A Little Look At Little Melodies
There is something amazing,
that you might not have never noticed about melodies.
Imagine a group of people singing Happy Birthday,
and now a world away... imagine a young pianist learning her first notes by playing Happy Birthday.
And now, get this,
they are both playing the Happy Birthday melody.
In one instance voice is used,
in the other, a piano.
See a melody like Happy Birthday was not composed on a classical musical instrument,
the lyrics were not added after the melody was made, the melody was made with the lyrics.
Singing turns us into musical instruments,
just imagine an opera singer or a church choir.
A melody can be made out of words,
or a piano, or a violin, on an electric guitar, or a mix thereof.
Musical rules are mean to be broken,
the best artists pretty much aim for it.
But that is something you do on your own in your musical career,
but to get there you must first adopt a few rules as your favorite, as your initial style.
So let us make a simple melody, in modern times a program like lmms can show you which keys belong to what scale,
and then even automatically convert your notes to chords, so knowledge of music theory in not a requirement, at all.
Rather than showing you how to create things in sequence,
which would be chords bass and melody, a task best left for a second tutorial.
I will show you how things sound when they stand alone,
how vulnerable things are until they come together.
I will do this as proof, that if you have ever made a melody before,
by drumming, or whistling, or creating your own words to a little song, you made a melody.
It was a perfect and beautiful melody,
but it was missing, the chords, and bass.
If you had all those things aligned together,
then you would have a beautiful work of art on your hands.
Before we begin, I will say that a song needs a soul,
lots of background sounds, that click together, but you can't quite hear where something starts and something ends.
It is just the center, or the background of a song,
these are called chords, multiple keys pressed together.
A chord is simply a complex and good sounding sound,
made by pressing few piano keys together, at the same time.
From time to time a chord can use some bass,
bass are the deep sounding notes, they aren't always audible, very often you can't hear them at all on cheap speakers.
Bass fills in whatever chords missed,
Together bass and chords, create a universe of sound.
Your melody must be born of that universe,
related to chords, but dominating the sound of the world, as if the melody was the sun.
Your melody, must not leave that world without great preparations,
if you take just the melody part, it won't last on its own.
Now let me show you what a melody outside of her universe sounds like,
and let me warn you, that it won't sound perfect,
There are connectors here that fit the chords,
but there are no chords, yet.
*MELODY PLAYS*
Now, before we get to the chords, the most complex sounding part of this melody,
let me show you what the bass sounds like.
The bass is the proto-chord, it was once the original set of notes that sparked the melody,
but now, it lives beneath everything, it serves as the ground for both chords and melody.
Here, is what it sounds like, and again I must warn you that it is very dark,
it is very, scary (and hard to hear on cheap speakers).
*BASS PLAYS*
And here we arrive at the chords, the oxygen, the lovely cumulonimbus,
but also the wind, and maybe the occasional gust as well.
Note how complete the chords are, there is nothing missing here,
the chords do not call for bass, nor are they in any way hurting when the melody is not playing.
That means you can have a section of just the cords,
perhaps with the bass to be consistent, but you do not need the melody to be playing.
This gives you the ability to let the listener rest from the for a bit,
before you put it back in, and if you dare, and I hope you never do, you could have a stretch with just the bass, what audacity!
*CHORDS PLAY*
Now time has come to assemble our song,
let us see what bass and chords sound like without the melody.
*BASS AND CHORDS PLAY*
Whoo Wee, well that certainly doesn't sound like all hat no cows,
it sounds nice like a moonlit search for wisdom.
And now finally, let us add the high pitched melody,
let us place it in the world that it belongs in.
*BASS CHORDS AND MELODY PLAYS*
And here is the song we created in this evenings journey,
I hope you like it.