100 Par t 3:Tunes
Create Variations
You can create additional melodies in your music by varying your motif slightly,
such as changing its rhythm or moving its tones up or down in the scale. You
should retain enough of the main motif so that listeners can tell where it came
from, but add enough variation so that you create a new—but related—melody.
How can you vary a motif? You can reverse the rhythm, simplify the rhythm,
or make the rhythm more complex. You can reverse the notes (so that the
melody goes up instead of down, or down instead of up), or change the middle
notes in the motif, or shift the notes up or down a third or a fifth. In short, just
about any variation is fair game, as long as the initial motif isn’t completely
obliterated by the variations.
Take a look at the following example, in which the simple four-note motif from
the previous example is run through a number of variations—both rhythmically
and melodically.A simple four-note motif, repeated throughout a longer melody.The same four-note motif, with variations.Remember that you want your variations to relate to the original motif. If you
get too far away from the original motif, it isn’t a variation anymore—it’s a
brand-new melody!Write in Four—or Eight, or Sixteen
When you’re composing a melody, it helps to keep the lengths of the parts of
the melody (the motifs and phrases) relatively simple. In most Western music—
popular music, especially—most melodies can be divisible by two. That means
you probably want your melody to be two, four, eight, or sixteen measures long.
You probably don’t want to write a three- or five-measure melody; writing to an
odd number of measures may feel wrong to some of your listeners.
When you write a longer melody, you can divide it up into two- or four- or
eight-measure chunks. For example, the following sixteen-measure melody is
constructed from four four-measure parts.One notable exception to
this 2/4/8/16 rule is the
genre we call the blues.
Most blues music uses a
twelve-measure form, with
twelve-measure melodies.
(To learn more about the
blues form, see Chapter
11.)Note