Many of us know how to rework a song lyric to make it stronger—add images, action words, tighten the focus, etc.—but melodies are often left out of the rewriting process. Many times, the first melody that pops out is the one we keep just because we don’t know how to make it better.
But what happens when your melodies all start to sound the same, or a music publisher tells you your melody sounds generic or dated? How do you fix those problems? Here are a few tips that will help you reshape and update your melodies. Experiment with these ideas; play around with them. If you don’t like the new melody you come up with, you can always go back to what you had.
1. Break up a series of similar lines into different lengths.
If you have a melody with a lot of lines that are the same length, your song might might sound monotonous or unstructured to listeners. Rewrite your chorus or verse melody to increase the contrast between sections. Try breaking up a long line into two shorter phrases or run two phrases together by adding extra notes and words.