Lesson with Christianc (Melodic Development)

I'll be working with christianc in this thread on helping him to develop a better sense of creating his pieces so that they transcend the realm of mood ambiences and pass into the wonderful world of melodic music. He's specifically asked me to help him with writing love themes and battle themes, so I think it'd be most prudent to start with one of those. The love theme gives much greater flexibility in terms of thematic production and development, so that'll be our first topic.

As the name suggests, a love theme must capture the essence of romance for a particular scene in an incidental production (game, film, etc). It may sound like a fairly easy task, but creating a sound that manages to do the trick without coming off as terribly cheesy takes some serious work. Love themes are generally very melodic and introduce a memorable tune that may then occur at later points in the soundtrack. For this reason, the melody must be well-thought-out, catchy, and effective for the setting.

With that in mind, a good first step would be to listen to a number of existing love themes out there in order to familiarize yourself with the style. I'm sure you can think of some famous ones (Across the Stars, from Star Wars Episode II, etc) but if you can't, let me know and I'll help you find some. Once you feel like you're getting the idea, you can start coming up with a theme. Before I start directly guiding you through, I want to see what kind of a melody you come up with just from the inspiration of listening to various existing examples.

Your assignment, therefore: find and listen to as many examples of love themes as you can. As you're listening, note the titles and source so that we can take a look at them later. See if you consider them effective or not and do your best to analyze why - think of how they make you feel more than the technical side of things for now. After you've done that, try your hand at creating one or two melodies that you think would work well in love themes. Just a melody for now - don't harmonize unless you have to to convey the melody better. Once you're satisfied with them, post them up here and we'll go from there!

Good luck, and feel free to ask any questions right here. :huh:

Here are the songs I listened to:

"Love Theme" (Ennio Morricone)

"Rose" (Titanic, James Horner)

"Theme from Love Story" (you know, that descending minor sixth :P!)

"Uncahined melody" (Ghost)

"All I ask of you" (Phantom of the opera, Webber)

"Moon River"

"Out of Africa" (John Williams)

"To the stars" (Randy Edelman)

"Across the stars" (Williams)

"Theme from ice castles"

"Can you read my mind?" (Superman, Maureen McGovern)

"Marion's theme" (Raiders of the lost ark, Williams)

And a few others

Some of them weren't used as love songs, but they could easily have been, I think.

What I love from the first one I listed is the melody exchange between clarinet, flute, french horn and strings. I think it's useful for repeating the theme whitout tiring the ear. The accompaniment also changed.

I agree with you that such a melody need to be catchy, so we can't easily put romance in a movie simply by starting again the "romance song". That's in part why "Theme from Love story" works so well, the first interval being a minor sixth easily recognizable.

Last thing I realized with "To the stars" (heard in Dragonheart), is that the theme in itself can develop... hard to explain, but when you listen to it, it's pretty clear I think.

So I'm going to try writing some melodies having those characteristics... soon.

Excellent choices!

And good interpretation of them too. I look forward to your melodies! :)

Here are two love melodies I wrote...

Tell me if you don't have Finale!

love melodies.MUS

Hey!

I took a good look at both melodies. The first, I feel, is the stronger of the two, so we'll work with that one for now. Keep the other for later though - it's never good to throw things away.

It's fairly typical, without necessarily being a direct rip-off of another theme. This is not a problem. In the world of incidental music, it's good to stick to what you KNOW works and only strive for innovation where you're fairly confident that the audience will be able to follow along with your train of musical thought. Otherwise, you'll end up setting a completely wrong mood for the scene.

The first melody, therefore, will be ideal for the purposes of the following exercises.

As you'll have noticed in many of the examples you listened to, love themes tend to be rather string-led or at least have significant string parts. For that reason, what I want you to do now is take the first melody and arrange it for a string orchestra. Violin I, II, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass. Use as many parts per instrument as you need, but don't be too excessive because we'll be expanding even further from here. Even though we'll be expanding even more, I want this arrangement to capture the essence of how you want the final product to sound - make sure all the harmonies and counter-melodies you want to work with are in there, unless you specifically want them for another instrumental part.

In terms of if and how to use counter-melodies, try a little visualization trick. Create, in your mind, a scene for a film where this love theme would be used. Now watch the scene and then attach the melody. Keep working it over in your head and let the theme evolve. Chances are, your mind will come up with appropriate harmonies and counter-melodies to fill it in. Once that happens, simply work on transcribing them.

Take your time and make it a good arrangement. Try to make good use of all the instruments in the string orchestra and give some interesting parts to each - try not to keep one instrument doing the same task throughout. Being that this is an arrangement I'm asking for and not just an orchestration, I'd like to see you take that theme and expand it into a piece of about a minute or so for now. Longer if it needs to be, but try not to have it too much shorter. You can always refer back to your examples for clues on how to expand and develop your melody.

If you feel that I'm going too quick here or you want to make sure everything's going fine, feel free to post any work-in-progress versions here with your questions and we'll work through them together. :)

Here is my attempt,

It's running exactly one minute, since I really didn't know how to make it longer...

I made a intro (12 bars), but I was fearing it might not be as effective as starting out with the melody... But well, I guess this would be, (in the hypothetical movie), the first time we would hear it. So later on in the movie, to trigger the love theme, we would just have to play directly the melody (you follow me? I lack English structure!)

The harmony is sometimes a bit complex, hope it's not too much?

And well, the melody would repeat (played by an other instrument, a woodwind or horns).

What do you think? If any, what sections should I rework?

love theme strings.MUS

Hey Christian!

This is a wonderful little arrangement; I think it's quite good. I actually quite like the more complex harmonies you used - they keep the piece from sounding too stereotypical and stale.

Something about measure 12 didn't really convince me musically, I'm having a hard time pinpointing exactly what about it I didn't like, but it interrupts the mood you've just set with the swell to the preceding few bars. Try out some other harmonies/arrangements for that little section and see if you can smooth it out a bit, if you can feel the slight jar to it that I'm referring to.

Besides that though, I'm quite impressed. My only concern will be to see how you orchestrate the rest of it, since this string arrangement is not particularly "grand". With the rest of the orchestrating then, the focus will be on working with the melody and making sure it gets some prominent statements within the piece.

For now, just go over the string arrangement once more and see if you can fix up that part I mentioned and make any other changes you'd like. When you're happy with it, post it up and we'll go from there.

Good work!

Well here you go!

Bar 12 is quite hard, since I had to lead to Ab (first chord of my melody)...

I added nuances, fixed a few things and added articulations (well, only slurs!)

I think it already sounds way better

love theme strings beta.MUS

So?

I'm sorry, Christian, I completely neglected this thread. :(

I've just listened and examined your work and I'm extremely impressed though. It's sounding very nice now and I can definitely see it as the exposition of a successful love theme. At this point, it's still very mellow and you've done a good job of leaving plenty of room for it to grow both rhythmically and harmonically. You also did a good job of arranging it so that all of the instrumental parts are interesting; you even worked in some double-stops so very nice there too.

So here's the next step: now that you have the initial presentation of the theme in the strings, load up a full orchestra template and copy in your string arrangement. Now we're going to start building the full orchestration from here. I realize that it's quite a jump from strings to full orchestra, but having seen the quality of this arranging, I think you'll manage just fine.

Start small and work your way up - remember that we'll be building upon this as you go, so decide if you want the full orchestra to be playing the theme at the beginning or just the strings? Perhaps you want to move the theme into the woodwinds at the beginning and then add strings only the second time it comes around? And remember that this is only the beginning of your theme: once you orchestrate this beginning section (or decide to leave it as is and orchestrate from here on in), then you'll be expanding from there - perhaps you want a fanfare-style brass statement of the theme, or maybe you want to introduce a secondary theme part-way through.

Don't be afraid to use cross instrumental sections either: have some strings and woodwinds, a brass solo over a low string drone, glockenspiel theme statement with soft woodwind arpeggios backing...have some fun with it. Orchestrate as thickly and complexly as you can because it's good practise.

Feel free to post up any stage of your work as you go and I'll do my best to get to it much more promptly. If you need any inspiration, go back to the examples and take another listen and/or ask in here and we'll work through any difficulties you're having together.

Thanks for your good work and good luck on this next bit! :thumbsup: