As you know, an earworm melody is one which gets stuck in the mind of the listener which, even with great effort, won’t easily relinquish its grip. When we’re experiencing a melody as an earworm, we don’t usually describe it as a pleasant experience. There’s an interesting recent study on earworm melodies, “Dissecting an Earworm: […]
If you were to ask for a generic definition from the average layperson for a melody, they’d probably come up with something like: “A series of notes that move up and down.” You’d then remind them that backing vocals also comprise a series of notes that move up and down, and that’s when we start […]
Do you get stuck at the melody-writing stage of songwriting? Do you find chords easy, but melody hard? What can you do to come up with melodies that are enticing and attractive to an audience? Melodies and lyrics are the trickiest parts of songwriting for most songwriters, because those are likely the parts of songs […]
There is an important aspect of a good song melody that the average listener is not much aware of: shape. Good melodies need an engaging shape — something that is memorable, enticing, and (at least relatively) easy to sing. In fact, song melodies need even more. They need to partner with a lyric so that […]
Melodies and lyrics are the two components of any song that must be unique. Song titles, chord progressions, rhythms… they can all have been heard before, and probably have. But melodies, if they share more than a few notes in a row with some other song, are said to have been plagiarized. Because every melody needs to […]
There’s a good reason why repetition factors into most good songs: it ensures that a song is easy to remember, which means that people are more inclined to sing them. But there are other qualities that make melodies easy to sing. And as a songwriter, you should consider the singability of your melodies to be […]
