To me, John, there is a difference between a riff, a melody and a theme.

If you go back to classic pop music (and before that, popular jazz),

certain songs had very, very strong themes................................melodic figures that could bear repeating over and
over and still have resonance with a lot of people.

Honestly, the last 15 years of all popular music has been dominated by three things: rhythm, timbre
and atmosphere.

We've all gotten really good at creating with those elements but the thing that has been significantly absent has
been melody..........................theme and repitition.

Back in the 80's the extremeley successfuly pop/r&b writer, Lionel Ritchie wrote something that , to this day , I think about.

He said that if you strip away everything from a complex modern mix........................and reduce the melodic theme
to just whistling it, that the average person would repond to it if it had a classic and memorable melody.

I think that it's important , especially since you play music that is very beautifully atmospheric with female vocalists who are
exquisite to reduce what you are doing to something that has nothing at all of atmosphere (timbre) or distinctive voice.

Play the melody on the most boring of monophonic synthesizer sounds and evaluate your melody thusly.

Additionally, there has been a strong trend in modern music of all genres in the last 15 years of playing
very, very close to the progression of the chords in a song. Singers and instrumentalists alike, have had a strong
tendency to follow the chord progressions very tightly.

I think that this can be antithetical to great thematic and melodic writing.

Analysis of some of the great and simple themes of classical music and older forms of pop usually reveals that
the melodies did not 'hug' the chord progressions.

*****
I just saw a really inspirational 2 1/2 hour master class by jazz saxaphonist Donnie McCaslen at the Kuumbwa Jazz society
and one thing he stressed about memorable improvisation was to practise different intervallic melodic jumps in phrasing.
He talked about using all the scalar notes in a key signature and playing the tonic and then up a fourth, then the 2nd and up a 4th
and the 3rd and up a 4th..........................He then said try this with 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, etc.

Playing with different intervallic jumps that are not the typical 3rds and 5ths approach of modal improvisation can produce really
interesting an memorable melodies.

A great record to listen to, as corny as it may seem, is the soundtrack to Leonard Bernstein's score to the musical 'West Side Story'.

Normally a classical composer, Bernstein specifically set out to write a score that celebrated intervallic leaps. From what i understand , every song on that soundtrack used a different melodic interval to start the first two notes of the melody.

'Maria', as an example, goes 1 - #4 - 5.

I think a great exercise is to take a track and compose 7 different melodies utilizing this game.
One based on a 2nd, one based on a 3rd, a 4th, a 5th, a 6th, a 7th and octave and a 9th.

It's really an ineresting game to try and create a memorable theme based on this exercises and I find that it really breaks me out of
the tightly harmonized world of the modal 'ambient' singer approach that is very beautiful but a little overused in the ambient world.

That's my 2 1/2 cents.

at the risk of stating the painfully obvious - try circle of fifths/fourths chord progressions.

if you already knew that, please don't throw a shoe at me.

when I think of the aesthetic of your music mixed with an anthemic quality... I can't help but think of this mortal coil "I want to live"... or "the spangle maker" by cocteau twins.

to me what makes something anthemic is the building of intensity through ascension.. where the chords or notes rise in pitch... then deliver a hearty release.

Wow! This is the coolest -- lots of people who know way more about music than I do (really; I just turn on a synth or plug in a guitar and play, and sometimes it comes out nice and sometimes not -- I don't really know 'what' i'm doing so much), who are willing to explain a few things to me. Many thanks!

Lately, i've been listening to a lot of Rush, some trance (Duderstadt), some 70s rock / pop (Rundgren, Steely Dan), a fair amount of the more power-pop derivatives of shoegaze (Chapterhouse, High Violets, Ride, etc.), a lot of spacey ambient (of course) and Cocteau Twin's "Heaven or Las Vegas". I'm starting to figure it out, and what you've all written here is starting to make sense to me :-)

Regards,

John

Falling You - exploring the beauty of voice and sound
www.fallingyou.com