5 Ways To Create Melodies And Make Them Sound Interesting

1.The trial and error approach

The most common way for guitar players to create melodies is to just mess around on the guitar, until you come up with something pleasant. Sometimes this approach does work and sometimes it doesn't.

For those of you who find it hard to create melodies this way, or get stuck sometimes, you may want to read further to explore some opportunities to improve your creativity.

2.Humming melodies

The easiest way to create melodies is to hum them with your voice. This is also a good way to create interesting melodies, if you are only used to create them on your guitar, since your voice will produce a different sound than what you achieve when creating them on your guitar and will therefore bring variety.

3.Creating a chord progression first

When you are stuck and don't come up with anything satisfying with the first two methods, sometimes creating melodies is easier when you have an underlining accompaniment to inspire your creativity.

You can do so by creating your own chord progressions, or use existing instrumental pieces without a melody. Depending on what type of melody you want to write, or what you want to express, you can fit your underlining accompaniment to the mood you want to convey.

For example you can choose between minor or major keys, modal keys, descending chord progressions, slower arpeggiated chords, faster rock riffs, etc.... You have a lot of different possibilities to choose from, depending on how you want your melody to sound like.

If you play your created excerpts, you may already have some melodies popping up in your head. However, you can use the same two approaches as discussed before to come up with a melody, if you find it hard to imagine them in your head.

4.Creating a rhythm first

A lot of times we don't even think about rhythms when we create melodies. If you find your melodies sounding boring and always the same, this might be one of the reasons why.

Besides the method we discussed in the last paragraph about chord progressions, using different rhythms is another way to make your melodies sounding more interesting and will help you to come up with cool variations.

There are two ways you can approach this. First, you can create different rhythms* and then hum or play melodies on your guitar along to it in that specific rhythm. Or second, you can take existing melodies you've created – if you think they sound boring – and rewrite them with new rhythms, by keeping the notes the same.

*If you can't read or write rhythm notation, you can create them for example by stomping with your feet at an even tempo and clapping different rhythms with your hands along to it.

5.Using exotic scales

To give your melodies an unique and interesting flair, you can use exotic scales to create them, for example oriental scales. You may find this hard at first, if you are not used to them, so the best way to get started is to play the scales up and down on your guitar and hum them simultaneously with your voice, to get the sound into your ear.

I hope I was able to give you some useful methods, to enhance your creativity and your ability to write melodies. My name is Marco von Baumbach and I am a guitar teacher in Wuppertal, germany. To visit my website, just click on the following link Gitarrenunterricht in Wuppertal.