is it possible to write good melodies without any knowledge or sophisticated command of chord structure or theory?

i just get all woozy when i hear people talk about major 7ths and stuff. i'd like to understand it, and sometimes watching a really skilled pianist i can visualize it, and hear how beautiful it can be. but it's just way beyond me. but i'm willing work with my instincts and simplicity as a building block and hope it'll slowly make more sense.

Non-R&B? don't you mean You NEED a knowledge of R&B(historically self taught) hence simple 2 and 3 chord riff rock

YES YES YES YES YES. My favorite example of this is Spoon's Soft Effects EP; the songwriting sounds absurdly simple, even reductive, but every time I listen to it I want to throw things at the wall and scream "How do they DO that?!"

: perhaps the single hardest thing to pull off in songwriting.

I mentioned this idea to my boss once.. Her answer/analogy was "If you're making a movie about retarded people, you don't necessarily want a retarded person playing the part." Meaning, it may still take some talent to do things simply (or wrongly) and have it come out well. Of course, you might luck into someting great.

Same would go for electronic composers. If you know the notes in a chord, you can quickly create on-key melodies with those notes.

Same with rythym. 4/4 gets really fucking fatiguing after a while, so the drummer can say, let's do something in 3/4 for a change, and if everyone knows what that means, you can creep out of redundancy sometimes by using diferent time signatures.

But it's as much of a trap as it is a tool. If you're formally trained and only know a small amount of theory, you suck because you'll have a very limited number of patterns to rely on. Sometimes the perfect melody relies on an off key note, and if you're using theory's structure to build a song, you have less chance finding the perfect melody because you're trapped into repeadetly kicking dead horses.

If you're formally trained and know A LOT of theory, you might just as well spend a liftime studying math, because the time it takes to learn and understand the order of it all takes away from the time you have to tool around and experiment with your instrument.

Fattest answer in my ears is that it's good to know some theory, but not so much where experimentation seems unprofessional or time wasting.

I have a fairly decent elementary understanding of scales and chord relationships, being that I've been playing guitar since 92 and once every 3 years I blow the dust off of my Guitar Grimoire and try and teach myself some theory or something (doesn't usually stick with me and I inevitably fall back into my minor penatonic/blues scale rut) I'd say that if you can hum something and it's catchy, you've just come up with a catchy melody, with or without years of training and classes.

Then again, you've probably just hummed the tune to a Beatles, Weezer, Midnight Star or Turbonegro song without knowing it.

This can happen with or without technique, though, dunnit?

IDM is total vomit right now because 99% of the stuff coming out these days is done by people who cannot actually write a song.

It is a great book because he is just telling you how to write a song they way your friend would if you asked him. He doesn't speak "musician" if you know what I mean. His book is very straight forward and to the point. If you need to know it, he brings it up in a very easy to understand manner. It is a good book to read even if you are not planning on writing on guitar.

During the past 50 years, maybe. Before that, the best melodies were all composed by people who did have that theoretical knowledge.

And before that, there was no music theory. So I guess it follows that there were no good melodies.

If you can write a good melody, that's grate--and it's even better to be able to know HOW and WHY it works. Theory doesn't change the way you write music. (I.e. if you want to just jab around on your keyboard until something sounds good, that's still fine.. it's not like theory renders you physically incapable of doing this)

DAN PERRY TO THREAD PLZ

theory != staff notation

theory = staff infection.
m.

certainly McCartney's experience explains the fool them with nostalgia aspect to the Beatles that sold them to peoples' parents, but Lennon had a back-to-front understanding of vintage rock (because he knew how to play rhythm guitar), and Harrison was no slouch either -- informal qualities in rock music made on the spur of the moment, but neccesary to remember it for recording, explain it to the band, etc.

i think you need rudimentary harmonics to make anything useful out of whatever melody you think up, no matter how pretty

the sufeit of bad electronic music that's been made on synths and computers recently and the immense dumbing down of music and resort to two chord disco -- all evidence that people equipped with technology but unable to attempt to bounce ideas off potential musical partners or enhance their sampled noises with the appropriate chords still have no chance unless they're into repetitive production line one-speed music -- ad-libbing track after track onto a computer will not get you anywhere out of the one-chord trap unless you understand harmony, however informerly

surely the return to rock music by the public is evidence of widespread bordeom with "one person in a bedroom" electronic "music"

Curtis is correct -- the "theory" of harmony isn't hard to get a grip on, but it is theory -- a bit like practising your instrument, practising messing with chords in an informed way will convert your single line melody into something dynamic, maybe a song or piece -- either you or your band-mates have to know how to do that

Music theory was invented by the old Greeks. Before them, there was mainly just drumming and primitive flutes, and definitely no good melodies.

This is VERY true and indeed something to consider, Geir - obviously theory has had a significant effect on the progression of music over the past few millenia, but it's ridiculous to say that the theory itself is the reason that post-theory melodies might be any "better" or less "primitive" than pre-theory melodies.

Geir, given that you think only White European music or White European influenced music is capable of producing "good melodies" I think we can disregard 99.99999999999% of what you say. Melody PRECEDED music theory, isn't that pretty obvious? Chord structures and musical theory are entirely unnecessary in the "writing" of a melody - the writing of a "song" or (in your case Geir) a symphony is a different matter. And if you think good melodies pre-1952 were largely written by people with "knowledge or sophisticated command of chord structure or theory" then you are rather disregarding the cats body of "folk" musics, the melodies of which were so often pilfered by Geir's dead white men to write THEIR music.

I think I meant to say "vast" instead of "cats". Is this a Freudian slip I wonder?

Yes I've played piano for like 15 years, and know a bunch of theory and stuff, but the best way I've found to write a melody is just to walk down the street and (while thinking about something else) start humming, and either write down little dots for pitch & rhythm, memorize it, or record it when I can get home.

"who does it best?"

I actually think most of my favorite music is based on who does this best: Velvet Underground, OMD, Bowie, Low, Bryan Ferry

You may hear clearly in the first couple of Roxy Music albums that they weren't exactly virtuosos.

Some of the best meoldies around come from birds!
(and they have a very limited knowledge of theory)

Not at all. They are repetitive and boring.

But then again, they aren't melodies - or music - either.

, melody was originally based on mathemathics, theory, that is.

at various stages, complimentary sick-fuck bad rock keyboards jerry-piss-lewis rock'n'roll(Ferry), truly dynamic tibral modulation of guitar "harmonies" (the melody that best compliments the initial melody) provided by Manzanera, the restrained oboe of Mckay, the form/process/ artistic integrity and perversity of Eno, the multi-weirdo instrument ensemble of Jobson, and bass players handpicked to deliver maximum funk/rock space on the already fleshed out -- all harmonic enhancements

they consistenly provided "art"/colour in a very harmonically layered and propulsive mix that sounded like science-fiction + smoking jacket,
truly "debauched" rocksy stuff, sexual politics, sleaze as "ambivalent heart of rock'n'roll"

such a collection of talent, and you're telling me this wasn't a harmonically intergrated band ???

I don't care how much they used the studio to defeat "virtuosity" (heuristics, the enemy of imagination), 'cause if they delivered at all it was that total musical (including harmonic) enrichment of melody

hey, they only spread harmonics into timbre, timings, lyrical foils, double entendres, atmospheres (and even pop-art dada paint in the dark eno jokes to confuse the straights for fun)

it's hard to think of a more harmonically complex band that kept changing/developing albums 1-5 -- real art storms the charts -- the confusing but seemingly coherent yet complicated vision of rock music "clockwork-orange time" into the future -- and that they expanded the palette of the velvet underground is now accepted wisdom

multi-level harmonic integration was this bands' gonads, frustration, everything they could think of to have it "all hanging out"

maybe you should listen to RMusic in their loud, headphonesie, in sexual circumstances, high on coke, kurb-crawling, flawed great gadsby revisited hits swinging london grandeur, ... whatever, so many angles

roxy music thankfully never sounded anyhting like genesis, and the world of "cananonical rock" is more honest and rich for the roxy music contribution -- genesis sound like private school "battle for pseudo-aristocrat endorsement of war gaming" interior decorators by comparison

To me, their first four albums still sound kind of strange, but they are certainly interesting to listen to anyway.

i've written two long-ish but considered posts on this -- not because i like my name in print, but because i believe what i say and yet want others' opinion on it

[though mark sinker can "stick" his "the greek street" puerile sexual simplifications and namecallling, stuff so inharmonius and improv-doo-dah as to bottom out of any discussion remotely touching on what he'd like to have me agree on what counts as "music = sex"]

so how about some comment on what i've written ? i can handle one-liner format if people would rather do that, or would you rather i just kept my opinons to myself ?

[but no mark sinker animal-nitrate-like "epiphanies" please]

"i think you need rudimentary harmonics to make anything useful out of whatever melody you think up, no matter how pretty"

I tend to disagree with this. (see my comment about birds above) I think a single line melody with no harmony can indeed be very pretty and beautiful, and I would even go as far as saying that added harmony can take away the focus on the prettiness of the melody.

As Roxy Music being one of favorite bands I think your discription is very accurate, but I would aslo agree with Geir's that "they seemed to use their skills as visual artists composing music rather than having skills as actual musicians."

But the difference between me and Geir is that unlike seeing this as strange I see this as the way music should be made. Taking ones inner visualization and applying that to music makes some of the best music (this may be because I myself approach music as a sort of unseen visualization) That is why my favorite music comes from people who are also interested in art, or who create music as if they were painting. Painting a song seems like such an appropriate thing to do. It's Impressionism of sound. A Van Gogh painting almost looks like a song. There is mysterious link between the senses.

let me replace this with:

"I would even go as far as saying that added harmony could possibly take away the focus on the prettiness of the melody."

wait, what? what is music?

(not expressing any specific opinion on the issue at hand, just clarifying things)