Estimated reading time 3 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Do you have lyrics but need a melody? Starting with the text’s rhythm helps you create the melody you need. Read more to learn how to extract a melody from your lyrics.
All words have a rhythm of their own through the natural accents of the syllables. String words together and your phrases will have a series of stressed and unstressed sounds.
Working with the lyric’s rhythm helps grease the wheels of inspiration. It also helps you to avoid mis-accented words. In popular music you need to maintain an everyday, conversational tone in your lyrics. Once you’ve created your melody, you can then expand your melodic material using variations. To learn how to do this:
This article uses musical and linguistic terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Using Prose to Extract a Melody from Your Lyrics
Mobile users will need to turn their phones 90o to the right to make the acute and breve stress marks look right.
Step one for extracting a melody from your lyrics. Scan the text.
In poetry and prose, “/” gets used to show the stressed part of a word and “u” the unstressed part. Start by scanning a phrase for natural speech accents:
u u / u / u / u u u / u /
I could feel the af-ter-im-age of her lips on mine.
Saying the sentence aloud helps reveal the rhythm of the words. In the example above, I could have also stressed the “I” at the beginning of the sentence. However, that would have changed the emphasis in the lyric from “feel” to “I”, thus effecting the interpretation.
Of course, regional accents – and therefore certain styles of music, such as country – may scan a phrase differently than the more generic (i.e., Midwestern) American accent.
Not sure which syllable or syllables get stressed in a word? Check a dictionary. Here are a few examples from Webster’s:
/ u / / u / u u / u /
Coun-sel, dumb-found, mel-lif-lu-ous, pock-et-book
A Sheet Music Example Showing How to Extract a Melody from Your Lyrics
Afterimage Rhythm:
I heard this rhythm in my head when I scanned the above text (no notes yet).
After you’ve got the rhythm set, you can move to step two for extracting a melody from your lyrics. Get your instrument and see if the rhythm sparks any melody ideas. Normally, I find that once I start scanning my lyrics for rhythm, melody ideas start popping into my head.
Remember, at this point you’re not looking for a finished product, just ideas to get the creative flow going. Editing will come at a later point.
Concluding Thoughts on How to Extract a Melody from Your Lyrics
That outlines the basic approach with respect to extracting a melody from your lyrics. Nevertheless, the final rhythm can have some flexibility with regards to its finished form.
It’s a long way from simple stressed/unstressed scansion to the final melodic rhythm, and an even longer way to the complete melody. However, scanning the text can help you find the melody that’s hiding in your ear. Have fun songwriting!
© 2021 Geoffrey Keith
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Glossary
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