How to Write a
Beautiful Melody.

There are 7 elements that create a beautiful melody.

In this PDF tutorial you'll learn what they are, and how to use them!

Free PDF Tutorial
includes multitrack MIDI file

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https://hackmusictheory.com/album/2554562/beautiful-melody

Intro.

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When I recently heard “Ray Of Solar” by Swedish House Mafia on Spotify’s “New Music Friday” playlist, the song’s beauty jumped out at me from amongst the almost 150 tracks that all seem to be sounding more and more alike each week.

And for the record, while I’ve heard the name Swedish House Mafia, I don’t think I’d ever listened to them before. In fact, I don’t even know if they’re from Sweden. I mean, you’d think the electronic duo Boards of Canada are from Canada, right? Wrong. They’re from Scotland! What?! Yep, it’s true. But I digress…

So, despite not being a Swedish House Mafia fan, the beauty of this song is undeniable. And as a result, we’ve ended up in the rare situation of making two tutorials on the same song.

In last week’s tutorial How to Write Beautiful Arpeggios (Free PDF) we taught our 6-step method for making a beautiful chord progression like you hear in “Ray Of Solar”. In this tutorial, inspired by the same section, you’ll learn our 7-step method for writing a beautiful melody.

And no, you don’t need to have done the previous tutorial, this one is completely independent. If you have, though, then you can write a melody for the beautiful arpeggios you made from that tutorial.

Alright, read on to learn the music theory hacks that create this undeniable beauty, and how you can use them to write your own beautiful melody. But first… Tea!

Step 1. Chords

Before we get to the melody, we need to talk chords. All beautiful melodies either have chords accompanying them, or if it’s a solo melody, the melody itself will imply chords. For more on implied chords, read MELODIC BASS DROP (PDF).

So let’s start by choosing some chords for a progression. If you did the other Swedish House Mafia tutorial mentioned in the intro, then load up that file in your DAW. You can write this melody over those chords. If you didn’t do that tutorial though, no problem, you can just write an eight-bar chord progression now.

“Ray Of Solar” actually has a sixteen-bar chord progression, which is super rare. Most songs nowadays don’t even have an eight-bar progression! Four-bars is standard. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can write a sixteen-bar progression, but there’s no need for that, as eight bars is plenty for writing a beautiful melody.

So, set up eight bars of 4|4 with a 1/4 note grid, and your tempo at 135 BPM. Swedish House Mafia is in the key of F♯ minor, but we’ll use A minor instead, as it keep things simple because it’s just all the white notes. Here are the chords:

You can use whichever chords you want, but start on the root chord (Am), as that will anchor your progression into the key. Here are the chords we chose:

Am → Cmaj → Dm → Em

Dm → Cmaj → Dm → Em

If you’re making a new progression, then four chords is all you need. We have eight chords because it’s our sixteen-bar progression from the previous Swedish House Mafia tutorial. We’ll only use the first half for now, though, then as a bonus (Step 8), we’ll show you what to do with your eight-bar melody if you’ve also got a sixteen-bar progression.

Right, so once you’ve chosen your chords, draw the root note of each chord on the grid. If you have four chords, start by drawing each root for two bars. But, it will sound better if they’re not all the same length. So keep a couple roots two bars long, but then make one root shorter (i.e. one and a half bars), and one root longer (i.e. two and a half bars).

If you’re writing a new progression, duplicate this track and draw in the full chords. Load up a warm pad sound on that other track with