HOW TO WRITE A MELODY 1: Period - An Easy Formula for Better Melodies and Themes with Balance
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- Just two patterns form the backbone of every great melody ever written.
📚 Many of the ideas in this video come from my favorite music book of all time: Analyzing Classical Form by William Caplin geni.us/lxrqx
In this video we explore The Period, the first (and more commonly known) of this pair of forms that composer shave been using to write music for centuries.
I use these patterns every day in my work as a film composer, and hopefully once you get the basic forms under your belt you'll find all the benefits of using them too.
We'll take a look at what the Period form is, how it's structured, and listen to an example by analyzing 'Cyrus the Scholar' from Yasunori Nishikawa's score to Octopath Traveler.At the end we'll look at how easy it is to take the form and use it to create a new melody!
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Title music used in this video:
Candy Jar Main Titles - / candy-jar-main-titles
During the writing part of this video I sped up a lot of the moments where I was improvising, looking for ideas, and working out parts that I thought would be a bit boring to watch. I realize that some people may want to watch that, so if you're one of those people please let me know so I can be sure I'm producing the kind of content people want to see!
I wanted to learn from your video, you have good ideas but I don't understand English very well. And I wanted so much to understand to end the procedure of all the instruments of the Orchestra in my music. Now that's a big annoyance for me, frustration for wanting to improve the sound and it takes me so long and I should be ready by now.
Don’t skip man… if it’s not interesting for us, we can always do it by ourselves
Sometimes people like to see people go through the ups and downs. Throwing ideas away and getting new ones etc. It can be reassuring to know people don’t just pluck things from thin air.
Personally I would like to see more on generating those base ideas. I like the tip of reiterating existing phrases from other songs. Any more like that?
Yes, this. I'd love to see and hear how your brain works when coming up with a new melody. But great video!! :)
I'm learning right now how to be a composer for films and videogames (or well composer in general) and this kind of videos are really really helpful. It changed the way i hear and analyze the music i like. Thank you for making this kind of content, it really helps a lot. Also another theme that has a period form (in its basic form) is ENSEI by Yuki Kajiura :]
So are you trying right now to get this job or did you recently get it?
I’m asking because I’ve really been wanting to get into this myself recently. Any ideas, tips, anything how to get started? Even how to get connected to people who might need music for shows/movies/games
I immediately thought of the Shire theme from Fellowship of the Ring. Gorgeous, textbook period form.
This is one of the most important, useful and well made tutorials on melody. You're a great teacher.
Got a serious "Concerning Hobbits" vibe from your example composition somehow! Nice video, thanks! Very interesting content, you got one more subscriber here :)
I felt the same!
Exactly!
Service post for "Concerning Hobbits" friends: ruclips.net/video/ILzI_j5E-Yo/видео.html
Incredibly nice version performed by lute and baroque flute.
I came to the comments to say the same thing! felt like I was stepping out of the front door at bag end into the summer sun :D
I've always struggled with form. The textbooks' definition of period and sentence always seemed rigid and unintuitive to me. Your explanation and demonstration in this video is superbly helpful. Thanks for sharing
Hymns are a great way to study form, many use this form and others use other forms, but the whole meat and potatoes of a good hymn is melody, so it might be worth your time to study them!
Discovered this channel just a few days ago. Instant favourite.
Really admire your knowlegde and grateful for your generosity to share. But overall, and most importantly, you seem such a genuine and nice guy !!!
Thank you.
Thank you, this was one of the most interesting videos I have watched for a while. I’m looking forward to part 2.
Really helpful stuff! I think this is the best tutorial i've seen on youtube on melody construction.
Man, I just found your channel a few days ago and I'm digging everything. You're teaching skills are amazing, you make it all so clear. This channel is music theory gold mine. I'm baffled by the quality of your content, that's all I can say. And of course, thank you a lot, wish you the best.
It's amazing how simple the concept is, but that example piece still sounded beautiful!
This is amazing, as someone trying to learn composition as a hobby this is gold. You asked if we would like to see the noodling and I for one would love to in order to understand your creative progress even more. Thank you though, this helped enormously.
This is amazingly helpful information, and you explained it so clearly! Thanks!
This is so clearly explained and demonstrated! Definitely going to check out all the noodling now.
Thank you, Ryan. Your videos are so awesome.🎶🎵🎶💕
you explained this so well, thank you so much !
Awesome explanation. I immediately learned something I can use.
Your channel is pure gold for amatures. For a long time i was thinking i hate melodies. Every time i started with them, everything goes off the rail. I never thought it was suspicious, coz i like and make mostly ambient, and melodies is usually not the main focus of the genre, but ater such simple and intuitive explanation of the form, i realized i just don't know how to write melodies, and this is the banal reason why i always started with harmonies and sound design before. After your videos i managed to make three thematic (zelda, adventure movie and dark comedy) melodies in two days, give them to my family with video references and we all came to agreement all three fits with the intended theme... It was life changing. Thank you so much!
good work man, making guidelines for things like this are really helpful
Fascinating! It instantly creates feelings and pictures in your mind. Personally I'm not yet satisfied with the ending of the contrasting part, because there is room for an unexpected little twist.
Thank you, Ryan! 🌺
Much appreciated and great video Ryan, you're the best
I've recently been writing music for my own film sequences in my free time. I found your videos through an article by George Strezov on the internet
caught on. I just want to get on this
Thank you very much for your effort in creating it
thank you for these videos. Your explanations are very valuable to me and also understandable, which many people say
other author can not necessarily claim.
So thanks again. i will me your other
Be sure to check out the posts to get ahead.
So basically the pop music today is all Period form, now I understand why classical musician Bash the Pop music XD, thanks for this awesome video. I will check more of your videos, very inside full.
when u said octopath traveler my jaw dropped and i got so excited because this is the music i love trying to emulate
Excellent video Ryan, one of the best I have seen on describing the period form
Thanks!
Very very very very good!
Thank you very much!
The second movement of the Haydn trumpet concerto uses the period form and is the piece that my teacher got me to analyse when learning about the period form.
Thanks so much, really helpful.
Very helpful writing process. I will explore this for my next piece.
You’re a genius! Period ! Please keep posting
Very good thanks for sharing! I’m learning a lot out of your videos
Very informative. Thanks Ryan!
Thank you very much, your lessons are valuable.
Sooooo Helpful! Thank You！！
Brilliant!
thanks for your efforts ❤❤🌹
Thank you for this valuable lesson.
you saved me. This answered my research about 5 years. Thank you
Beautiful like your videos and teachings you are making the world a better place. Subscribed😊
Thanks for thiss...Great Job.. I am currently working on some period form composition and needed help . Thankful I got it here .. Your'e awesome
Glad it was helpful!
Ryan!
You are an excellent teacher and amazing musician. Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing.
Doug G in LV
Amazing video, thank you! Best wishes from Argentina!
I immediately thought of The Bard's Song by Blind Guardian when trying to think of a tune that used this melodic pattern.
A textbook example of period form in Classical music would be the first eight bars of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K.331 (first half of the variation theme), since you used the first movement of Beethoven's first piano sonata as an example of sentence form. The siciliana rhythm of the Cyrus the Scholar theme also made me think of the first movement of the Mozart K.331 sonata.
Fantastic. Keep up the great videos!
Thanks, will do!
Thanks so much for this video. It all just clicked whilst watching this.
I would love to see you break down metal or progressive music to see how they use or deviate from classical composition
That's incredibly interesting, thank you
Wow. This guy is a genius. Thank you!
Great video! I'd imagine in the context of writing loops for game music, there's a higher prevalence of ending with a half cadence so it brings us back around to the start.
Just found your amazing videos, and enjoy them really much! An example of this form is the Harry Potter main theme. I believe it actually just consists of a bunch of period forms one after another.
True, now that i think of it it is a very good example
Dvorak 9 2nd movement nails this.
Great job sir
I like the period form, too. Still sentence form is the best. 💕🎶🎵
I'm happy about found this channel.
Thanks, me too!
thank you
Great video man.
Appreciate it!
Darn I need this in the piano roll
Brilliant and lucid. Period appears in every music theory syllabus. It's familiar. You asked for examples. How about all music, just about? Yet, as omnipresent as the structure is, your guidance distills it clearly. And it's motivating! It's easy to find my own themes that I like and see the correlation with your breakdown. I guess I did it instinctively. My themes that dissatisfied me? Those broke somewhere in your skeleton. So now I'm motivated to follow the plan, not instinctively, but considered. I want to time how long it takes me to come up with 10 decent themes.
Welp, obviously I hadn’t seen the sentence video yet. Not everything is a period. Musical sentence is a structure I never encountered in my musical training. That is an illuminating follow up to this video.
ha you beat me to it, and yea learning about the sentence form and how "actually no the period doesn't really explain everything" was huge for me
Ryan. I had so much fun composing today. In 60 minutes, I composed 6 themes. 5 were periods, one was a sentence. All of them were certainly decent enough to turn into something, with work.
Yesterday I composed a sonatina based on your analysis of classical developments. That took me about 45 minutes. The point about timings is simply this, that if I’m working to a formal plan, something comes out of me.
Your keys unlock doors. I’m grateful for your channel. Thank you!
Maestro: Thank you for your time and musical analysis it is beginning to make more sense; I have a question can you help me? The question is can you suggest a few pieces of music that follows the Period Phrase for Mozart and the other Classical Artists? Again, thank you much, please, please do not stop. R
Good vid. Sounds like a sea shanty.
In the key of CMaj, in bar 4 you have a GMaj, on tool that i love to use is replace GMaj with Em but even better and Em7, and you can reposition the notes on Em7 if you want.
Lets face it: Em7 and GMaj+6 are the same thing but positioned differently.
At yhe end of the day: the inly difference between a magir chord and its relative minor chord is a single note one whole note away.
I've been loving your work, Ryan!
I've what I'm afraid might be an odd question, about the rhythmic structure of the chords for Cyrus the Scholar: where can this sort of structure be traced to, historically? Obviously, this would be to somewhere much later than the polyphonic texture of Bach's chorales, but then to somewhere a little earlier (or so I presume) than the invention of the stride piano technique, which is the best I can associate with the structure. Hopefully you'll see what I mean, for it bedevils me in own composition to arrange chords in a more dynamic manner of accompaniment than the sort of languidness which seems entwined with the rule-abiding of polyphony.
Now,after you get a grip on this,do an analysis of phrase structure in Gabriel Faure's "Dolly Suite". There's all kinds of ways to play with expectation and to add variety to the "4-square" feeling of 2/4/8 regularity in phrase structure. The goal should be lyrical without "sing-songiness". The phrases should be enhanced by expressive harmony,not the predictable same old same old.. especially at the cadences. Any single pitch in the melody can be reharmonized in dozens of different ways - you don't always have to choose the obvious one.
im more so interested in how you came up with your idea of the other piece, can you do more of those im intrigued as to how to achieve the same feeling of another song without copying the song can you do more of those ?
Interesting, while watching your videos about the 8 Orchestral textures I was constantly identifying with what you said, while in this video, and the one on sentence form, I understood what you were saying but felt it was far from the way I write melodies. I guess there's something I'm missing. Also, I didn't find the contrusting material in most of the examples quite contrusting. I guess it's just the way I perceive that concept, but when I think of contrust I expect something very different, not an organic continuation using the same melodic ideas.
thanks
Can you do a video on cadences please.
🔥
awesome explained! How would you make a change in Key and melody? For Example, you Start here in a C major and want to go to a minor scale in the following part. What can you use to make a smooth transition?
Ryan what comes after the period or sentence form...tell us how to finish a small sonata form for example...thank you.❤
Such a great lesson. Thank you! What notation program are you using?
Back when I made this I was using Sibelius but I have since switched to Dorico
Hello Ryan, thank you for this video ! Would you happen to know books which analyze melodies, deconstructing them and explaining their structure and role of each notes / patterns, as you did in the first part of the video ? Thank you !
The video is based on Analyzing Classical Form, that's probably the best I know of for this kind of stuff
Hi Ryan thanks for the videos,Is there any course for newbies for strong foundation?Cheers
Do you have a video for chords progression tutorial?
Thank you. This is really nicely explained, but I struggle recognizing this period form unless it sounds pretty plain vanilla. I really like "Kyoto" by Phoebe Bridgers, and I keep wondering if the first 20-ish seconds after the short intro are actually the same thing that you are explaining here. It sounds like this short main theme that ascends and descends, and there's this short, descending contrast, followed by the third part that sounds a bit like the first, but it seems to resolve things. Is it an 8-bar period form though? I've always been somewhat rhythmically challenged, and never quite know where exactly to count from :). I am also having trouble discerning if it's a 3-part or a 4-part form with a very short cadence, but I love the instant catchiness of the melody, which got me curious.
what software r u using. very cool stuff!!!!
Hi thanks for your videos.please say more of relation between melody and harmony
In this video you said the first bar is usually harmonically stable
But what if the melody notes of first bars are not from the background harmony?
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏽🙌🏼, 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏽🙌🏽!
Your last bar was very similar to how I pictured it. That only goes to show how predictable the ending usually is.
Great vid thanks ! In film music, when you move quickly from one scene to another (which can be very different in terms of style, mood...) is there any real form followed (period, sentence...) ? I feel it is very often a succession of groups of a couple of bars right ? With no particular form, no particular cadence... since you don't have time to play 8 bars for just a couple of seconds ? (except of course when main themes are clearly exposed as foreground material). How do you approach the writing in this case to keep some consistency/continuity in the music (ex: animation movie) ?
They say "picture is King" which basically means that if the main character falls out the window while you're halfway through a Period form, you're just going to have to abandon your form! The best examples of "pure" forms in John Williams, for example, usually come from main titles or scenes without a lot of action. What I think about more is the fundamental elements, for examples do I want to establish an idea, get a feeling of forward motion, or have some sort of cadence?
@@RyanLeach Thanks a lot ! Makes sense.
I would be interested in learning about how these forms relate to the 12-bar blues progression, any thoughts on that?
Ooo la laaa.... Good question!!
If love to see this too
Clearly most of the time it uses period form - basic idea, contrasting one, repeat basic one, cadence strongly ending the period =)
Can we use the idea of the “period form” to write chord progressions only ?
How do you add music to lyrics?
How do you choose which chords go with a certain part of your melody? For example, why did you start with the C chord? Is there a reason or did you just pick it out of the key at random/because it sounded good?
The vast majority of the time, the first chord of your melody will be the tonic (or root, or "key") chord. He chose his scale to be C major, so his first chord traditionally will be the C major chord.
Do you have more example of the period form vs sentence form?
Thanks!
ruclips.net/video/kC8035kFbiE/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/34gSQTW2vuU/видео.html
What are your personnal pro and cons of composing with midi notation in your DAW versus standard notation in Sibelius ?
Good video ! :)
It doesn’t look like Ryan is going to jump in here, so this is my two cents - it comes down to whatever works for you. The most fundamental issue is how well you read and write standard notation. I find Musescore to be in the main most intuitive, while in a DAW, I often find myself struggling with the quirks of the program and getting lost in the details of trying to get it to do what I want it to. On the other hand, putting ideas in a DAW piano roll allows you to concentrate on what you are hearing, not what you are seeing (notation), so both have strengths and weaknesses. It all comes down to what you are most comfortable with…
Dorico has both standard notation and a midi piano roll.
@@globetrotterdk thanks for your answer 🙏
Hey Ryan, thank you for the insightful videos. I currently use musescore, what software are you using to write in this video?
Looks like Sibelius...
Compare resources.avid.com/SupportFiles/FAQ_Avid/425931/ribbon_ex_annotated.png to 9:42.
The Inspector and Color round icons are there.
where did the strings you played come from? Did you eq them, effects? Thank you
No EQ, effects, or anything else. It's called NotePerformer which is like a plugin for Dorico (or Sibelius at the time I made this) and you're hearing it right out of the box! I love it.
Does it matter how long (or short) each part of the idea is?
I think you didn't put enough emphasis on the fact that motives are being called back all the time, and starting from there makes building melodies way easier. Other than that, great job !
I really like melodies by Incubus, Muse, My Chemical Romance, Twenty One Pilots (especially their older stuff), PVRIS, Marilyn Manson (preferably when Daisy Berkowitz was around), Pink Floyd....How do they write their melodies?
Really good video 🙂
I have a question. I'm a big noob, hardly know about music theory at all, but I got that 4 bars violin thing Iike. To me, it looks like a basic idea. Can I use the period form to develop it, using a 4 bars constrating idea and a 4 bars cadence?
Of course, any multiples of two that still have the same structure would be considered the form. 2+2+2+2 or 8+8+8+8 etc
Please upload the full process.
I haven't uploaded any videos yet but I plan on announcing my second channel soon which is where I'll do more long form content including writing, sketching, orchestrating, etc. m.ruclips.net/channel/UCxOWcx_NSZ4Hd6KaDmzphSA
Hi Ryan,
I have watched several of your videos and I am very impressed. I have to ask, what kind of Notation Software is that you are using when writing this Period piece?
Thx
ElectricEddie
Back when I made this I was using Sibelius but I use Dorico now
@@RyanLeach Cool.. This notation software idea is new to me, is there one you recomend over the other?
@@ElectricEddieDaus I am very happy I switched to Dorico!
So if you want a 16 bar form, how do you modify this?
Ryan, how would you recommend using a period such that it doesn't sound so final at the end? I understand that by definition it has an authentic cadence in the consequent phrase but how can I use a period for an A section of a longer composition without killing all the momentum at the very beginning?
Great question. One thing you can do is keep your accompaniment going so there’s still movement. Another is to think of it as a “sense of resolution” and not a strict authentic cadence. You could end on the third melody degree, or even the IV chord and have it feel more satisfying if you’re first half ended on the V, for example. It’s relative tension vs release.
@@RyanLeach Great, thanks. I was thinking too "classically" I suppose. I had just listened to the A section of Kids Return (by Joe Hisaishi) which uses a period for its A section and it ends on the b7 (it's in a minor key) which definitely helps push to the next section.
I have a video coming out next Monday that is just examples of period form in Mario music. They all end pretty firmly but it doesn’t kill the momentum.
Also check out Rhapsody in Blue for a longer form piece, that thing has half cadences everywhere!
Whats it called if you dont explicitly resolve to the i in your cadence section, but rather set up another question which resolves when the phrase repeats? for example, the cadence section just being an elongated Vsus4 to V7?
You might be thinking of half cadence?
What's your take on mapping out chords and then working on a melody using the guide tones/voice leading? Do you think that approach is limiting vs improvising at the keyboard and working things out based on what you like?
sometimes chord come first, some times melody, usually it's a little bit of each. Like maybe come up with the first part of the melody, then find what chord should come next, then a little more melody and so on. Whatever works for you
@@RyanLeach, cool.
Hi Ryan, me again ^^" I don' t really get how the skeleton method you spoke about in another video fit with the sentence and period method you're using in these ones. Could you please explain what I'm missing ?
Period and sentence are structure of length, proportions, time. Skeleton from the other video is contour and shape of the line (rising and falling in interesting way).
You can use the skeleton as outlining anchor points for the melodic ideas, and the period or sentence for the phrase structure.
The example at the end of that skeleton video uses sentence form.