The well-placed tonic note, coupled with a climactic moment, helps create beautiful melodies.
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Every once in a while I get comments or emails from people who deride the value of song analysis. Their argument goes something like this: if the best songwriters out there do what they do instinctively, that automatically negates the value of analysis. Their songs just work – end of story. Right?
It’s a silly argument. It’s like saying that the best football players just have an inborn talent – end of story – and we have nothing to learn from them. But I guarantee you that there are up-and-coming football players everywhere who are studying every single move those talented pros make.
There are many songwriters who have an innate ability to create music without being able to describe in any sort of theoretical way why the song works. They just know.
That’s an ability that I applaud. Many of the best songwriters write instinctively, but that does not mean that their music is devoid of some basic guidelines of musical composition. In fact, most of the most beautiful tunes in the world follow standard musical principles. It’s just that they feel those principles often without even being aware of them.
So the principles are still in place, and we can better ourselves by uncovering how the best melodies work.
A perfect example is Paul McCartney’s “Hey Jude.” It’s a wonderful melody; not just easy to remember, but enticing and beautiful as well. What makes that melody work so well?
Like “Hey Jude”, The best song melodies are ones that:
- are careful about how they use the tonic note; and
- contain a climactic moment.
The tonic note is the one that represents the key your song is in. For songs in F major, for example, F is the tonic note. The tonic note feels like “home.”
There is often a sense of rest that comes from hearing the tonic note in a melody. But that depends on where you find it. Tonic notes will often happen as passing notes between two other structurally important notes, and in those cases the impact of the tonic is negligible. But when it occurs at the end of a phrase, especially if it occurs on beat 1 of a bar, the tonic note represents a strong goal, a musical target of great significance.
“Hey Jude” demonstrates this concept perfectly. The tonic note occurs sparingly in the verse. It’s first occurrence is on the word “song” (“take a sad song…”). It occurs again as part of a passing line down through the tonic chord (“let her into your heart”). Both of those incidents of tonic see the note in a “weak” position – exactly as it should be while in the middle of a verse.
The tonic note happens twice more: just before the end on the word “then” (“then you can start”). Because this tonic is on beat 3, it’s still in a relatively weak position. It’s not until the very last note of the melody that we finally get a tonic note in a strong position: beat 1.
Now what about the issue of the melody’s climactic note? This is a principle of melody-writing that has been in place for literally hundreds of years: Climactic moments in melodies are best placed near the end (not usually at the end). In a melody like this one, we hear the melody constantly reaching higher and higher. The climactic moment happens in the second-last line of the verse (…LET her into your heart…), after which melodic energy dissipates and the melody ends back in the original octave.
As you work on your own songs, if you feel that your melody is lacking something and just comes across as boring, ask yourself these two questions:
- How do I use the tonic note? (How often do I use it? Do I save placing it in a strong position until I reach a structurally important place, like the end?)
- Does my melody have a climactic moment?
As you can see with “Hey Jude”, the climactic moment doesn’t need to be earth-shattering – just there. You hear the importance of the climactic moment in Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water“, and also in the verse and chorus of a song like Bruno Mars’ “Lazy Song“.
In “Skyfall” (Adele and Paul Epworth), you hear the importance of the tonic note as offering a sense of rest and repose throughout the verse. It’s role reverses in the chorus, where we hear the melody reaching higher and higher until the upper tonic serves as its climactic moment, down from which the melody rests.
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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter.
Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, which includes “Chord Progression Formulas”, a great way to create dozens of progressions in any key.
Hi Gary: interesting concept regarding the placement of tonic note.
Another extremely important concept to good melody writing is intervals – that is, the balance and proportion between step-wise melodic motion, and small, medium and large leaps.
To take this a step further, good melodies don’t just focus on the intervals between adjacent notes, but also the interval of the first note in a phrase and the last note of the same phrase – or an interval between the note of the beginning of a phrase and the beginning of the next phrase, or even the interval between a high point in one melody to the high point in a separate melody (let’s say a verse melody’s high point to a chorus melody’s high point) – or whatever other combinations that could happen.
Hello David:
Thank very much for writing. I certainly agree with your first point, and it’s something I’ve written about in other blog posts, here for example.
I really like your second point as well, about comparing beginnings and endings of phrases, as well as comparing high points between adjacent phrases. This is the kind of structure integrity that listeners won’t immediately notice, but is important nonetheless. I’ve mentioned in the past on this blog that songs usually have more than one climactic moment; there is one that often happens in a verse, and then in a chorus. But a chorus climactic moment is usually more “important” (often higher) than the verse one. In that sense, you should be able to trace a mostly upward line that starts with a verse, moves higher with the verse’s climactic moment, then higher still in the chorus’s climactic moment, and possibly even higher in the bridge.
Many thanks for your good thoughts on this.
-Gary
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