Creating a Melody

I wanted to show a certain YouTube video, made by 12tone, a YouTube account that talks about music. It’s a short, helpful video that explains a little bit about how to create a melody. I would have difficulty teaching how to create a melody simply because melody doesn’t have rules or steps like chord progressions do. It’s not as simple as giving you a list of chord progressions, but despite that, this video does a good job of explaining a few things about how melody works.

The video is a little bit technical so before you watch it, I just want to mention that when the narrator talks about moving to the fifth or second or sixth, he’s referring to scale degrees, which is just a numbering of scale. For instance, in the key of C, the note F would be the fourth scale degree, because it’s four notes from C. He also mentions leading tone, which is simply the seventh scale degree. You can see the scale degrees’ technical names in the picture below.