a melodic idea doesn’t feel boring if the chords are changing underneath it.

As you work on your song melodies, consider using the pentatonic scale as a way of making sure that your melody and chords almost always work together without glitches.

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Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website.
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