Tutorial Learn to write own songs

[monamohn]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a tutorial on how to write your own fingerpicking songs, or arrange existing ones. I am sometimes able to write down the melody, but have no idea on how to go from that.

I really love the tutorials by Matt Stead but I haven't found anything by him so far, except for a video where he says that you should use the existing chords to accompany the melody - but what if you don't have any chords?

There are tons of tabs out there but no one to explain on how you get them on your own...

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[simerix]

Matt Dahlberg has a tutorial on this called How to Unlock Chord Melodies on his Patreon that you might find helpful.

If you have the melody down and you know the chords, just play an arpeggio in between the melody notes. If you need the chords, a quick google search will help. The hard part is transposing the melody and chords to a different key if it is hard/not possible to play on the ukulele.

Musescore has a helpful to for writing out music that allows you to play back the audio which I've found extremely useful.

 

[simerix]

If it is a song with guitar, referencing guitar tabs from websites like ultimate-guitar.com can help you fill in instrumentals that are more true to the song. This requires the ability to read guitar tab and transfer it to the ukulele but it is very rewarding if you put the effort in.

 

[Mike $]

If you know what key you're in, the chords you use are pretty much harmonized from the scale.

 

[monamohn]

@Mike $ , how do you do that? Do you just pick any chord from the scale that has the melody note as the highest note? Do you maybe have a link to a tutorial?

 

[man0a]

Matt Dahlberg has a tutorial on this called How to Unlock Chord Melodies on his Patreon that you might find helpful.

If you have the melody down and you know the chords, just play an arpeggio in between the melody notes. If you need the chords, a quick google search will help. The hard part is transposing the melody and chords to a different key if it is hard/not possible to play on the ukulele.

Musescore has a helpful to for writing out music that allows you to play back the audio which I've found extremely useful.

Don't know if this is the same tutorial that you are talking about, but if you click on the "Shop" button at the top of this page, there is series of video tutorials titled "How to Unlock Chord Melodies With Matt Dahlberg".

 

[Jan D]

If you don’t know what chords to use for a song, first identify what Key the song is in. (Frequently, the Key is the same as the last note of the song.) Once you know the Key, refer to the charts below to identify the 7 chords typically associated with that particular Key.

This chart identifies the chords used in each Major Key:

Chords in Each Major Key – Country Guitar Online

countryguitaronline.com

This chart identifies the chords used in each Minor Key:

Chords in Each Minor Key – Country Guitar Online

countryguitaronline.com

 

[Mike $]

@Mike $ , how do you do that? Do you just pick any chord from the scale that has the melody note as the highest note? Do you maybe have a link to a tutorial?

How much experience do you have playing a stringed instrument?

 

[ailevin]

I searched youtube for "ukulele compose chord melody" and found this. It is a start, but your question is actually not so simple. Learning a melody and either hearing the chords being used or deciding which chords go with a melody are things I would put in the category of ear training. Some folks study it as part of an academic course and call it music theory. Others learn the patterns by listening and playing a lot and call it playing by ear. Choosing chords when doing a chord/melody arrangement is another skill that you develop with time by studying and/or listening to arrangements by other people.

I think the place to start with chord/melody is with a relatively simple song where you know the chords and the melody or at least you have the music/tabs for both chords and melody and you can learn them both separately. Then the basic idea is to keep the melody notes above (higher in pitch) than the chord notes as you play the melody. This often means you sometimes need to adjust the chord so that you either dont play all the notes in the chord, or you use a different version of the chord. It could be an inversion (the same chord but with the notes arranged on different strings), or a substitute chord (a chord which shares several but not all the notes of the original chord). As @simerix said, you will often find that the melody shares enough of the notes in the chord, that playing some of the chord notes as an arpeggio or in the proper rhythm is in fact the melody.

I started out just learning simple chord/melody arrangements, then making adjustments to those arrangements, and then with the help of a teacher, doing my own arrangements. I find MuseScore very helpful for arranging and transposing. I think that Music Theory for Ukulele by David Shipway is a good book for learning some basics about chord progressions and song structure. As you learn more about chord progressions, you begin to hear that a few progressions provide the backbone of most songs. This video is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is pretty cool.

 

[monamohn]

@Mike $ I only play ukulele. I'd say intermediate level, mainly Fingerstyle songs.