Melody and Form

A melody is the part people remember. Form is the reason they recognise it when it comes back. These nine pages treat both as things you can hear happening rather than diagrams to memorise.

Start here

Melody and Harmony.

Hold one note and swap the chord underneath it. That single demo explains more about how melody works than any rule about steps and leaps.

Jump straight inPress the triangle to hear it, the name to read it

Writing a melody

Building a song

Taking it apart

Writing a melody

Writing a MelodyBuild a line people can sing. Hear what steps, leaps, range and a single climax do to a melody, and change one note at a time to test it.
Motifs and PhrasingA motif is the smallest piece you recognize when it returns. Hear one grow through inversion, sequence and augmentation into a full phrase.
Melody and HarmonyThe same note feels warm over one chord and restless over the next. Play a line over changing chords and hear root, third, fifth and seventh shift.
Non-Chord TonesHear each embellishing tone against the chord it rubs against. Three questions give you the type: how you enter, how you leave, where it lands.

Building a song

Taking it apart

Keep going

The other sections

Everything on this site sits in one of these, in the order they are meant to be learned.

The building blocks

How music works

In practice