How do I write a melody over chords?

Land on the notes of the chord that is sounding — its root, third and fifth — on the strong beats and the long notes, and move between them mostly by step through the other notes of the key. The chord tones are where a melody rests; the scale's other notes are what it passes through; notes outside the key are for a deliberate clash. That gives you two or three good choices at every note instead of a blank page.

What chords go together in a key?

The triads built on the seven notes of the key's scale: in C major, C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am (and B diminished, rarely used). Any four of them in any order sound related, because each shares notes with its neighbors. Counted from the key's home they are 1, 2m, 3m, 4, 5, 6m — and 1 5 6m 4 is the most-used progression in pop.

What time signature should a beginner write in?

4/4 — four beats to the bar. It is what nearly every song uses and what a listener's ear expects, so a song in four can spend its surprises on the melody and the words instead of the count. 3/4 is the waltz; five and six exist, but learn them after.

How long should a verse and a chorus be?

A verse is usually eight or sixteen bars, a chorus eight. Two verses, three choruses and a bridge is the commonest shape — about 64 bars, which at 120 beats a minute is a little over two minutes, three with an intro and an ending. Half of that is music written once; the rest is the same music again with new words.

Should a melody move by step or by leap?

Mostly by step — to a neighboring note of the scale, occasionally skipping one. A leap is what you spend when you want a moment noticed; a line made of leaps sounds like an exercise. Stepwise lines are also the ones your ear can predict, which is what makes a melody singable.

Notes landing between the beats instead of on them, while the beat underneath keeps going. It is most of what 'feel' means, and it changes nothing about which notes you chose — the same melody on the beat and off it are the same pitches with the timing moved.

Do I need to know music theory to write a song?

No — most songwriters learn the habits by ear. But the five on this page are the theory that matters most, and knowing them turns a blank page into a few small choices: which key, which of its chords, which chord tone to land on next. The rest is taste.

Songwriting Basics: How Songs Usually Go

Five habits most songs share — the grid, the key, where a melody rests and how it moves, the shape of a song — each drawn by a songwriting app's own melody engine, so you can hear the rule beside what it prevents.

How do you write a song when you have never written one? Most people start by looking for rules, and the honest answer is that there are none — but there are habits, and most of the songs you know share the same five. They keep an even grid of four beats to the bar. They take their chords from one key. Their melody rests on the notes of the chord underneath it and moves mostly by small steps. And they are made of a verse and a chorus, repeated. None of these is a law. All of them make writing a song much easier, and a common beginner mistake is to think an interesting song needs to break them. It does not; the space inside them is endless.

This page shows each habit as a figure you can hear. The figures are not drawn by hand: they are drawn by the melody engine inside Bard, our songwriting app, under one constraint at a time — a tune that rests on the chord tones beside one that does not, a line that moves by step beside one that leaps — so that what you see is the rule next to the thing it prevents. Tap a tile and it plays round, drawing a new line over the same chords at every lap, until you tap it again; ↻ Again starts over from a new draw. A rule you can only see one example of is a picture, not a rule.

Songs keep an even grid: 4/4 time

Almost every song you know places its chord changes and its melody on an even grid of beats and bars, and nearly always with four beats to the bar — 4/4, or "common time", which is what the name tells you. The figure holds one bar to the same length of time and cuts it four ways: in four, the way nearly every song does; in three, the waltz; in five and six. The tall mark is the downbeat, the first beat of the bar, and it is the one thing a listener counts from. Everything else on this page — where a chord changes, where a note lands — is a position on this grid.

An even grid

One bar, the same length of time, cut 4, 3, 5, 6 ways — tap a bar to hear its count, round and round. Nearly every song is the four.

If you are a beginning songwriter, stick with 4/4. It is not that the others are hard; it is that four is what your ear already expects, so a song in four can spend its surprises somewhere else. The tempo is a separate decision — the same bar of four at 70 beats a minute is a ballad and at 140 is a dance — and it decides how many bars three minutes is, which the last section comes back to.

The chords come from one key

Most progressions choose their chords from one major mode — a scale of seven notes with a home note, which is what a key is — and most of those chords are plain triads, three notes each. The first tile is four chords from one key: four of C major's own six usable triads, in whatever order the draw put them, every note of every chord inside the same seven notes. The second is four chords picked from nowhere — each still a perfectly good major or minor triad, each belonging to some key, just not to the same one — and the third is not even that: chords that belong to no key at all. Press them in turn. You do not need to know what a key is to hear that the first tile has somewhere to sit and the others do not.

Chords from one key

Song strip3 draws of Bard's melody roll that share their chords, their rhythm and their seed and differ in one thing. Tap a tile to hear it — it plays round, and draws new chords at every lap; tap again to stop. ↻ starts over from a new draw. Seed 7.

That is what a key is for. The seven notes of a major mode give you a triad on every degree, and every triad shares notes with its neighbors, so any four of them in any order sound related — the chords are "in the key", and so will be the melody you write over them. The numerals in the lane above each tile are the chords counted from the key's home: 1 is the chord on the home note, 5 the chord on the fifth note, 6m the minor chord on the sixth. Counting them that way is what lets a progression be the same progression in any key — 1 5 6m 4 is the most-used progression in pop, and it is the same song in C and in G. The circle of fifths is the map of which keys share their chords; the chords inside any scale are on the nest explorer, in every key.

Seventh chords — four notes, a triad with one more — add color, and you will want them eventually. But the same color can be added by the melody instead, which is the next habit, and triads and sevenths between them cover nearly everything anybody plays.

The melody rests on the chord tones

A melody can come to rest in three places: on the notes of the chord under it, on the key's other notes, or outside the key altogether. The three tiles are three draws of the same tune — same chords, same rhythm — that differ only in where they rest. On the chord, every long note and every note on the beat is one of the three notes of the chord sounding under it, and the line sits on the colored rows. On the key's other notes, the line rests on the four notes of the scale the chord does not contain — it is still in the key, and it sounds a little unsettled, pulling towards the chord tones: that pull is tension, and used on purpose it is most of what makes a melody interesting. Outside the key, the line rests a semitone above the root, the one note the ear cannot hear as a color on the chord, only as a mistake.

Where a melody rests

Song strip3 draws of Bard's melody roll that share their chords, their rhythm and their seed and differ in one thing. Tap a tile to hear it — it plays round, and draws a new line over the same rhythm at every lap; tap again to stop. ↻ starts over from a new draw. Seed 7.

The rows tell you why. Each bar's chord lights the rows of its three notes in their degree colors, counted from the key — the 1, 3 and 5 of the key's home chord, the 5, 7 and 2 of its fifth chord — and the little number on each note of the line says what the note is against that. A melody that mostly sits on the lit rows and passes through the others is a melody that sounds like it belongs to its chords. This makes writing melodies far simpler than it looks: over any chord there are only three notes you will usually want to land on, and four more you might linger on for a moment. Everything else is somewhere you visit and leave.

The melody moves mostly by step

Melodies move, most of the time, to one of the neighboring notes of the scale — up or down a step, occasionally skipping one. A larger leap is a spend: it gets noticed, which is what you want once in a while and not what you want everywhere. By step is a line that stays inside about a sixth and walks; by leap is the same chords and rhythm with the line jumping thirds, fifths and more, and traveling more than an octave to do it. One sounds like a tune and one sounds like an exercise, and the only difference between them is the size of the moves.

Steps and leaps

Song strip2 draws of Bard's melody roll that share their chords, their rhythm and their seed and differ in one thing. Tap a tile to hear it — it plays round, and draws a new line over the same rhythm at every lap; tap again to stop. ↻ starts over from a new draw. Seed 7.

Put this together with the last habit and writing a melody stops being a search through the whole range of your voice. If you tend to move by step, and you tend to land on the chord tones, then at every note there are two or three good places to go — a step up, a step down, the nearest chord tone — and a melody is a run of small choices, left or right, rather than a blank page. That is also how you sing one back: a line made of steps is a line your ear can predict, which is why it is singable, and why a leap, when you use one, lands.

The contour — the up-and-down shape of the line — is what a listener actually remembers. Bard draws it as the line in these figures, and the app's ladder draws yours the same way when you sing into it, against the chords you have chosen.

Notes land on the beat — or just off it

Notes tend to arrive with the pulse: the long ones on the strong beats, a phrase starting at the top of a bar. On the beat is a line whose notes all land on the grid's marks. Off the beat moves a good share of them between the beats instead — the same chords, the same rules for which notes to land on, only the timing changed. That is syncopation, and it is most of what "feel" means. It works because the grid underneath is still keeping time: a syncopated note is not the absence of a pulse but a note arriving where the pulse is not, which takes a pulse to be missed.

On the beat, off the beat

It is the cheapest way to make a plain melody sound less plain, and it is a dial you can turn after the notes are written: keep every pitch and move a few of them off the beat, and the line pushes and pulls where it used to walk. Rock, folk and soul do not differ much here — measured across real songs, the spread inside any one genre is wider than the gap between them — so it is a matter of feel, not a costume.

A verse and a chorus is nearly a whole song

Songs run about three minutes, and most of those three minutes happens more than once. The shape in the figure is the commonest there is: two verses off one block of music, three choruses off another, and a bridge that happens once. Six sections, three parts. About half the bars are music written once; the rest is the same music again with new words, and it does not feel repetitive, because repetition is how a listener learns something well enough to like it. The hook is not the part you wrote best. It is the part you wrote three times.

The shape of a song

A typical shape: two verses off one block of music, three choruses off another, a bridge once. Half the bars are new music; the rest is repetition, which is how a listener learns a song well enough to like it.

The tempo decides how many bars that is. At 120 beats a minute, a bar of four is two seconds, and the 64 bars in the figure are just over two minutes — add an intro and an ending and you are at three. Write a verse of eight or sixteen bars and a chorus of eight, and you have most of a song; a bridge is the one section that goes somewhere else, once, so the last chorus lands harder for having been away.

Where these figures come from

Everything above is drawn by Bard, a songwriting app for iOS by the makers of NoSheet. It is not a course and it does not generate songs for you; it holds your ideas in whatever order they arrive — a hummed line, a chord, a loop, a lyric — and shows you what they are against each other, the way these figures do: your melody as a line against the chords you chose, each note named for what it is in the key, so that "rest on the chord tones" and "move by step" are things you can see while you sing. The figures on this page are its own melody engine, asked for one habit at a time.

Under the habits sits the theory NoSheet teaches by ear: keys and scale degrees, triads and the chords inside a scale, consonance and tension, why the major modes in particular. If you want the chord tones under your fingers rather than on a page, Build Shapes deals you the triads of a key and asks for their shapes, and the riff loop plays a phrase on the chord tones and waits for you to play it back — which is the melody habit, practiced.

Questions

How do I write a melody over chords?: Land on the notes of the chord that is sounding — its root, third and fifth — on the strong beats and the long notes, and move between them mostly by step through the other notes of the key. The chord tones are where a melody rests; the scale's other notes are what it passes through; notes outside the key are for a deliberate clash. That gives you two or three good choices at every note instead of a blank page.
What chords go together in a key?: The triads built on the seven notes of the key's scale: in C major, C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am (and B diminished, rarely used). Any four of them in any order sound related, because each shares notes with its neighbors. Counted from the key's home they are 1, 2m, 3m, 4, 5, 6m — and 1 5 6m 4 is the most-used progression in pop.
What time signature should a beginner write in?: 4/4 — four beats to the bar. It is what nearly every song uses and what a listener's ear expects, so a song in four can spend its surprises on the melody and the words instead of the count. 3/4 is the waltz; five and six exist, but learn them after.
How long should a verse and a chorus be?: A verse is usually eight or sixteen bars, a chorus eight. Two verses, three choruses and a bridge is the commonest shape — about 64 bars, which at 120 beats a minute is a little over two minutes, three with an intro and an ending. Half of that is music written once; the rest is the same music again with new words.
Should a melody move by step or by leap?: Mostly by step — to a neighboring note of the scale, occasionally skipping one. A leap is what you spend when you want a moment noticed; a line made of leaps sounds like an exercise. Stepwise lines are also the ones your ear can predict, which is what makes a melody singable.
What is syncopation?: Notes landing between the beats instead of on them, while the beat underneath keeps going. It is most of what 'feel' means, and it changes nothing about which notes you chose — the same melody on the beat and off it are the same pitches with the timing moved.
Do I need to know music theory to write a song?: No — most songwriters learn the habits by ear. But the five on this page are the theory that matters most, and knowing them turns a blank page into a few small choices: which key, which of its chords, which chord tone to land on next. The rest is taste.