Music Melody
The Basics

We can define melody as a sequence of single notes, usually in the same key, that produce a musical motif or phrase. You may want the melody line for the vocals, the guitar, the piano, or whatever. So lets take a look at how you can create some memorable melodies.

1. The Shape Of The Melody

Most melodies tend to follow a pattern of ups and downs, rather than just randomly jumping all over the place. This gives a melody a nice, smooth, flowing sound. The more technical way for describing this is:

• Conjunct motion occurs when one pitch of a melody moves step-wise to another. This has a natural flowing sound. Conjunct motion occurs more often than disjunct motion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Disjunct motion occurs when one pitch of a melody leaps to another.
  
  
  
  
  
  

2. Repetition

For a music melody to be effective it's important it has some repetition. Although we need it, we don't want there to be too much as this gets too repetitive.