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This Jazz Piano Tutorial is about Composition and Melodic Development.
Composing a melody is much like improvising, just not spontaneous. That is, you can go back and modify what you’re written. Writing a song is a very personal and subjective thing and there’s no right or wrong method to doing it.
There are 4 basic musical elements:
- Melody,
- Harmony,
- Rhythm,
- Timbre.
And various genres of music place differing levels of importance to each of these elements.
There are also 4 ways to analyse a melody:
- Intervallic,
- Motivic,
- Scalar,
- Harmonic
A widely used technique when writing creative stories is the Snowflake Method. I recommend using something similar when composing a song.
- Doodle about on the piano
- Accidentally discover a phrase you like
- Use that phrase as a motif
- Develop the motif into a melody
- Find another motif and link the two motifs together somehow
- Embellish your melody (by adding ornamentals, passing notes, etc)
- Harmonise the Melody with Chords (see my lessons on reharmonization. The same principles apply here)
- Arrange your composition (by adding a form, chord voicings, instrumentation, dynamics, etc.)
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