Creating Chords and Melodies At the Same Time

Here’s a procedure for writing songs by creating the melodies and chords simultaneously.

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Successful chord progressions usually follow a predictable formula, but melodies need to be unique. Therefore, you could argue that there is a certain logic to making sure your chords work before moving on to the writing of a melody.

But that’s not necessarily the case. You can work out the important parts of a song melody even if you’re not sure what chords you’re ultimately going to use to accompany it. What follows is a set of steps that show you how you might create a melody, along with chords, at more or less the same time.

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The First Step

Let’s say you’ve created a fragment of melody that sounds like this: [PLAY] (A-Bb-A-G-F-A-F-D)

As you can tell, it doesn’t take a lot of musical knowledge to come up with a simple fragment like that. It sounds nondescript enough that it might be the sort of thing that any number songwriters might randomly create.

Now, instead of continuing on with adding to your melody, switch to creating a chord progression that would accompany it well. How do you do that?

It’s best to get a sense of key first. The melody starts on A, but when you listen to the entire fragment, you get a strong sense of D minor, since it ends with 3 notes from the D minor triad played from high to low: A-F-D.

So I’m going to try working out a progression that makes D minor sound like a tonal focus. I’m also (arbitrarily) going to decide to change chords every 2 beats. So that gives the following choices:

1. Dm  F  Am  Dm [LISTEN]
2. F  Am  Gm9  Dm [LISTEN]
3. Dm  Bbmaj7  Am  Dm [LISTEN]
4. Dm  Gm9  F  Dm [LISTEN]

Now this is an important point: none of those progressions could be considered unique. They’ve probably been used hundreds of times in other songs. It’s the combination with the melodic fragment that makes it all sound unique: there is probably no song in the past that has put those melody notes together in quite that way.

So instead of working out a chord progression and then seeing what melody I might be able to come up with, I created a short melodic fragment that “made musical sense”, and then experimented with chords that might act as a backing accompaniment.

The Next Step

Now I want to expand on my melodic fragment. In a sense, I want to create an “answering figure” that works well with the first one. I’ve come up with something like this: [PLAY] (F-C-A-G-F-G). What I like about it is that it sounds like it’s shifting focus from D minor to F major, and that’s a nice contrast to the first phrase ending in minor.

Just as before, I now come up with possibilities for chords that might work well. After some experimenting, I’ve decided on F  Bbmaj7  Csus4  C. [LISTEN].

So far, assuming I take the first chord progression above (Dm  F  Am  Dm) as my opening progression, the whole tune so far sounds like this: [PLAY].

If this were a verse melody, you could do a simple repeat of those bars of music, and you’d have a considerable chunk of verse completed.

If you compose this way, the best answer to “how do you start your songs… chords first or melody first?” would be “both.” You started with a short fragment of melody that you liked, you then created chords that made that one fragment sound nice, and then you moved on to creating an answering melody, and then the chords to make that fragment work.

Adding Lyrics

You can compose all song elements at the same time by adding lyrics at this time. Sometimes the music will start to give you a sense of topic, or even at least of a category. Now is the time to start working those details out.

And you’ll find that you can continue in this way, where melodic ideas give rise to chord options, and the combined sound gives you a feeling of what the song is about. And you can continue on with the chorus, and optional sections such as pre-chorus and/or bridge. You’ll find that as you continue to write, new ideas are easier to create.

So the next time you think about whether you should be starting your song with chords first or melody first, try the option described above: work them both out at more-or-less the same time.

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow on Twitter

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