How to write a great chorus melody

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People often want to know how to write a great chorus. And instead of answering that question as a whole, let’s zoom in a bit on one specific element: the melody. What are the rules for writing a great chorus melody in order to raise your chorus as a whole to the next level?

A lot of it comes down to introducing a rhythmic and melodic motif, that serves as a common thread for the listener to follow. Also, the strategic placement of where all your phrases are going to be, and particularly the one that holds the title lyrically is very important.

The art of songwriting isn’t of course all academic, and a lot of it also depends on the inspiration you get in the moment. So writing songs always requires both parts of our brain: the rational part and the intuitive part. This article mostly focuses on the former. So with that out of the way, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty stuff!

Kati Hoehl, Unsplash

Table of Contents

The importance of a great hook

You’ve probably heard this word at least once when people give you feedback on your music: the song needs a great “hook”. Well, I’d rather use a different term in this article: a motif. A motif is a short melodic phrase that holds both melodic and rhythmic information.

The motif functions as a “hook” (hence the word) for the listener to hold on to and to follow. A motif can be repeated, or slightly altered every time it occurs in the chorus. The trick is to constantly find a balance between enough repetition and change, expectation and surprise, all for the sake of keeping the listener engaged in our song.

So that is the challenge: keep our listeners interested enough by showing them what is happening with this motif that we’ve got. So that leads us ultimately to our next question: how to create a motif?

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How to create a motif

Firstly, you need to decide how many bars long your motif is going to be. If you are new to this concept, I recommend you write phrases of two bars. Secondly, it is important to realise that the ending of your phrases is rather important and that the most common way to end a phrase, is on the first count or the third count of the second measure (see example).

Knowing the title of your song and where to place it is everything

Do you already have a title or catchphrase for your song lyrically? Well, it is rather necessary that you have at least a global idea because the title of the song is preferably in the chorus, and the strongest positions where you can put your song title are most definitely at the beginning and/or the end. This doesn’t always need to be the case of course, but it can give you a great starting point of writing a melody since you are writing everything around this line.

Use contrast to your advantage

Most people that listen to your song are non-musicians, and they don’t really care for all the cool music theory tricks that you are pulling off in your melody-writing. But the great thing that they do notice when listening is contrast; every change between fast and slow, loud or quiet, consonant or dissonant, long notes or short notes, etc. So if you have been writing your melody in a certain way for your verses (maybe a fast-paced rhythm with short notes), you should definitely explore the opposite of that in your chorus to create contrast and to surprise your listeners.

Example:

A great example of contrast in a chorus melody is “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. The repetitive pre-chorus where Kurt Cobain is singing not too loud: “Hello, hello, hello, how low?” is being followed up by a different motif in the chorus, that is sung extremely loud with a much higher melody.

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Official Music Video for Smells Like Teen Spirit performed by Nirvana.

Play with different intervals in your phrases

A mistake a lot of beginning songwriters make is to always use the same intervals in their melodies, and especially small intervals (like the 2nd and 3rd). Try using arches in your melodies, and become aware of the lines that you are making. Are you staying too much in one area of notes for too long? Try using some larger intervals sometimes like making a large leap from the 1 to the major 6th. Of course, you shouldn’t overdo this because it would make your melody too all over the place, but throwing in a large interval every once in a while can sometimes create the most memorable parts of a melody.

Stable notes versus unstable notes

If you’ve never heard about this concept before, I guarantee you, it will blow your mind and it will be of so much use to the improvement of your songwriting. When you write a song, let’s say in the key of C, you are playing in the C major scale, and in that scale, some notes are labeled as “stable” and “unstable”. Some notes are more stable than others, and they are even ranked in an order (see example).

So knowing about stable and unstable notes, we can again use this to our advantage to play with expectations for the listener. Unstable notes naturally create the expectation to resolve them into a stable note. So you can play with this phenomenon to your liking by for example writing a row of unstable notes to build up tension and resolve it at a tactical spot where you would like it to be.

My personal opinion

Knowing about some of these techniques and trying them out on your songs can be really useful, but you should definitely NOT consider them like rules that are set in stone. In my opinion, you should always use them more like advice, and always in combination with your intuition and feeling. Sometimes just trying out some melodies by singing them or playing them on your instrument can be the best way of writing something. Then again: these techniques are there to support you with your songwriting process as a whole.

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Conclusion

So which techniques for writing a great chorus melody are there? Of course, there are many more, but the ones discussed in this article are:

Deciding on a motif, and playing with it repeating and changing it when necessary. So the listener can actually somewhat “follow” what you are doing.
Deciding where the title of your song is going to be in the chorus. The strongest points where you can put the title are at the beginning and/or ending of the chorus.
Play with contrast so your listeners aren’t falling asleep. Repetition is good of course, but we don’t want to be too predictable. If two sections of a song are too similar, it can be deadly for a song (and not in the good sense of the word).
Be aware of which melodic lines you are using. Sometimes a large interval like going from the 1 to the major 6th can create a really memorable melody.
And lastly, we can again play with the expectations of the listener by using stable and unstable notes at tactical spots in our melody. For example, you might always start on a stable note in your melodies, and you don’t even know it. Well, in that case: try to start a phrase on an unstable note a couple of times. It will do wonders for your songwriting.