Melody on the Map.

00Introduction

I’m Tamas Bodzsar, a songwriter and producer, and The Emotional Map of Melody is my book about why each note of a melody feels the way it does. These notes are a companion to it. They explain its ideas from the beginning, on a piano roll rather than in sheet music, and every idea comes with an example you can play.

Book Transcriptions

The Book Examples panels restore the excerpts used in the supplied book. They appear in the chapter that explains them. Original practice examples remain alongside them.

The song maps retain the book’s exact dot counts. A map shows which kinds of note occur, not their order or rhythm. Melody excerpts are playable piano rolls, with lyric syllables beneath their notes. Some examples use the book’s transposition; their captions say so.

The Book’s Subject

Most people think of a melody as a line of pitches: this note, then that one, a little higher, a little lower. To me, that is only the shadow of a melody. Every note in a melody also has a feel. Some notes sound settled and safe. Some lean forward, as if they want to move. Some rub against what is underneath them and give the music an edge.

Where does that feel come from? Partly from rhythm: from where each note falls in time. That is the subject of my earlier book, The Rhythm Code, which has a companion guide of its own, Rhythm on the Grid.

But The Emotional Map of Melody is about two other sources of feeling, and a piano roll shows neither of them. The first is the note’s relationship with the key: where it sits in the scale the song is built from. The second is its relationship with the chord playing underneath it at that moment: whether it belongs to that chord or not. Together with rhythm, these make up what I call the three dimensions of a melody. I put the two of them on a single picture: the emotional map.

My bigger point is about songwriting. The balance between settled and unsettled notes is one of the main things that makes a melody sound fresh or dated, and that balance has changed over the decades. The hits of the 1980s and 1990s landed on a note of the chord at almost every chord change. Today’s hits deliberately mix in more tension. Once you know this, you can stop guessing and make those choices on purpose instead of by accident.

Guide note Notes on the Book takes a closer look at this history.

Reading a Roll

Most examples in these notes are small piano rolls, like the one in your DAW (digital audio workstation, the software producers record and arrange in, such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro or FL Studio). Time runs from left to right, and the numbers along the top count the beats of each bar.

• The Chord row shows the chord that is playing, with its name and its Roman numeral, a way of naming chords by their place in the key that Solfège explains.
• Below it, each row is one pitch. The label at the left gives the note’s syllable, its solfège name (DO, RE, MI and so on, also explained in Solfège), and its letter name with an octave number, such as MI E5. Middle C is C4, and the number goes up by one at each C, so E5 is the E just over an octave above middle C. (On a phone, the rows show only the syllable.)
• A coloured block is a melody note. Its left edge is where it starts, and its length is how long it lasts. The colour shows its syllable, running from warm for the most settled syllables to cool for the most restless.
• A solid block belongs to the chord underneath it: it is a chord tone. A hatched block does not belong to the chord: it is a non-chord tone. Chord Tones explains both.
• A note with a dark ring round it is the note heard at a chord change. Those are the notes that matter most, for reasons explained in The Most Important Notes.
• Under the roll, the cards headed At the chord changes list those ringed notes, and many examples draw them on the emotional map as well.

The seven syllables, in the order I rank them from the most settled to the most restless, look like this:

You do not need to remember any of this yet. Each part is explained when it first matters.

Using the Examples

• Play starts an example and Stop ends it. Only one plays at a time.
• BPM (beats per minute) is the tempo. Use − and + to slow an example down. Slowing down makes it much easier to hear how each note sits against the chord.
• Click adds a metronome. Note names swaps the syllables on the notes for letter names.
• Where an example has versions, the buttons above the roll switch between them, even while it plays.
• The buttons beside Hear, under the roll, turn the melody, chords, bass and beat on and off. Listening to the melody and chords alone is often the clearest way to hear what a note is doing.
• Where you see Edit, you can change the melody. Click a note to select it, then move it with ▲ ▼ ◀ ▶, change its length with − and +, or delete it with ✕. Click an empty space in a row to add a note there. The cards and the map update as you go.

On a phone, tap wherever these notes say click. On an iPhone, turn the volume up; the examples are built to play even when the phone is set to silent. At the end of each chapter there is a button to mark it done, and the contents list keeps count.

The Songs

In the book I make my case with well-known songs, from Phil Collins and the Backstreet Boys to Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish.

Guide note The Book Examples panels include the transcriptions from the supplied book. The original practice examples demonstrate the same ideas with other material.

The chapters that discuss songs end with a table: what to listen to, what to listen for, and the page where I talk about it in the book. I have also built ear-training apps, and you will find them on my website. Its address is printed in the book.

In the book: pp. 5–10, What Stays When Everything Changes.

01The Lasting Power of Melody

Sounds go in and out of fashion. Production styles come and go. So what lasts? That is the question I begin my book with, and my answer is the melody.

The Memorable Part

Think about the last song you couldn’t get out of your head. What was stuck there? Almost certainly the melody: the tune of the chorus, or a line of the verse. Casual listeners rarely remember a drum sound or a synth patch. Most of the time, the melody is the only thing they take away from a track. They can even enjoy a melody on its own, hummed, whistled or sung without any chords or words at all.

Melody is also very old. Long before people built instruments, they sang, and a great deal of traditional folk music is still just a voice and a tune. Together with rhythm, melody was the first music people made. And it is still the most direct musical language we have: it reaches our emotions sooner than anything else in a song.

Melody, Chords and Words

But a melody is never completely on its own in a song. Every modern song is made of three things that have to lock together: the melody, the chord progression underneath it, and the lyrics. I think of the melody as the face of the song. Yet the chords strongly shape how we see that face. The same tune over different chords can sound hopeful or sad, settled or restless. Much of what follows is about exactly that.

The Limits of Production

Here is a claim that surprises many producers. No amount of production can make a generic song sound fresh. A great singer, a polished mix and the latest sounds won’t save a melody and a chord progression that feel predictable and worn out. The reverse is also true. Play a well-written song on one guitar or one piano, sing it, and it still works. Even more important, it still sounds modern.

I once had a private student who was sure his songs needed the very latest sounds and effects to feel current. It was a while before I could persuade him that what makes a song modern lives in its melody and its chord progression. If you want proof, look at some of today’s biggest artists. The Weeknd is a good example: his records often use synths and drums that sound like the 1980s. The surface is retro, but the melodies and chord progressions underneath behave in a modern way. That is why the records feel current rather than like a throwback. And some recent hits barely have an arrangement at all: a voice, a guitar and perhaps a light beat.

Try it with this example. The first version is a full arrangement, with a pad, a bass line and a beat. The second strips it down to the melody and a piano, the way a singer and a pianist might perform it.

The sound changes completely, but the song does not. The melody and the chords carry it in both versions. That is my point. Production can matter, but the writing is the foundation, and production is what you build on top of it.

The Author’s Route

Here is how I came to see this. For a long time I felt that what music schools teach about melody just didn’t add up. Something was missing. At nineteen I was studying jazz, and we were taught to build melodies out of scales. So I learned to play literally every scale in every key on my trumpet, at 200 BPM. Yet I couldn’t write a decent melody with all that technique. Everything I wrote was, honestly, garbage. I could play almost anything, as long as somebody else had written it, but I couldn’t come up with a good melody of my own. I found that contradiction very frustrating.

For the past ten years I have bought every songwriting book and course I came across, and none of them gave me real answers. Every time I dug deeper, I found the same basic, outdated theories repeated again and again. What finally worked was the opposite approach. First I unlearned what music school had taught me and used only my instinct. Then I analysed the melodies of very successful songs to see what they actually do. That mix of instinct and analysis did more for me than any book or course.

The analysis also showed me something that runs through my whole book. The way top songwriters write melodies isn’t fixed; it keeps changing. Techniques that worked well even ten years ago don’t work the same way any more. As I say more than once in the book, a song can last for decades, but the tools for writing new songs go out of date.

Three Dimensions of Melody

Most people treat melody as one-dimensional: they only think about which pitch comes next. Pitch matters, of course. But it’s like trying to judge a sculpture by the shadow it throws on a wall. The shadow gives you the outline, and nothing of the depth.

A melody actually has three dimensions:

• Rhythm: where each note is placed in time. The same pitches feel completely different on the beat and off it. My earlier book, The Rhythm Code, covers this in detail, and so does its companion guide, Rhythm on the Grid.
• The relationship with the key: which degree of the scale each note is. Solfège syllables, DO, RE, MI and so on, give each degree its name.
• The relationship with the chords: whether each note belongs to the chord playing under it.

The last two decide how a melody feels, and yet they have never been clearly pinned down. My emotional map makes them visible by putting both on one picture. And because songs from different decades look different on that picture, the map also shows how listeners’ preferences have changed. It explains why some new songs sound modern and others sound dated the moment you hear them.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at earlier work on these ideas, and at the evidence for this history.

When I first saw these patterns, writing melody suddenly made sense to me. Once you start to see melody this way too, it’s like a light coming on in a dark room.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 5–10, What Stays When Everything Changes.

02The Limits of Old Theory

If music theory explains how music works, why do so many highly trained musicians find it hard to write songs that don’t sound generic? It’s a real irony. My answer is that most theory was built for a different job, and partly for a different era.

Theory for Players

Think how much is happening in a song at any moment: a melody, chords, a rhythm, words, perhaps a second melody weaving round the first. You might expect a well-developed theory of how all of that fits together. In fact there is surprisingly little, and I think I know why. Music schools train people to play: to perform, to master technique, and to interpret music that other people wrote. Writing a song is a completely different skill, and hardly any of us were ever taught it step by step.

In my experience, most songwriters, even very successful ones, still work largely by instinct. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with that. But think about harmony. Nobody expects a new guitarist to discover chords, scales and keys on their own. They are taught them, and that saves years of fumbling. There’s no need for every musician to reinvent the wheel, and songwriting deserves the same kind of head start.

Theory as an Obstacle

I would go further. Traditional, outdated theory can actually hold a modern songwriter back, and it often does more harm than good. Ryan Tedder, among the most successful songwriters of his generation, has said he knows very little theory. He has also said that many of his highly trained musician friends still find it hard to write a really strong song. And many of the biggest songwriters of the last few decades had almost no academic training.

Why would that be? Musicians who learn traditional theory tend to follow its rules, and some of those rules are rigid and describe the music of the past. Writers who are “clueless” about theory have nothing to follow but their own ears and whatever feels right at that moment. That freedom often leads them somewhere fresher.

None of this means theory is bad. It means you need the right theory: a way of thinking that matches how songs actually work today. The right theory is a shortcut. It can spare you years of trial and error, sometimes decades, and show you things you might never have worked out alone.

Testing the Rules

Music has changed a great deal in the last few decades, but much of what music schools teach is centuries old, or at least decades old. Even ten years makes a difference: the way melodies, chords and lyrics behave in today’s hits has moved on noticeably in that time. Not everything old is outdated, but some of it is.

So here is a simple test for any piece of theory you meet. Ask yourself: do today’s songs actually use this, in a real and practical way? If every song a book or a video uses as an example comes from decades ago, be suspicious. And don’t accept a rule just because someone told you.

Here’s an example. Before he came to me, one of my private students paid for an expensive songwriting course. There he was taught that every song must contain the I, IV and V chords. Those are the chords built on the first, fourth and fifth notes of the scale: in C major, C, F and G. That held until the 1990s, but it doesn’t hold any more.

Lessons From History

This isn’t a new problem. We have seen before what happens when people cling to an old musical language once tastes have moved on. Classical music was never meant just to be played as written. Throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, musicians were not only performers. They composed and improvised as a matter of course, and a written score was a starting point they felt free to change.

There’s a scene in the 1984 film Amadeus that shows this. Salieri has written a march to welcome Mozart. Mozart hears it once, then plays the whole thing from memory and improves it on the spot. The scene was probably invented, but it captures how musicians of the time treated a score: as something they could reshape. The idea of a musician who only ever plays other people’s music is largely a twentieth-century invention.

So why did that change? There’s a reason. Those old styles stopped speaking to new listeners, and it took people a long time to see it. That is the trouble: by the time most musicians notice that a style has had its day, the moment to move on has already passed.

Bach is a good example. Composers kept writing in his style for years after his death, but none of them made his mark, because musical taste had already moved elsewhere. Bach’s own sons wrote in a newer style, and audiences preferred their music straight away, which shows how fast a style can date. In the nineteenth century, composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms and Reger made a close study of Bach and wrote pieces in his manner. Critics dismissed the results as “archaic” and “old-fashioned”.

The lesson from history is clear. When a style has peaked, its methods lose their power to make new music. Copying Bach is possible; making a copy of Bach feel current is not. Songwriting works the same way: a great song can stay great for ever, but the techniques used to write it don’t stay fresh.

In the book: pp. 11–15, Why Traditional Music Theory Fails Songwriters.

03Seeing Melody

You can write music entirely by ear. But it is much easier to build something when you can see how it is put together, and in my view melody has been missing a picture of its own.

The Blueprint

Think about a car. When you drive one, you’re just the user, and you never need to see how it was designed. But if you are designing one, a blueprint is essential. It would be nearly impossible to build a car without some kind of plan you can look at.

Music works the same way. The average listener doesn’t need to know that a song has a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus. But the first time you try to finish a song, you find out how much it helps to write the structure down and plan it, so that you always know what comes next. Seeing the system underneath turns guesswork into something deliberate, and makes the whole job so much easier.

If you have worked through my book The Rhythm Code, or Rhythm on the Grid, you already know how much clearer rhythm becomes once you can see exactly where every note sits in the bar. Working without a picture is like finding your way through a maze blindfolded. Working with one is like having the map in your hand. You can make music without any picture at all, but it is slower and harder.

The Limits of a Piano Roll

Now, you might think melody already has its pictures: sheet music, or the piano roll in your DAW. But look at what they actually show: the height of each note, its pitch, and when it plays. Neither one shows how the note feels, or what job it is doing in the music.

Here is a short melody in two versions. The first shows it the way a DAW does, with pitch and timing only. The second shows the same notes with four things added on this page:

• each note’s syllable, written on the note and coloured to match;
• whether the note belongs to the chord underneath: solid if it does, hatched if it does not;
• a ring on the notes heard at each chord change;
• those ringed notes drawn on the emotional map below the roll.

Switch between the two while it plays. The music is identical, but the second picture explains what you hear. The second bar has a slight ache to it, and the third bar leans forward, because the notes at those chord changes do not belong to their chords. The first picture can’t tell you that. From here on, you will learn to read the second kind of picture, and then to hear what it shows without looking.

From Words to a Map

For many years I had been teaching these ideas, in my videos and to my private students, but only in words. Without a picture, they stayed abstract. They were easy to discuss and hard to grasp, because you couldn’t see how the parts fitted together.

Then one day it dawned on me that the thing I’d been describing for years could be drawn. As soon as I pictured it as a map, everything clicked, because the relationships were there to see instead of hiding inside vague descriptions. Melody, I found, can be laid out on a flat, two-dimensional map, and it becomes three-dimensional when you add rhythm.

That map is the subject of The Emotional Map. The chapters before it build up to it step by step. First comes the feeling of stability and tension in general, then the notes that matter most. Then come the map’s two axes, one at a time: the note’s relationship with the key, and its relationship with the chord.

In the book: pp. 17–19, Why Visualizing Music Changes Everything.

04Stability and Tension

Why do some moments in a song lift you, while others leave you hanging? Part of the answer is that music keeps setting up small expectations, and then meets them, delays them or plays with them. Let me give you the words for that push and pull.

Naming the Feeling

Feelings in music are hard to put into words, but I think it is worth trying. A feeling you can name is one you can notice, and a feeling you can notice is one you can use on purpose, as a tool. There are several pairs of words for the same basic idea:

• Tension and release, or stability and instability: whether the music feels settled, or feels as if it needs to move on.
• Sweet and bitter, the pair I like to use myself: a sweet note is pleasant and safe; a bitter one has a sharper taste.
• Calm and excitement: a long note on the beat calms things down, while a quick run that arrives early stirs them up.

Three more words describe how we follow music in time: expectation, predictability and surprise. Imagine a song building towards its chorus. You can feel the chorus coming, and that expectation keeps you listening. If it arrives exactly when you expect, the predictability is comforting. If it arrives a beat early, the surprise is exciting.

And there is contrast, which gives music its depth. A quiet passage makes the loud one that follows sound bigger, and a dark verse makes the chorus after it sound brighter. Without contrast everything sounds flat, because our brains need variety: we feel emotion mostly through change.

The Same Push and Pull in Rhythm

If you know The Rhythm Code, you have met this already, because all of these pairs apply to rhythm too. Notes that land on the beats feel settled and predictable. Anticipated notes, which arrive just before the beat, feel lively and surprising. Every time a songwriter plays with expectations like these, the listener’s brain gets a real boost of dopamine, its reward chemical. That reward is why a melody that does something a little unexpected, but still makes sense, feels so satisfying. (Notes on the Book looks at the evidence for that.)

The secret is balance. When a melody resolves just where you expect it to, it feels safe. When it delays the resolution and keeps you waiting a little longer, it suddenly feels exciting. But if everything is safe, the music becomes boring. And if nothing is predictable, it becomes confusing, and the listener loses touch with it.

Free jazz and experimental music, whatever their merits, are not the most popular styles on the planet, and there’s a reason for that. History shows that playing it too safe can’t last for long either. Modern songs sit between the two: familiar enough to feel grounded, surprising enough to stay interesting.

The Rubber Band

But it’s not only rhythm. Melody notes create the same push and pull. Some notes feel calm and safe. Others feel unexpected, as if they are not quite where the music wants to be. You already know this feeling, whether or not you have ever put it into words.

I think of it as a stretch. Between where the melody is and where we expect it to arrive, there is a small gap, and the listener feels that gap as a kind of inner pull. Our brain holds it like a stretched rubber band. When the melody gets there, the band relaxes, and there is a little moment of relief. That small cycle of stretch and release happens again and again inside a song.

Listen to it here. The first three bars of this phrase are the same in both versions. In the first, the phrase ends on RE, the second note of the scale, over a G chord, and it is left hanging, like a question. In the second, the melody moves on to DO, the home note, as the chord moves home to C, and the phrase closes.

The first version isn’t wrong. A phrase that ends on RE is very useful. It keeps the music open, and it makes the listener want to hear what comes next. You will see in Tension Across a Song that many verses end exactly like this, so that the chorus feels like an arrival.

The Backdrop

The chords add a second layer. A melody note never stands alone: it stands in front of a background, the chord, which I call the backdrop. Put a different chord under the same note, and the note feels different. The chord can support it, so that it sounds stable, or work against it, so that it sounds unexpected.

In this example the melody plays the same E twice. The first time, the chord underneath is C major, which contains E, and the note sounds settled. The second time, the chord is D minor, which does not contain E, and the same note sounds a little less settled, as if it were rubbing gently against the chord.

This is why two melodies with exactly the same notes can feel worlds apart. On paper they look identical, but the chords under them shift the balance of stability and tension. Listeners never think about any of this. They simply feel that one song is dull and another one is interesting.

Moving Between the Two

Our brains keep score. They track how long the music stays comfortable and how long it stays uneasy. Too much comfort, and a song starts to sound flat. Too much unease, and it becomes exhausting to listen to. In modern songs, the sweet spot is to keep moving between the two in a way that means something.

Good songwriters manage all this by instinct. They may not be able to explain it, but they sense when a verse should stay a little unsettled and when a chorus should land. In other words, they are deliberately shaping stability and tension, even if they know none of the theory.

Once you start listening for this, a melody stops sounding like a string of notes. It sounds like a series of choices: comfort here, friction there, and a decision each time about how long to stay.

In the book: pp. 21–25, The Psychology of Stability and Tension.

05The Most Important Notes

Of course, every note in a melody matters. But some matter more than others, because the ear holds on to them while the rest slip by. So before we analyse a single melody, we need to know which notes those are.

The Weight of Each Note

Think about how little material a song really has. A pop song lasts three or four minutes, and it usually has only two or three sections that repeat. Some songs are little more than a verse and a chorus, each heard several times over, with the same tune and new words. So the number of different melody notes in a song is surprisingly small, and the fewer there are, the more each one counts.

Even so, your brain does not give every note the same attention. Without your noticing, it latches on to some notes and lets others pass. I call these anchor notes. They are the backbone of the melody, and the notes in between connect them. When I analyse a melody, the anchor notes are the ones I look at first, and in many songs I don’t need to look at every note.

The Five Kinds of Anchor Note

Here is my list of the notes that shape a melody’s feel the most:

• notes at the chord changes, the most important of all for everything that follows;
• repeated, static notes, because a note sung several times in a row is emphasised by the repetition;
• longer notes, because a held note has time to be heard against the chord;
• starting notes, the first note of a phrase or a section;
• ending notes, the last note of a phrase or a section, where the melody stops, whether it comes to rest there or is left hanging.

Most of these are obvious once you hear them. The first one needs a little explaining.

The Notes at the Chord Changes

Most of the time, a new chord arrives on the first beat of a bar. Sometimes the chords change only every second bar, or every fourth, but even then the change tends to come on a first beat. So the melody note that goes with a chord change is usually the one sung on that first beat: the note that arrives together with the new chord. Keep in mind, though, that this note sometimes comes a little early; you will see how at the end of this chapter.

Why do these notes matter so much? Because each chord change feels like a new place the melody has reached. And above all, at that moment the ear is waiting to hear something particular. The way the melody meets each new chord does a great deal to set the feel of the whole melody. Of course, several things shape the feel at once, such as how predictable its rhythm is. But the way it meets the chords is one of the most important.

Here is a four-bar melody with a new chord in every bar. The ringed notes are the notes at each chord change. Play it, then press Changes only and play it again.

With only the four ringed notes left, E, D, G and D, you can still hear the shape of the line. The other twelve notes decorate and connect them, but these four carry it. The cards under the roll show what each ringed note is doing against its chord, and the map below plots them. You will learn to read both over the next few chapters.

Notice the other kinds of anchor note in this example too. The melody starts on E and ends on C, its starting and ending notes. And the notes held longest, such as the D at the start of bar four, carry more weight than the quick notes between them.

Anticipated Notes

There is one complication. A note can be anticipated: played half a beat early, an eighth note before the beat it belongs to. (I go into anticipation in depth in The Rhythm Code, and its companion, Rhythm on the Grid, covers it too.) A melody note can anticipate a chord change in exactly this way. It starts just before the new chord and is held across the change, and then it belongs to the new chord, not the old one.

Look at the B at the end of bar one. It starts half a beat before the G major chord arrives and is held across the bar line, so it is heard against G, not against C. The same thing happens with the G at the end of bar two, which belongs to the E minor chord that follows. That is why both are ringed, and why each is drawn solid: B belongs to G major, and G belongs to E minor.

So when you look for the note at a chord change, look first at the note that starts with the chord. If nothing starts there, look for a note that started just before and is still sounding. An anticipated note is easy to miss, so keep an eye out for it.

In the book: pp. 27–30, The Notes That Define the Melody’s Feel.

06Solfège

Most people think every melody note is the same kind of thing, just at a different height. I am convinced that this is exactly why their melodies fail to move anyone. The truth is that each note of a key has its own feel, and solfège is the way to name it.

Seven Notes, Seven Characters

A song is usually in a key, which means it is built from a set of seven notes, its scale, with one of them as home. In C major the seven notes are C, D, E, F, G, A and B, the white keys of a piano, and C is home.

Solfège gives each of those seven notes a syllable according to its place in the scale: DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA and TI. In a major key, DO is always the home note, RE the second note of the scale, MI the third, and so on. In the book I call the system by its older name, solmization. Some countries use SI instead of TI for the seventh note; I always use TI.

The important word is “always”. The syllables do not belong to particular pitches. They belong to positions in the key. In C major, DO is C. In G major, DO is G. In any major key, the home note is DO, and the other syllables follow from it. (Minor keys work slightly differently: their home note is LA, as you will see in the next chapter.)

This brings me to my central claim about the key: each syllable has a distinctive feel, and that feel stays the same whatever the key. DO always sounds like home, like arriving. FA always sounds strained, as if something hurts a little. In other words, the feel of a note comes from its position in the key, not from its pitch.

Hear it for yourself. The player below sets the key with four chords, then plays the syllable you choose on its own. Try a few syllables in one key, then switch key and try the same ones again.

A Little History

The syllables are nearly a thousand years old. In the eleventh century, a monk called Guido of Arezzo used them to help singers learn chants by ear. He took UT, RE, MI, FA, SOL and LA from the first syllables of the lines of a hymn, Ut queant laxis. So his system had only six notes, and no seventh.

In the nineteenth century, an English music teacher, Sarah Anna Glover, turned the syllables into a system of relative pitch, called the Norwich Sol-fa. Instead of standing for fixed pitches, the syllables stood for relationships within the key. John Curwen developed her work into Tonic Sol-fa, and he took the idea further still. In his teaching, every degree of the scale had a character of its own, which he called its “mental effect”: DO was strong, MI calm, FA desolate and TI piercing. So Curwen had already noticed, more than a century ago, one of the ideas my book is built on: each note of a key has its own emotional colour.

I learned solfège at music school from the age of eight, and nobody ever told me what it was for. For years I was sure it was completely useless. And honestly, in a way I was right. If you only play music that other people have written, solfège is fairly useless: you just follow the notes on the page. You never need to understand what makes a melody work, since you are not writing one.

I know this from my own experience. I spent ten years playing classical music, and music only started to make sense to me when I moved on to jazz improvisation, and then to songwriting. I am not the only one, either. More than one friend of mine with a classical music degree from the Academy of Music has told me they realised they knew nothing about how music works. But the moment you try to write a melody, solfège becomes one of the most useful things you can know, because it tells you how each note will feel.

Transposing

Here is one way to see that the syllables, not the pitches, carry the feel. Say a song was written for a tenor, and your voice is lower, a baritone’s. You can move the whole song down into a lower key: every note and every chord moves by the same amount. That is called transposing. Every single pitch is now different, and yet the song sounds like the same song. Most listeners could not tell you that anything had changed.

Switch between the two keys. Every letter name changes, but every syllable stays where it was: MI, SO, MI, then RE, TI, RE, and so on. The tune is the same because the relationships between its notes are the same. That is what I mean when I say that music is all about relationships, not absolute pitches.

You may have seen the famous, or infamous, video by the Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome. In it they sing dozens of hit songs, one after another, over the same four chords, repeated in one key. What they don’t mention is that the original recordings are in many different keys. And yet every song is instantly recognisable over the group’s chords. The lesson is simple: we hear music through its relationships, not through its pitches.

That is why it is better to think of a chord progression in Roman numerals than in chord names. I is the chord built on DO, ii the chord built on RE, and so on; capitals mean major chords and small letters minor ones. The loop in that video is I – V – vi – IV, and it is the same progression in any key. Solfège does the same job for melody notes that Roman numerals do for chords.

The Same Pitch in Two Roles

So what does a C feel like in a melody? There is no single answer, because it depends on the key. In C major, C is DO, and it feels like arrival. In G major, C is FA, and it feels tense and unresolved. It is exactly the same note, with two completely different feelings.

Both versions end on the same C, held over the same C major chord. In the first version we are in C major, so that C is DO, and the phrase has come home. In the second, the first three bars set up G major, so the final C is FA, and the phrase is left leaning forward, waiting for something more. On the map, watch the last dot: as DO it sits at the far left, the stable end; as FA it jumps to the far right.

I like to think of a pitch as an actor. Whatever film you cast him in, he is the same person, with the same face and the same voice. The key is the film. In one film he plays the hero, and everything about him feels safe and settled; that is C as DO. In another he plays the villain, and something about him is unsettling and unresolved; that is C as FA. The actor hasn’t changed, but his role has, and so has the emotion. The letter name C tells you which actor it is. The syllable tells you which role he is playing, and so how you will feel about him.

I also like to describe the syllables as flavours. To me, DO tastes sweet, while FA tastes of lemon. Change the key and a note can taste slightly different, because of its register and the way the instrument resonates, but the flavour stays the same. A FA in another key may be a slightly different lemon, but it is still lemon.

Unconscious Hearing

And to be clear, you don’t need any theory to feel any of this. Everyone feels the strain of a FA and the sweetness of a DO; that is simply how melody works on us. It all happens unconsciously. Solfège brings the feeling up to a conscious level and gives it a label, so that you can use it on purpose instead of guessing blindly.

So the skill to develop is hearing a melody note and knowing its syllable. You don’t need perfect pitch to do it: the rare ability to name a note with nothing to compare it with. You need relative pitch: hearing each note by its relationship to the others, and above all to home. Anyone can develop relative pitch with practice, and Training Your Ear gives you a way to start.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 31–36, Relationship With the Key.

07Stable and Unstable Syllables

Each note of the key now has a name and a character. Next, I am going to put the seven in order: from the most stable, the one that feels most at rest, to the most unstable, the one that most wants to move.

The Order of Stability

First, what do “stable” and “unstable” mean? They are simply one way of describing how a melody note feels, and you will soon see the theory behind them as well. A stable note sounds settled: you could stop on it. An unstable note sounds as if it is on its way somewhere: stop on it and the music feels unfinished. Here is how I rank the syllables, from the most stable down to the least:

DO, the home note, is the most stable. FA, the note that sounds as if something hurts a little, is the least stable of all. Play them in this order below and listen to the feeling change as you move along the row. Each syllable is played after the key has been set, so that your ear knows where home is.

Try playing DO and then FA, and then DO and then MI. Even on their own, outside any melody, DO and MI feel like places to rest, while FA feels like a step that needs another step after it.

The Logic of the Order

There are a few things you can learn from this order, and two of them will also help you remember it.

First, look at the three most stable syllables, DO, SO and MI. They are the three notes of the home chord. In C major they are C, G and E, which together make the C major chord, the I chord. Those notes sound at rest because the home chord is where the key itself comes to rest.

Second, the first five syllables, DO, SO, MI, LA and RE, make up the pentatonic scale: the five-note scale DO, RE, MI, SO, LA. You find it in folk music all over the world, in Asia, Africa and Europe. It is almost a universal musical language, one that people seem to be drawn to by nature. And it is ancient: bone flutes about 40,000 years old have been found tuned to it.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at what is actually known about how these flutes were tuned.

That leaves TI and FA at the unstable end, and standard music theory offers a good reason for that. TI and FA are the two notes of the scale outside the pentatonic, and each sits just a half step from a note of the home chord. A half step is the smallest step there is, from one key of the piano to the very next. B and C are neighbouring white keys with no black key between them, and so are E and F.

So TI sits a half step below DO, and FA a half step above MI. Notes that close to a resting point sound as if they are leaning into it. That is why TI pulls so strongly up to DO, and FA down to MI.

Pentatonic Melodies

Because the pentatonic notes are the most stable, a melody built only from them sounds smooth and easy. And the scale is not just a relic of the past; it is still very much alive in today’s songs. Take the melody of Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. There is not a single FA or TI in it: it is built entirely from the five pentatonic syllables. That is the song I use in the book, and the melody below is built the same way. Its second version adds FA and TI.

The first version flows without friction. The second has more pull to it. The Fs in bars three and four, and the Bs scattered through the line, give it a sense of leaning and wanting. Neither is better; they simply feel different, and now you know why.

Here is a habit I would like you to pick up. When you listen to your favourite songs, try to catch the syllables of the notes that grab your attention, such as the opening note of a chorus. Is it DO? SO? RE? You will not always be sure at first, but asking the question is how your ear learns.

Minor Keys

You might be wondering about minor keys. The short answer is that the syllables stay exactly the same. In a major key the home note, the tonal centre, is DO. In a minor key it is LA. So A minor uses the same seven notes as C major, the white keys, and the same syllables, with A, LA, as the note the melody comes home to. (In the Dorian mode a song can treat RE as home, but that is very rare.)

Listen to the last note. The phrase ends on A, LA, over an A minor chord, and it has come home. And my order of stability does not change in a minor key. Each syllable keeps its own character whether the key is major or minor, and even in one of the rarer modes, such as Phrygian.

Guide note These notes follow that single order: the map still draws this final LA on the middle line, as it does every LA, even though here LA is home. Notes on the Book questions keeping one order in minor keys.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 37–40, Relationship With the Key.

08Chord Tones

Every melody note relates to the key, and solfège gives that relationship a name. But each note also relates to the chord playing under it. This chapter is about that second relationship, and in my experience it is the one most writers get wrong.

Two Contexts at Once

I believe one reason melody has been so hard to figure out is that everyone has looked at it in isolation. But no melody lives in a vacuum. Listeners always hear it against two backgrounds at the same moment: the key, which gives each note its syllable, and the chords, which change every bar or so. They take in both without thinking about it. A note can be stable in the key and yet clash with the chord under it, or unstable in the key and yet sit comfortably inside the chord. To understand how a note feels, you need both.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at earlier work on how melody notes sit against the key and the chord.

Chords as Triads

In the book, and here too, when I say chord I mean a triad: three notes stacked a third apart, called the root, the third and the fifth. “A third apart” means every other note of the scale: start on C, skip D, take E, skip F, take G. The root is the note the chord is named after. A C major chord is C, E and G. An F major chord is F, A and C. An A minor chord is A, C and E.

Chords made only from the notes of the key are called diatonic chords. A major key has seven, one on each note of the scale. In C major they are:

• I C major: C, E, G
• ii D minor: D, F, A
• iii E minor: E, G, B
• IV F major: F, A, C
• V G major: G, B, D
• vi A minor: A, C, E
• vii° B diminished: B, D, F

I usually leave out the seventh, B diminished, because it is hardly ever used in modern songs. The other six are the chords that nearly every song you know is built from.

Chord Tones and Non-Chord Tones

Now for the key idea. At any moment, the melody note either belongs to the chord playing underneath or it does not. If it is one of the chord’s three notes, it is a chord tone. If it is any other note of the key, it is a non-chord tone.

Take the key of C major. When the chord is C major, C, E and G are chord tones, while D, F, A and B are non-chord tones. Now suppose the next chord is F major. We are still in C major, but everything has changed: F, A and C are now the chord tones, and G, B, D and E have become the non-chord tones. The E that was a chord tone a moment ago is now a non-chord tone. Every time the chord changes, the chord tones change with it.

Here is the scale played straight up over C major and then again over F major. Remember the rule for reading the roll: solid notes are chord tones, hatched notes are non-chord tones.

Over C, the solid notes are C, E and G, plus the C at the top. Over F, the solid ones shift to C, F and A, plus the top C again. Notice that C is a chord tone over both chords, because both C major and F major contain it, while E is solid over C and hatched over F. Listen too: the chord tones melt into the chord, and the non-chord tones rub against it slightly.

One more detail. Because I count only the three notes of the triad, a note that would make a richer chord still counts as a non-chord tone. A B over C, for example, would turn C major into C major seven, yet here it is a non-chord tone.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at styles such as R&B and jazz, where a seventh on top of a chord is usually heard as part of it.

The First Beat

Chords usually change on the first beat of a bar. So the note you choose for the melody on that first beat, as the new chord arrives, does a great deal to decide how the melody feels, and how the whole song feels. These are the notes at each chord change, the most important kind of anchor note in The Most Important Notes, and this is why they matter.

It comes down to predictability. At a chord change, we expect the melody to land on a chord tone, because that is what our ears have heard thousands of times. When the melody does, it feels safe. When it does so at every single change, it feels too safe, and safe soon turns into boring. That is exactly what the next chapter is about.

In the book: pp. 41–42 and 50–52, Relationship With the Chords.

09The Sweetness Problem

Ask almost anyone who teaches melody, and you will hear the same rule: follow the chord tones. I think that rule, applied at every chord change, is one of the main things that makes a brand-new song sound old. It is one of the central ideas of my book.

Predictable Melodies

I have analysed thousands of modern songs, and one of the biggest things they taught me is that melodies do not always follow the chord tones. In fact, a melody that follows them from start to finish tends to leave a song sounding generic and dated today.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at the song analysis behind this claim.

Don’t misunderstand me. A chord tone in your melody is not wrong. Technically, it is perfect, and of course it sounds good with its chord. So I am not talking about good and bad notes. I am talking about predictability. A melody that hits a chord tone at each change gives the listener exactly what they expect, every single time. That is what makes it feel safe and sweet and, in the end, dull.

Listen to the difference. The chords are the same in both versions. In the first, the note at every chord change belongs to its chord. In the second, three of the four do not.

Both versions are perfectly musical. But the first sounds like something you have heard many times before. The second has a little more life in it, because at three of the four changes the melody does not land where you expect.

So-Called Mistakes

I have noticed something interesting about people trained in traditional music theory. They often hear modern songs as slightly wrong, because those songs break the rules they were taught. At the same time, they can see that the songs are hugely successful, and to them that feels like a contradiction.

A retired music professor who had read one of my books summed up this attitude. He said I might be “onto something big”, but that my ideas were better suited to young musicians with open minds than to someone like him, raised on traditional notation. Put simply, he felt too old for it.

My answer is this. What traditional theory calls a mistake is, in a modern song, usually deliberate. The songwriter may have no theory to explain it, but their instinct is steering them away from notes that would make the song sound dated.

The funny part is that I used to be one of those people. As a young musician I studied classical music and jazz, so I had a fixed picture of how a song ought to sound, and I could not stand modern songs. Then I analysed hundreds of them and learned why they work the way they do, unlearning some of what I had been taught. And something clicked. I remember hearing a song I used to hate and loving it. It was the strangest experience.

It reminded me of the spinning dancer, the optical illusion of a woman’s silhouette that seems to turn one way and then, suddenly, the other. Which way it turns depends only on how your brain reads it. My hearing switched in exactly that way.

This is not the first time a so-called mistake has become the standard. Think of guitar distortion. When electric guitars were new, a distorted tone counted as a technical fault, and players did all they could to avoid it. Then some of them heard attitude and emotion in that broken, fuzzy sound. They began to overdrive their amplifiers on purpose, and later came pedals made to produce the same fault whenever you wanted it. Nowadays a clean, polite guitar on a rock record is what sounds wrong. A whole style grew out of what was once an error.

Sugar

Here is a comparison I will keep coming back to: sugar. A chord tone in a melody is good in the same way that sugar is good. A slice of cake now and then is a real pleasure. But would you put sugar in every meal you eat? Probably not. A melody built on chord tones from beginning to end is a diet of nothing but cake.

Anyone who grew up in the 1990s, as I did, remembers how enormous the teen-pop acts were: Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, NSYNC. It’s no secret now that many of those hits came from one songwriter and producer, Max Martin. People loved that music for its sweetness, and a big part of the sweetness came from melodies that kept landing on chord tones.

But sweetness at every meal wears thin. Everyone loves the idea of a day in a cake shop where you can eat as much as you like. Now imagine being locked in there for years, eating nothing but cake. By the time they let you out, another slice would be the last thing you ever wanted to see.

In my view, this is precisely what happened around 2001, when hip hop artists such as Eminem took over the charts. People had had enough of the sugary melodies of 90s pop. Rap verses ran on rhythm and attitude rather than big, sweet tunes. Next to the pop that came before, it was as if the voice had stopped singing on the chords. After years of cake every day, at last we could have a steak and a beer.

Pop itself has changed a great deal since then. I know plenty of people who still dismiss it as the same sugar-coated music as in the 90s. It isn’t. Look at Max Martin. In the 90s he was the most sought-after pop producer in the world, but when that first wave of teen pop collapsed, his sound briefly went out of fashion. He had to change, and consciously or not, he found what worked. Soon he was back on top of the charts, writing hits for artists such as Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry. One of the things he changed is that his melodies began deliberately avoiding chord tones at the changes.

Mozart’s Example

Avoiding the chord tones at a chord change is not a twenty-first-century invention. Composers were doing it hundreds of years ago; the most famous example is Mozart. In the book I show it in his Eine kleine Nachtmusik, from 1787. In the main theme, only the opening note belongs to its chord. At every chord change after that, the melody lands outside the chord and then moves onto it.

I’ll be honest about how big the effect is. In the book I also show the theme rewritten with a chord tone on the first beat of each new chord, and the difference is not huge. Both versions sound correct, but the original feels more alive. I have not analysed a great deal of classical music, but this does not sound like an accident to me. Earlier composers relied far more on chord tones at moments like these, and that is what made Mozart’s approach new. In his own day, he was thought bold for the way he played with what listeners expected.

The phrase below is built the same way. In the first version, the melody begins on a chord tone, and then every chord change lands a step away from the chord and moves onto it a moment later. In the second version, every change lands straight on a chord tone. Play each a few times. The difference is small, so let your ear decide.

Look at the cards under the roll. In the first version, the second, third and fourth changes land on non-chord tones: a C over G, which then falls to B; an F over C, which falls to E; and an E over G, which falls to D. Classical musicians have a name for a note like this, which leans on the beat and then resolves by a step: an appoggiatura. The second version is tidier and plainer. And that is the point. Hold back the note your listener is waiting for on the first beat, and the melody gains feeling and interest. Great writers have known this for centuries.

The 90s Syndrome

Over the past few years I have worked as a producer with many songwriters, and by far their most common problem was that their songs sounded dated, although they had only just been written. Many of them were very talented: good players, good singers, writers with real ideas. At first I hesitated to tell them, because I was afraid of offending them and losing clients. In the end I was honest with them: their new songs sounded old.

I gave the problem a name: “the 90s syndrome”, a new song that sounds as if it comes from the 90s, and not in a good way. I set out to track down its causes, and I soon found one of the main ones in the melody: every melody note that lands on a chord change is a chord tone.

Modern songwriters steer away from chord tones when the chord changes, and they do it on purpose. Not always, but often. And this is not just theory: listeners feel it too, even if they could never say what it is. I tried it on my wife. She isn’t a musician, but when I played her the same song in two versions, one written the old way and one the modern way, she picked out the dated one straight away. And she loves 90s songs.

So this is not about hating older songs. People often misunderstand me on this point. Think of the Mona Lisa. Nobody thinks it is a bad painting. But if you painted a new picture in exactly that style today, no gallery would want to hang it, because it would look generic. That has already been done. It is the same with songs. The old techniques produced great songs, but use them to write new ones, and the result sounds like something we have already heard.

Finally, keep in mind that a song can sound dated for reasons other than its melody. Its chord progressions and lyrics can do it too. My book deals mainly with melody, and so do these pages; Changing the Backdrop looks at the chords.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 42–52, Relationship With the Chords.

10Training Your Ear

“How do I actually use this when I write?” It is one of the questions I hear most often from people who read my books or take my courses. My answer is that theory only becomes useful once you can feel it, and the way to feel it is to train your ear.

Feeling the Theory

Understanding an idea is one thing. Using it while you write is another. To use any piece of theory, you need to know how it feels, so that you can reach for it without stopping to work it out. So your intuition needs training, and you train it through your ears, by learning to recognise these ideas when you hear them. I think of this as connecting your intuition with your logic. Once your ear recognises a sweet note or a tense one, you are no longer just guessing when you write. You know when you are adding tension and when you are adding sweetness, and you can choose. You are writing with intention.

I realise it would be much easier to learn a few formulas and work out the right notes on paper. Training your ears takes real work. And yes, there are patterns you can borrow from successful songs. But formulas go stale, as the earlier chapters showed. A trained ear does not. It keeps telling you what genuinely works in a melody, rather than what a rule allows, so it always stays one step ahead of the formulas.

When I started writing songs, it was all guesswork, and my melodies did not always hang together. Then I understood a few things, such as when to avoid chord tones, and my songwriting jumped forward.

Two Skills

There are two skills to practise, one for each of the map’s two axes (the next chapter, The Emotional Map, puts them together):

• recognising melody notes as syllables: hearing that a note is MI or RE or TI in the key of the song;
• recognising whether a melody note is a chord tone or a non-chord tone against the chord under it.

Can you really learn this? Yes, absolutely. If you can recognise a song you know, you can learn to recognise syllables. It is the same skill, because both depend on relative pitch: hearing notes by their relationships to each other, not by their exact pitch. Anyone can develop it. And relative pitch is not only about naming intervals and chords. It is also about hearing how a note sits in its key and against its chord.

In fact, your brain already does this, without your noticing. That is simply the way music works. You only enjoy it at all because your brain picks up these relationships. So what you are practising is bringing that recognition up to the surface and giving it a name.

Practising the Syllables

This drill plays four chords to set a key, then a single note. Name its syllable. Each question picks a key at random, so you cannot rely on remembering a pitch: you have to hear the note’s relationship to home.

Start with Five notes, the five pentatonic syllables DO, RE, MI, SO and LA. When you can name those reliably, switch to All seven. If you are unsure, press Hear DO and sing from DO up the scale to the note you heard, counting the syllables as you go. That is slow at first, but it trains exactly the right connection. With practice the counting disappears, and you simply know.

Practising Chord Tones

This drill plays one of the six chords of C major, C, D minor, E minor, F, G or A minor, with one note on top. Decide whether the note belongs to the chord.

Listen to whether the top note melts into the chord, as if it were part of it, or rubs against it, as if it were standing slightly apart. That melting or rubbing is exactly what the solid and hatched notes on the rolls are drawing.

A Daily Habit

A few minutes a day is enough. Once the drills feel comfortable, take the skill to real songs, because that is where it pays off. Play a song you know, pause it at a chord change, and ask two questions about the melody note you just heard. What is its syllable? Is it in the chord? You will often be unsure at first, and that is fine. Every time you ask, your ear gets a little better.

Most ear-training apps are built on traditional notation. I have made two apps of my own, one for each of these two skills, and neither uses any notation at all, so you can use them even if you can’t read sheet music. You’ll find them on my website; the address is printed in the book.

In the book: pp. 53–55, How to Train Your Intuition.

11The Emotional Map

A melody note has a place in the key and a relationship with its chord, and both shape how it feels at the same moment. The emotional map is how I see both at once.

Two Axes

For years I knew that a melody note’s feel came from two relationships, one with the key and one with the chord. Both work on the listener at the same time, but I could not see how to bring them together. I felt that something was missing, without knowing what it was.

Then one day it came to me: why not draw the two relationships as the axes of a graph? I pictured the syllables along a horizontal line, then turned the other relationship, chord tone or not, to stand upright across it. It was a eureka moment, and looking back, it seems so simple. I had not analysed a single song with it yet, but I knew I was onto something. Here is how it works.

• The horizontal axis is the key. The seven syllables are laid out in their order of stability, from DO on the left, the most stable, to FA on the right, the least stable.
• The vertical axis is the chord. A note that belongs to its chord, a chord tone, goes above the line. A note that does not, a non-chord tone, goes below it.

The two axes cross at LA, in the middle of the row. Everything to the left of that point is on the stable side, and everything to the right is on the unstable side. LA itself sits right on the dividing line.

Guide note The book does not say which side LA belongs to. These notes plot a LA on the middle line rather than in one of the four areas, and the cards under the rolls call it “on the middle line”. Notes on the Book says more.

The rest of the map divides into four areas, which I number from the most settled to the most tense:

1. Stable, top left: a stable syllable that is also a chord tone. This is the sweetest, most settled place a note can be. MI over a C major chord, for example: MI is stable, and E is part of C major.
2. Less stable, bottom left: a stable syllable that is not in the chord. One step less settled. SO over A minor, for example: SO is stable, but G is not part of A minor.
3. Tense, top right: an unstable syllable that is a chord tone. RE over G major, for example: RE is on the unstable side, but D is part of G major.
4. Very tense, bottom right: an unstable syllable that is not in the chord. The most tension a note can carry. FA over C major, for example: FA is the least stable syllable, and F is not part of C major.

If the numbers feel too abstract, there is a simpler way to think of it. The top-left area feels sweet, and the bottom-right area feels bitter. Notice the order of the middle two areas. In my ranking, a stable syllable outside the chord (area 2) is less tense than an unstable syllable inside it (area 3).

Hearing the Four Areas

Each version of this example leads into one held note at the start of bar two, and only that note is plotted. Listen to each one and see where it lands.

The first, MI over C, simply settles. The second, SO over A minor, is still calm but has a soft ache to it. The third, RE over G, sits comfortably in its chord, yet it still feels as if the music is in mid-sentence. The fourth, FA over C, clashes with its chord and pulls hard towards resolution.

The opening example, at the very top of the page, was written to land in all four areas: MI over A minor (stable), SO over F (less stable), RE over C (very tense) and RE over G (tense). Scroll back up and play it again with the map in mind.

Notes to Plot

To use the map, you mark a song’s melody notes on it as dots. You do not usually need every note. Remember from The Most Important Notes that some notes shape the feel far more than others. Most of the time, the notes where the chords change are enough, especially when the question is whether a note is a chord tone.

It depends on the song, though. Some sections have no chord changes at all: a whole verse can sit on a single chord. And some melodies repeat one note several times, which gives that note extra weight. In cases like these, it is worth plotting every melody note. One example later on, in Anchoring the One, does exactly that; its map is headed “The melody on the map”.

Once the dots are on the map, you can see at a glance the overall balance of a melody: how much of it is sweet, how much bitter, and how much in between. And as you will see in the next chapters, you can compare songs from different decades and watch how that balance has shifted over time.

In the book: pp. 57–61, The Emotional Map.

12The Sweet Decades

Put the melodies of hit songs from different decades on the map, and a pattern appears. This chapter looks at the songs of the 1980s and 1990s, which, when I plot them, crowd into the sweet corner.

Expectation and Surprise

Why should avoiding chord tones make a melody more exciting? I have already said that following them everywhere can make a melody too sweet, too predictable and, in the end, dated. But there is more to it. Avoiding them is also a way of playing with what the listener expects.

Think of rhythm. We expect notes to land on the beats, which is exactly why a part with every note on the beat sounds dull. Anticipate some of the notes, placing them just before the beat, and the rhythm comes alive, because it is less predictable. Chord tones work the same way. At a chord change we expect a chord tone, so a melody that always delivers one is predictable. A melody that sometimes avoids it surprises us, and a surprise that still makes sense is one of the things we enjoy most in music.

In fact, I would go further. When a melody steers around the chord tones on purpose, it gives your brain a real boost of dopamine, its reward chemical. There is research linking musical pleasure closely to prediction and surprise, and in the book I cite a study to back this up.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at what that study actually measured.

A Century of Chord Tones

Interestingly, popular melodies hardly changed in this respect for almost a hundred years, right up to the 2000s. Landing on chord tones at the changes was simply how melodies were written. Then, in the 1990s, pop became more commercial than ever before. One production sound, much of it Max Martin’s, ruled the charts all over the world. Radio and music television everywhere played the same few dozen songs, again and again, every single day. The result, I believe, was an overdose of sweet melodies. We were all locked in the cake shop.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at how far this history holds.

The Songs on the Map

In the book I put several hits from these decades on the map, plotting the melody note at each chord change. For example:

• Phil Collins’s Against All Odds (1984): almost every note at a chord change is a chord tone, and there is nothing at all in the very tense area at the bottom right.
• Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven (1991): even more typical, with every note at every chord change a chord tone.
• Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way (1999): almost every note is a chord tone, and the dots crowd into the sweetest corner, top left. Most of them are DO on a chord tone, the most stable combination there is, and there is not a single FA, the least stable syllable, in the whole song.

The melody below is written in that style. Look where its dots land.

Every ringed note is a chord tone, and every one is DO or SO. All four dots sit in the top-left area. It is a pleasant melody, and it would have fitted perfectly on the radio in 1998. That is exactly the problem I am describing.

Again, this does not mean the songs I plot are bad in any way. Tears in Heaven is a beautiful song. My point is about new songs. Write a new melody that way today, with nothing but chord tones at the changes, and the result sounds generic and dated. This is the 90s syndrome again, and it is not just theory: music fans feel it. Your song may be perfectly fine, but the listener feels they have heard it a million times before, even if they cannot say why.

Listening List

Listen for the note the melody lands on each time the chord changes. In these songs it nearly always sounds settled.

In the book: pp. 63–67, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

13The Turn Towards Tension

After the sweet decades, the dots on the map start to move. They drop below the line, and they drift to the right, towards tension. In this chapter we follow that change from 2001 onwards.

2001

I see 2001 as a turning point for mainstream music. Around that time, the typical sweet pop of the 1990s fell sharply out of favour, and hip hop was fast becoming one of the most popular genres. Look at Billboard’s year-end chart for 2001. The biggest song of the year was not a pop song at all. It was an alternative rock song, Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment.

Take the important notes of its chorus, the ones that arrive with each new chord, and plot them on the map. The picture is already very different from the 1990s. More of them land in the bottom-right corner, the very tense area, than anywhere else. But a few sit on the stable side too, so the chorus as a whole is balanced: sweet and bitter together.

Fewer Notes

Compare this map with the ones from the 1990s, and a second difference shows up. Those older melodies ran through nearly every note of the scale. This one does not. The backbone of Hanging by a Moment is built from just three syllables.

Some people take that as proof that older songs were richer. There has even been research claiming that modern hits have simpler melodies, with fewer different notes. It all comes down to what “richer” means. I would turn the argument round. Using fewer chords and fewer notes is a sign that modern songs are more sophisticated, not less. They don’t spell everything out for you, and they don’t over-explain the emotion.

Jazz went through something similar. In the late 1940s, Miles Davis introduced cool jazz. The bebop players before him packed every bar with notes. Davis set out to play fewer notes and chords, on purpose, and the notes he left out came to matter as much as the ones he played. The aim was no longer to show off everything you knew. It was to say more with less. And that is exactly the shift happening in songwriting now.

The same idea turns up in the other arts, even in architecture. It was the architect Mies van der Rohe who gave us the phrase “less is more”.

Guide note Notes on the Book traces the phrase back further than Mies van der Rohe.

Painting raises the same question. Is a picture that looks exactly like a photograph really better than a minimalist one? I don’t think so; if anything, it’s the other way round. These days, photorealistic painting is often thought of as kitsch.

Here is a chorus written in the same spirit as Hanging by a Moment. It uses only three syllables, MI, RE and DO, and it repeats the same two notes a great deal.

Now look at the map. There are very few different notes, and yet the four chord changes land in four different areas. MI over A minor is stable, and MI over F is less stable. RE over C is very tense, and RE over G is tense. The melody hardly moves at all. It is the chords moving underneath it that create the balance of sweet and bitter. We will come back to this idea in Changing the Backdrop.

Too Much Tension

Hanging by a Moment was not the first hit with this much tension. Back in 1991, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was already full of it, and yet it only reached number 32 on Billboard’s year-end chart. Its chorus is probably the edgiest one I have ever put on the map. At every single chord change, the melody sits on one of the most unstable syllables.

Maybe Nirvana were simply ahead of their time. Or maybe they went too far in the other direction, and too much tension can be just as wrong as too much sweetness. More is not always better in music. Think of salt. Most of us like some in our food, but piling on more does not make a dish better. It spoils it, just as too much sugar does.

The phrase below goes to that same extreme.

Every chord change lands on TI, RE or FA, and none of them belongs to its chord, so every dot ends up in the very tense corner. A beat later, each one moves onto a chord tone, which keeps the phrase musical. Even so, the overall effect is restless and raw.

Pop melodies have grown edgier over the years, but I still haven’t come across one with this much edge, not even among the songs of 2025. Those lean slightly towards tension, but overall they stay balanced. Will choruses like this become the next trend? Who knows.

Balance in Pop

As the years went by, even pop writers who had leaned towards the sweet side began to move towards a more balanced melody. They used more unstable notes, and above all more non-chord tones.

It even shows up within the songs of a single artist. In the book I use two by Taylor Swift. On the map of Love Story, the melody lands on DO as a chord tone at most of the changes. That is the most stable combination there is, and it is probably why the song feels on the sweet side. But non-chord tones are already creeping in, even though the melody still uses every syllable, just like a 1990s song.

The map of Everything Has Changed, from 2012, is much more balanced. It has more tension, less sweetness, and fewer different syllables at the changes. I believe this is part of the reason Taylor Swift’s career has lasted so long. Knowingly or not, she has kept changing her melodies in exactly this way.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 67–72, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

14Tension Across a Song

A song is not one melody but several: a verse, perhaps a pre-chorus, and a chorus. Good songs give each of these sections its own balance of sweet and bitter. As you will see, the contrast between them is part of the story the melody tells.

Different Sections, Different Balances

I have said that melodies in modern songs don’t always follow the chord tones. That doesn’t mean you have to avoid chord tones completely. Even in a modern song, a section built only on chord tones can work without sounding too sweet. One of the main ways to pull this off is to give each section of the song its own level of sweetness and tension.

The usual pattern is a verse with more tension and a chorus that is more balanced. But it is a tendency, not a rule. Some very successful songs do the exact opposite, as you will see later in this chapter.

The Sweet Pre-Chorus

I have a name for one pattern: the sweet pre-chorus. The verse is full of unstable notes and tension. Then the pre-chorus, the short section that leads into the chorus, turns sweet. Each time the chord changes, the pre-chorus melody arrives on a chord tone. The contrast makes the pre-chorus feel like a release. Contrast between sections matters a great deal, because it is what keeps the listener engaged.

In the book I show this with two songs from 2013, both co-written by Ryan Tedder: Ellie Goulding’s Burn and OneRepublic’s Counting Stars. In Burn, a tense verse gives way to a very sweet pre-chorus. Listen to how much tension the verse builds, then notice how sweet the pre-chorus sounds after it. In Counting Stars, the verse mixes notes inside and outside the chord. The pre-chorus lands on chord tones all the way through. And the chorus is balanced, with a slight lean towards tension.

None of this is an accident. The writer probably never worked it out in theory. Most likely he was going on instinct, reaching for a particular feel: an edgy verse, then a sweeter pre-chorus to set it off. He didn’t have the theory to explain what created those emotions. Now you do.

The three sections below follow the same plan. Play each one and compare the maps.

• The verse starts after the first beat. Every chord change it lands on is a non-chord tone on the unstable side: RE, RE and FA. All its dots are in the very tense corner, and it ends on RE.
• The pre-chorus meets every change with a chord tone: DO, MI, MI and RE. Its dots are all above the line. After the verse, it sounds sweet and clear.
• The chorus mixes the two. It opens on SO, a chord tone, then lands on MI and RE outside their chords, and comes home to DO on a chord tone. It ends on DO.

Ending on RE, Ending on DO

Two habits go with this pattern. First, in most songs the chorus melody ends on DO, the most stable syllable of all, whether or not DO is a chord tone at that moment. In a modern chorus, that final note is often the only truly stable one. Counting Stars is a good example: the last note of its chorus is the most stable note in it. So listen out for DO at the end of a chorus. It is one of the easiest syllables to hear.

Second, most verse melodies end on RE. Ending on RE leaves the verse open and unresolved, like the question in Stability and Tension. Then the chorus arrives, usually on a stable chord tone, and after that open verse the arrival feels satisfying. Finally, the chorus settles on DO, the note of conclusion. This is what I mean by storytelling with melody: open, arrive, conclude.

Reversed Patterns

Patterns like these are tendencies, not laws. The most successful writers keep breaking them, so that each new song sounds a little different from the ones before it. Not completely different, because the songs still feel familiar, but different in a way that means something. Here are a few examples.

Take Morgan Wallen’s Cowgirls, from 2023, which turns the usual order upside down. Its verse is completely sweet: every time the chord changes, the melody is on a chord tone. Then the pre-chorus fills up with tension and non-chord tones. So does the chorus, except for its very first note, which belongs to the chord. Listen to the song and notice how satisfying that first chorus note is after all the tension that comes before it. A touch of sweetness lands hard when you use it sparingly.

Justin Bieber’s DAISIES, from 2025, has a balanced verse, with sweet and bitter notes side by side. Its verse chords are a very familiar progression, I – vi – IV – V. Honestly, it is a pretty overused one. But because the melody often avoids the chord tones, the verse doesn’t sound generic. Put the same progression under a melody that follows the chord tones all the way, and you are bound to end up with something dated.

The chorus of DAISIES has no chord changes at all. So the notes that shape its feel are the first and last notes of each motif, the short musical ideas the chorus is built from. Put those on the map, and you find even more non-chord tones than in the verse. They give the chorus a floating feel. In fact, it doesn’t sound much like a traditional chorus at all; it is closer to a pre-chorus. And, not by coincidence, its last note is DO once again.

The Exception

So must every modern song steer clear of chord tones and spread its notes over all four areas? No. Look at the map of Gracie Abrams’s That’s So True. At every chord change, the melody note is a chord tone. You might think that contradicts what I said earlier, because that is exactly the pattern I blame for the 90s syndrome. And yet the song doesn’t sound dated. There are three reasons.

• Exceptions exist. Music doesn’t have rules; it has concepts. Show me a rule, and I can show you a dozen songs that break it. And any one song may be the exception rather than the norm.
• The chords are modern. A song can sound dated for reasons other than its melody. The chord progression alone can do it. Put an old-fashioned melody over an old-fashioned progression, and you have the surest recipe for something generic. Here, though, the progression follows a very modern idea, and together with the lyrics it keeps the song sounding current.
• The melody is still unusual. It never puts DO on a chord change, not even at the end of the chorus, while every earlier song I plotted in the book did. And its verse opens with four repeated FAs, the least stable syllable. That has almost never happened in the last thirty years. Plenty of songs from that period never use FA at all. Even Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, from 2017, doesn’t have a single FA or TI.

So here is the practical point. If your melody sticks to chord tones for the whole song, you will find it far harder to stay clear of a generic, dated sound, whatever chords you use. Not impossible, but much harder. It is also a question of what kind of song you want to write. Tate McRae’s greedy (more on it in Anchoring the One) is packed with tension; That’s So True leans to the sweeter side. Listen to both, and notice how well their lyrics match: bold confidence in one, softness and honesty in the other.

Listening List

For each song, compare the sections: where does the melody feel tense, and where does it relax?

In the book: pp. 72–76 and 81–90, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

15Anchoring the One

Funk musicians talk about “the one”: the opening beat of every bar, the anchor the whole groove keeps coming back to. I see the same idea at work in the way modern choruses handle chord tones.

The One in Funk

In funk, “the one” means beat one: the beat that starts each bar and tells everyone where the cycle begins again. James Brown turned it into something like a personal motto. He hammered it into his bands, calling out for it in rehearsals and even in the middle of live shows. In a groove built on the one, the first note of the bar acts as an anchor. Everything else is free to move around it, on the beat and off it. But every time the groove comes round again, it starts on the one.

This is a narrower use of the word “anchor” than the anchor notes of The Most Important Notes. Here it simply means the note that starts each cycle of the groove.

You hear this most often in bass lines and kick drum patterns, and in every style, not just funk. In the book I point to the bass line of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Dark Necessities, and to a typical R&B kick pattern. The bass line below is built the same way.

Every bar begins with the root of its chord on beat one, played together with the kick. Between those anchors, the line moves freely, on and off the beat. And because the one is always secure, the movement in between sounds playful rather than lost. The first beat is nailed down, and the rest of the groove is free to bounce around it.

The One in a Chorus Melody

So why am I telling you about funk? Because modern choruses treat chord tones the way funk treats the one. When a chorus begins, the note that arrives with its first chord is usually a chord tone. It is not a rule, but it happens far more often than not. Choruses are a natural home for this. Roughly nine times out of ten, the chorus melody starts right on the first beat, so its first note arrives together with the first chord, exactly where the one falls in a groove.

After that anchor, the notes at the following chord changes alternate: outside the chord, then inside it, then outside again. Then the chorus comes round again, and its first note is a chord tone once more, just like the one in a funk groove.

The first change lands on MI, a chord tone of C major: that is the anchor. The next three alternate. MI over G is outside the chord, DO over A minor is inside it, and RE over F is outside it. Then the loop starts again on the anchor. The map shows the result: two dots above the line and two below. It is a balance of sweet and bitter, held together by a secure start.

You can hear this pattern clearly in the chorus of Tate McRae’s greedy, and in the chorus of Speechless, as sung by Naomi Scott. Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now plays a variation on it, as part of a bigger plan. In its verse, nearly every note at a chord change is a non-chord tone. Then the pre-chorus turns sweet and fills up with chord tones; notice how sweet it sounds after the verse. The chorus then sets down a single chord tone as its anchor, right on the first beat. But it doesn’t alternate after that: every change that follows lands on a non-chord tone.

Static Notes

Tate McRae’s greedy also shows how far the turn towards tension has gone. Her songs tend to be full of tension, and they deliberately steer clear of sweetness. To me, it feels almost like a rebellion against older ways of writing songs. The verse of greedy sits on a single minor chord, with no chord changes at all. So in the book I plot every note of its melody, not only the notes at chord changes.

The melody also repeats some notes many times, and those notes carry extra weight. The one it leans on most is RE, and RE is not in the chord. So it is an unstable syllable and a non-chord tone, repeated again and again. That creates a huge amount of tension.

The chorus is more balanced, with dots all over the map. It uses static notes too: the same note sung several times in a row, which again puts extra weight on certain notes. Repeating a note while the chords change underneath it is one of the simplest ways to play with tension and release, because the same pitch can cross from one side of the line to the other. The example below shows how.

Four Ds in a row. The first three are heard over A minor, which has no D in it, so they are hatched and plotted in the very tense area. The fourth arrives with G major, which does contain D, so it turns solid and moves above the line. It is the same note four times. Only the chord under it changes, and that puts it in a different context. The pitch never changes, but the feel does.

Here is a way to hear this in any song. If you can, play the song’s chords and melody slowly on a piano or a guitar, and stop each time the chord changes, to feel how that melody note sits against the new chord. Taking it slowly helps you notice, consciously, which notes are tense and which are sweet.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 77–86, How Melody Evolved Over Time.

16Pillar Notes

Understanding the map is one thing. Using it when you sit down to write is something else. In this chapter I turn the ideas so far into a method you can use the next time you write a melody, built around what I call pillar notes.

From Knowing to Choosing

The first step, as I said in Training Your Ear, is to train your ear. To get really good at this, you need to be able to hear a melody and know, straight away, roughly where it falls on the map. At that point the map is no longer theory: it is a tool you can use while you write.

Once your ear knows how stable a note is, you can start choosing that stability on purpose. You hear a chord progression, and before you try a single note, you already have a feeling for the kind of melody it wants, sweeter or more bitter. You are no longer trying notes at random until something works. You are choosing instead of guessing.

I’m convinced that, more often than not, what separates a very successful songwriter from an average one is not talent. It is the ideas they work with. Follow an outdated or overused idea, and you will write generic music, however talented you are. Many writers were taught old cadences, the stock chord moves that end a phrase, such as IV – V – I or the jazz ii – V – I. Then they can’t understand why nobody wants to hear their songs.

But I’m just as clear that you can’t work out a melody like a sum. There is no way round the work of training your ear and your intuition. Try to calculate the notes from theory alone, and you will probably fail. The only job of theory is to show your intuition what to look for. You will still have to try things and throw most of them away, and you will still have to practise.

Some writers work all this out by instinct, with no theory at all, but it usually takes them ten or fifteen years. Sia has said that it took her fifteen years to learn to write hit melodies. Knowing what to look for, and what to avoid, can save you much of that time.

Planning the Feel

Now that you have the map, you can plan a song’s feel in advance, the same way you plan its structure of verse, chorus and bridge. Before you write a note, decide what kind of song, or what kind of section, you want. A verse with plenty of tension and a more balanced chorus? Or the other way round? A sweet pre-chorus between them? Deciding this first gives your melody writing a direction.

Setting Pillar Notes

Here is the practical problem. When you write a melody, you will almost certainly drift towards chord tones whenever the chord changes. Everyone does this, especially before they have written many songs, because chord tones are where the ear expects to land. Setting pillar notes is a simple way to force yourself out of the habit, and it works very well.

A pillar note is a note you fix in advance for a chord change. Remember that the notes heard at chord changes matter most, so that is where the pillars go. Since your instinct would be to put a chord tone there, you deliberately choose a non-chord tone instead. Then you write the rest of the melody around the pillars. In the book I work through an example in C major. Say you want to write a verse over this four-bar progression:

F – F – Am – G   (in numerals, IV – IV – vi – V)

1. List each chord’s non-chord tones. These are simply the notes of C major that the chord leaves out. For F major (F, A, C) they are G, B, D and E. For A minor (A, C, E) they are B, D, F and G. For G major (G, B, D) they are A, C, E and F.
2. Pick a non-chord tone for every chord change. My first suggestion in the book is E over F, D over A minor and E over G. Notice that there are only three chord changes, because the second bar repeats the F chord.
3. Play the chords and sing the pillars on the first beat of each change: E, then D, then E.
4. Fill in the rest. Improvise melody ideas between the pillars, keeping only the pillars fixed. Arrive on E as the F chord comes in, move freely through the two bars of F, and make sure you land on D the moment A minor arrives, and on E when G arrives.

You now have a backbone for your melody that won’t sound generic, because the notes the ear listens to most are deliberately off the chord. All that is left is to fill the space between them. Try it with the planner below. The buttons for each chord show its candidate notes: hatched ones are non-chord tones for that chord, and solid ones are chord tones. Pick one note per change, then play the result.

Mixed Pillars

Bear in mind that this is not a formula, and it won’t automatically give you a good melody. Its job is to stop you landing on chord tones where you would otherwise land on them without thinking. Write several melodies on the same pillars, and try different non-chord tones as your pillars too.

And not every pillar has to be a non-chord tone. You can mix them, for example by alternating. The planner’s presets include the two other combinations I suggest in the book:

• E over F, E over A minor and E over G. The middle pillar is a chord tone, because A minor contains E.
• E over F, D over A minor and D over G. The last pillar is a chord tone, because G major contains D.

The last preset puts a chord tone on every change, for comparison. Listen to how much plainer it sounds. Also, the pillars here sit very close together, but they don’t have to. You can choose pillars that are far apart, so the possibilities are endless.

Finally, nothing says your melody must begin right on beat one! Most verse melodies don’t. They often start just before the first beat, or somewhere after it. Either way, the pillars stay fixed to the chord changes. A phrase that starts just before the first beat arrives on its first pillar as the F chord comes in. A phrase that starts after the first beat has no note at that first change, like the verse in Tension Across a Song, so the D and E pillars carry the plan.

Here is a finished verse built on the first set of pillars, E, D and E. Everything apart from the pillars was written afterwards, just to join them up.

All three ringed notes are non-chord tones, two of them MI and one RE, so the map shows them below the line: two in the less stable area and one in the very tense one. The melody between them is simple, but the verse already sounds more interesting than a melody that lands on the chords.

In the book: pp. 91–97, Using the Emotional Map in Songwriting.

17Four Ways to Meet a Chord

So far, a note at a chord change has been black or white: a chord tone or not. We already know that landing outside the chord there is one way to stop a melody sounding generic and dated. Here I want to add one more detail, small but very useful in practice: what the melody does in the moment after it arrives. That detail turns two choices into four.

Four Moves

When the melody reaches a new chord, there are actually four different things it can do:

1. On the chord, and it stays. The melody arrives on a chord tone, and the motif ends right there. The tune may carry on after a short rest, but it does not move on at once.
2. Off the chord, and it stays. The melody lands on a note outside the chord and holds it.
3. Off the chord, then onto it. The melody lands on a note outside the chord and moves straight to a chord tone.
4. On the chord, then off it. The melody arrives on a chord tone and moves straight to a note outside the chord.

Each version of this example arrives at the same C major chord in one of the four ways. Only the note at the change is plotted.

The first move, landing on E and staying there, is the simplest. It is settled, and honestly, there is nothing more to say about it. Moves 2 and 3 are less clear-cut, because the note at the change is a non-chord tone. Outside their chord, some syllables clash much more than others, and that decides which of the two moves suits them. We will come back to move 4 at the end of the chapter.

An Experiment

Before I go into the details, try an experiment for me. I want your ears to find the answer first, before any “rules” from me get in the way.

Take a guitar or a keyboard, choose a key, and play its chords one at a time: I, ii, iii, IV, V and vi. In C major, that is C, D minor, E minor, F, G and A minor. While you play them, sing the same syllable over every chord: DO, which is C, over all six. Notice how each chord sounds with that note, especially the chords that do not contain it. Then repeat the whole thing with RE, then MI, FA, SO, LA and TI.

The example below does the playing for you. Choose a syllable, and it is held over the six chords in turn. Sing along with it if you can. The map counts how often the syllable belongs to the chord and how often it does not.

Please try every syllable before you read on.

The Experiment’s Results

Chances are you found that some syllables sound good over almost every chord, some do not, and a couple sound uncomfortable over nearly everything they are not part of. Here is what I hear in most cases:

• MI and RE work best. MI in particular sounds good with every diatonic chord. So when MI or RE is a non-chord tone, you can usually use move 2: land on it and stay.
• DO, SO and LA also work as non-chord tones in many cases. Together with MI and RE, that is basically the pentatonic scale again.
• TI and FA do not sound good with any chord unless they are in it. FA is the worst of all as a non-chord tone.

Notice that this is not simply the order of stability. You might expect the most stable syllables to clash the least. That is partly true, but only partly: RE, on the unstable side, sits more comfortably over other chords than DO does. What really matters is how each particular note sounds against each particular chord. However independent a modern melody may seem, we never hear it on its own. We always hear it together with the chord.

So what about TI and FA? This is where move 3 comes in: land on the non-chord tone at the change, then go straight to a chord tone. To be clear, any syllable can take move 3. With FA, though, you hardly have a choice, because it clashes so much when it is held. This is the appoggiatura from The Sweetness Problem: a note that leans on the beat and then resolves by a step.

Long story short: if a note at a chord change doesn’t sound good, it is most likely a TI or a FA. Resolve it to the nearest chord tone.

But please don’t turn this into a rule! Trust your ears. If it sounds good, it is good.

Resolving a Clash

I give several examples of move 3 in the book. Take Ed Sheeran’s Eyes Closed, from 2023. The stressed syllable at the start of the chorus lands on FA over the home chord, where it does not belong, and the very next note steps down to MI, which does. Charlie Puth does exactly the same thing in Attention: the stressed syllable of the title lands on TI over A minor and resolves at once onto A.

And remember Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit? Its chorus is probably the edgiest I have ever put on the map. Every note at a chord change there is outside its chord, and it is no surprise that many of them are TI and FA. But here is the thing: every one of them resolves straight away to a chord tone. With notes that clash this much, it makes a huge difference whether you hold them or resolve them at once.

Stepping Off the Chord

Move 4 is the reverse, and I find it really interesting. Here the melody hits a chord tone just as the chord changes, right where your ear is waiting for it, so the moment feels safe and familiar. Then it moves off, onto a note outside the chord, and the line becomes edgier and more individual.

It is the opposite of move 3. There, the melody fixes a clash by correcting it straight away. Here, it says clearly “we have arrived”, and then adds a little twist to finish. It is like a sentence that ends on the chord change, with a quick, sharper aside in brackets after it. It starts safe, but it does not become too sweet, because the line ends on a more interesting spot.

Sting does this in many of his songs, including Englishman in New York, where the stressed word at a chord change is a chord tone and the words after it step off onto non-chord tones. You can hear it again in Zoe Wees’s Control, from 2020, where a chord tone at the change is followed straight away by a non-chord tone.

So a melody at a chord change does more than land on the chord or off it. Some notes sound good with almost any chord, and others clash so much that they usually resolve at once. Once these four moves become familiar to your ear in other people’s songs, you will find yourself reaching for them in your own.

Listening List

Listen for the note on the stressed syllable at each chord change, and for what the melody does straight afterwards.

In the book: pp. 99–108, How Melody Behaves at Chord Changes.

18Changing the Backdrop

A melody note’s feel depends on the chord under it. So you can change how a melody feels without changing a single note of it, just by changing the chords. I call the chord progression the backdrop.

Dated Progressions

A dated melody isn’t the only way to end up with a generic song. The chords can do it on their own: a tired, overused progression can make a fresh-sounding song very hard to write. So if something still feels wrong after you have put non-chord tones into your melody, maybe the melody is not the whole problem. It is not impossible to write something fresh over a worn-out progression, but it is much harder. You are better off starting from chords that already sound modern.

Many of the songwriters I have worked with were using old, tired chord progressions, so it was no surprise that their songs sounded dated. Sometimes one of them would pick up a guitar to play me a song, and I wanted to stop them before they even reached the first word. The chords alone already gave off that “I’ve heard this before” feeling.

Once we had gone through some more modern ideas about chord progressions, they turned up at their next lesson with new songs, and the change was huge. And no, they had not suddenly turned into better writers. It was just that the ideas they were using were no longer out of date.

I made the same mistake myself, with my very first songs, back when I knew nothing about songwriting. People would tell me that a song sounded like something they had heard before. At first I wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment. Now I am sure: it isn’t. That is practically the definition of generic.

One Melody, Two Progressions

So sometimes the melody is fine, and the chords are all that needs to change. In the book I point you to two recordings of the same song, with exactly the same melody and different chords. In the first, the chords follow the melody, so the melody keeps landing on chord tones, and that is why it sounds generic. In the second, the original, the chords were chosen on purpose so that the melody does not simply outline them.

The melody below gets the same treatment.

The melody does not change at all. Over the first progression, C, G, A minor and G, every ringed note is a chord tone, and every dot sits above the line. Over the second, F, C, D minor and E minor, three of the four ringed notes fall outside their chords: E over F, D over C and C over D minor. Only the B over E minor is still a chord tone. The tune now sounds less settled and less predictable, purely because of what is underneath it.

Repeated Lines

The same thing can happen inside a song, and it is a bit of a cheat code. Imagine you have written one line of a verse melody, and you simply repeat it, note for note, as the second line. If everything stays the same, the repetition feels lazy, dull or even annoying. But if the chord under the second line is different, the context changes, and you get away with it.

Bars three and four repeat bars one and two exactly. The first time, the line starts on E over a C major chord, where E belongs. The second time, it starts on the same E over F major, where it does not. On the map, the dot keeps its place on the horizontal axis, because the syllable is still MI, but it drops from above the line to below it, from the stable area to the less stable one. The pitch has not changed; its emotional job has.

In the book I show this with the verse of Charlie Puth’s Attention. The second line repeats the first almost exactly, starting on the same note, but over a different chord, so a chord tone becomes a non-chord tone. Modern songs do this all the time. It also makes the melody seem independent of the chords, which is another break with traditional theory. But that is only an impression: we always hear a melody in the light of its chords.

One Note, Many Chords

Take the idea to its limit, and the melody hardly moves at all. In the refrain of Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather, the melody is nearly all one repeated note. That note belongs to the first two chords and not to the other two. It is no surprise that the note is MI: as you saw in Four Ways to Meet a Chord, MI sounds good with every chord in the key.

The chorus of Taylor Swift’s Out of the Woods, from 2014, does something similar. Its melody keeps coming back to DO while the chords change under it, so the same note keeps switching between chord tone and non-chord tone. (To be fair, she still lands on a chord tone each time a new chord arrives. But the note that stands out is DO.)

In the first version, the melody is nothing but E, over C, A minor, D minor and G: inside the chord, inside, outside, outside. In the second, it is nothing but C, over C, E minor, F and G: inside, outside, inside, outside. The melody stands still while the backdrop moves, and the map shows the same syllable crossing back and forth over the line.

Simple Melodies

Taylor Swift has been criticised for melodies that are too plain, without big leaps. In my view, that misunderstands how modern melodies work. As I mentioned earlier, cool jazz went through the same thing: its players were criticised by bebop musicians for playing too few notes. Taylor Swift is doing what they did, and getting more with less. A simple, static melody makes it sound as though the melody has broken free of the chords, and that is exactly what makes it less generic and more modern.

When I was promoting The Rhythm Code, I made a video about why the melody of Birds of a Feather is so catchy. Dozens of people commented that it was “not catchy at all”. But they were only projecting their own taste onto a song with more than three billion streams on Spotify. What they probably have in mind when they say catchy is a melody with big leaps and lots of movement. Melodies like that were catchy fifteen to thirty years ago. Today what counts is mood, attitude and story, not a melody that races across the whole scale.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at whether popular also means better.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 109–115, Changing the Backdrop.

19The Future of Melody

To finish, I want to look forward. If listeners’ tastes in melody have changed before, they will change again. What does that mean for you, writing songs now?

A Language for Melody

For over a hundred years, many songwriters wrote melodies without any clear framework for the emotional mechanics behind them. They went on instinct, followed trends, copied what they liked and used trial and error. Even very successful writers worked like this. They could sense what worked and polish it, but they seldom had the words to explain why it worked.

The emotional map gives you those words. Instead of vague impressions, you have consistent categories for what a melody is doing emotionally: this note is sweet, that one is bitter, this section sits mostly above the line. Once you can name it, you can track it and teach it. Above all, you can design it on purpose, instead of only feeling it.

Changing Tastes

Today’s listeners already prefer melodies that balance tension and stability. They are drawn to melodies that move through all four areas of the map, rather than repeating the sweet, safe patterns of the past. And that preference keeps shifting. Familiar patterns slowly lose their effect: what excited us the first hundred times starts to sound predictable. New music keeps pushing a little further, and gradually our sense of what sounds normal moves with it. Melodies that behave the same way for too long start to feel dull, even when nothing about them is technically wrong.

You have already heard this happen. The sweet, chord-tone melody in The Sweet Decades would have sounded fresh in the 1990s, and it sounds generic now. I expect today’s fresh melodies to go the same way, and to sound predictable a decade from now. So the map is a picture of how taste has moved so far, not of what will work for ever.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at the evidence for this history of the decades.

What I want is for you to see melody as an organised landscape, in which each note has a job and a feeling of its own. That is a very different thing from a list of scales, a set of tips and tricks, or the old advice to follow the chords.

The Illusion of Timelessness

So why is melody writing still taught as if it never changed? Interestingly, I haven’t found a single book or course that talks about these shifts, and believe me, over the years I have bought just about every songwriting book and course out there.

Guide note Notes on the Book looks at earlier work on melody and expectation.

I think there are two reasons why these shifts are so easy to miss. First, on the surface the differences are subtle. On paper, a hit from today looks much like one from 1995: the same chords from the key, mostly simple triads, the same notes. But what looks like a small difference on paper makes a big difference to the listener.

Second, some of today’s biggest hits deliberately borrow the sound of earlier decades, as you saw in The Lasting Power of Melody, so that the production has a nostalgic feel. But that resemblance is mostly cosmetic. It sits in the sound itself, the instruments and the production, and that surface is far easier to copy than the writing underneath. The writing, meaning the melody, the way the chords move, the rhythm of the phrases and the shape of the lyrics, is still modern. A song can be timeless, and so can a sound. The tools for writing songs are not.

Future Shifts

So where will melody go next? Nobody knows exactly. One thing is certain, though: it will not stay as it is today. It won’t be a total change, and much of it will still sound familiar. But small shifts will come, and they will matter to how listeners feel. Every new generation of writers pushes the line a little further, usually so subtly that listeners feel the change without knowing what it is. Taste moves first, and the theory follows later.

What the map does give you is one more dimension to measure melody by, one that was invisible before, and with it a way to notice those shifts as they happen. None of this is abstract theory. You can hear it in actual songs. Once you start listening for it, you will notice details you never knew were there, like the way a single note can change the feel of a whole section. And for me, that is the whole point: to understand what is really happening in a melody, and to take that understanding into your own writing.

In the book: pp. 117–120, The Future of Melody.

20Notes on the Book

Editor’s notes · not in the author’s voice

The book is short, practical and well worth reading alongside this guide. A few of its points deserve a second look, either because it overstates something or because this guide handles it differently.

• Earlier work. The book presents its ideas as new, though it credits John Curwen with noticing that each degree of the scale has its own character. Others have explored this ground too. The music psychologist David Huron, in Sweet Anticipation (2006), studied how listeners describe the feel of each scale degree and how expectation shapes musical pleasure. Classical theory has long had names for notes that sit outside the chord on a strong beat: the appoggiatura, and the suspension, a note held over from one chord into the next, where it clashes until it moves. Jazz teaching talks about tensions and “avoid notes” over each chord. The book’s real contribution is putting the key and the chord on one simple picture that a songwriter can use.
• The research it cites. The study the book refers to, by Cheung and colleagues (2019), appeared in Current Biology, not Nature Communications as the book’s footnote says. It played listeners chord progressions taken from Billboard hits, with the melody removed. It measured how much they enjoyed each chord, and their brain activity in an MRI scanner. It supports the general idea that surprise and uncertainty shape how much we enjoy music. It did not measure dopamine, and it says nothing directly about non-chord tones in melodies.
• Popular and better. The book often treats what most people prefer, measured by charts and streams, as an objective fact about what works. Popularity is a fact; whether it makes a melody better is a judgment. The book’s advice is most useful if your aim is to write songs that sound current to a mainstream audience, which is the aim it sets itself.
• The decades. The book’s history of melody is illustrated with only a handful of songs. The author says he has analysed thousands, but the book does not show that data, so its history cannot be checked. Notes outside the chord on strong beats were common long before 2000, as its own Mozart example shows, and they are everywhere in jazz standards and in much of the pop of the 1960s and 1970s. Read the history as a tendency in mainstream pop, not a law.
• LA in the middle. The book draws the vertical axis of the map through LA, without saying whether LA counts as stable or unstable. This guide marks notes on LA as being on the middle line, rather than putting them in one of the four areas.
• Minor keys. The book keeps the same order of stability in a minor key, with LA as home. But a home note, by definition, sounds settled, so in a minor key LA behaves much as DO does in a major key. The order is clearest in major keys, and this guide’s examples are mostly in major for that reason.
• Triads only. The book counts only the three notes of a triad as chord tones. In styles built on richer chords, such as R&B, jazz and neo-soul, a seventh on top of a chord is usually heard as part of it. If your song uses seventh chords, decide for yourself whether to count the seventh as a chord tone.
• Ancient flutes. The book says that flutes about 40,000 years old were tuned to the pentatonic scale. The oldest known flutes, from caves in southern Germany, are made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, but how they were tuned is not known.
• “Less is more”. The book credits the phrase to the architect Mies van der Rohe, who made it famous. It appears earlier, in Robert Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto (1855).
• Small details. The book calls Morgan Wallen’s song Cowgirl; its title is Cowgirls. And it dates Zoe Wees’s Control to 2023, but the song was released in 2020; it later appeared on her 2023 album.

The author is a songwriter and producer who trained in classical music and jazz before turning to the analysis of modern songs. He has also written The Rhythm Code, which covers the third dimension of melody, its rhythm, and which has a companion of its own: Rhythm on the Grid. His website, printed in the book, offers ear-training apps for the two skills described in Training Your Ear, and courses on modern chord progressions.

ABook Index and Glossary

Book Index

Glossary

90s syndrome

The book’s name for a new song that sounds dated, often because every melody note at a chord change is a chord tone.

Anchor note

A note the ear holds on to: a note at a chord change, a repeated note, a long note, or a starting or ending note. In funk, “the one” is also called an anchor, in a narrower sense.

Anticipation

A note played just before the beat it belongs to. A melody note can anticipate a chord change and belong to the new chord.

Appoggiatura

A non-chord tone on a strong beat that then moves by step to a chord tone.

Areas of the map

1 stable (a stable syllable that is a chord tone), 2 less stable (a stable syllable that is not), 3 tense (an unstable syllable that is a chord tone), 4 very tense (an unstable syllable that is not). LA sits on the line between them.

Backdrop

The book’s word for the chord progression under a melody.

Bitter

The book’s word for the tense notes at the bottom right of the map.

Cadence

A stock chord move that ends a phrase, such as V – I or IV – V – I.

Chord

Here, a triad: three notes stacked a third apart, called the root, the third and the fifth.

Chord tone

A melody note that is one of the three notes of the chord under it. Drawn solid in this guide.

Diatonic

Made from the notes of the key. A major key has seven diatonic chords, I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi and vii°; the book leaves out vii°, which modern songs rarely use.

DO

The home note of a major key, and the most stable syllable.

Emotional map

The book’s chart of melody notes: syllables from stable to unstable across, chord tones above the line and non-chord tones below.

FA

The fourth note of the scale, and the least stable syllable.

Half step

The smallest step between two notes: from one key of a piano to the very next, such as E to F or B to C.

Key

The set of seven notes a song is built from, with one of them as home.

LA

The sixth note of the scale; the middle of the map, and home in a minor key.

Motif

A short musical idea, a few notes long.

Non-chord tone

A melody note that is not in the chord under it. Drawn hatched in this guide.

Pentatonic scale

A five-note scale: DO, RE, MI, SO and LA, the major scale without FA and TI. Found in folk music all over the world.

Perfect pitch

The rare ability to name a note with nothing to compare it with. Not needed for anything in this guide.

Piano roll

The grid in a DAW where melody notes are drawn, with time running left to right and pitch from bottom to top.

Pillar note

A melody note chosen in advance for a chord change, usually a non-chord tone, around which the rest of the melody is written.

Pre-chorus

A short section that leads from the verse into the chorus.

Relative pitch

Hearing notes by their relationships to each other and to the key, rather than by their exact pitch.

Roman numeral

A way of naming a chord by its place in the key: I for the chord on DO, ii for the chord on RE, and so on. Capitals mean major, small letters minor.

Solfège

Naming the notes of a key by syllables, DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA and TI, according to their position. The book calls it solmization.

Stable, unstable

How settled a note sounds. A stable note feels like a place to rest; an unstable one feels as if it needs to move on.

Static note

A note repeated several times in a row, which gives it extra weight.

Suspension

A note held over from one chord into the next, where it clashes until it moves.

Sweet

The book’s word for the settled notes at the top left of the map.

Syllable

A note’s solfège name, such as DO or MI, which says where it sits in the key.

The one

The first beat of the bar, used as an anchor in funk; by extension, a chorus melody that anchors its first note on a chord tone.

TI

The seventh note of the scale, which leans strongly up to DO.

Tonal centre

The home note of a key: DO in a major key, LA in a minor key.

Transposing

Moving a whole song into a different key. The pitches change; the syllables do not.

Triad

A three-note chord: root, third and fifth.

Melody on the Map is a set of personal study notes on The Emotional Map of Melody by Tamas Bodzsar (2026), written in his voice but not by him, and not endorsed by him. The practice examples are original. Book Examples provide native, playable transcriptions of the supplied excerpts.