Creating a musical toolkit Part 2

In part 1, I gave an overview of the basic tools for a musical toolkit; rhythm, harmony, melody and timbre. My intent is to build on each of these elements and gradually apply each to various world musics. As we examine these elements in the context of various musics we'll also look at ways of incorporating both the elements and the world musics into our own playing.

Here in part 2, I'd like to discuss the basics of melody. Melody is the organization of a set of notes into a meaningful and defined structure. Yeah, I know; what's a meaningful and defined structure? Good question. An Armenian oud player has one idea of this, a flamenco guitarist another and someone playing bebop a third. But there are common as well as differing elements in all these musics and examining both the common and different elements can provide us with useful information for our toolkit.

In the examples I mentioned above, each of the musics shares an element of key center, a way of giving values to each note. Once a note feels like home base, like a stable resting area, that means another note must be unstable or simply "not home base". There's nothing which prevents us from having home base move during the course of a song or solo, but as soon as one note is stable, it forces other notes to be unstable.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to create stability or instability. The most important thing to remember is that context is everything. In the purest, most abstract way of thinking any note can be anything (that is, have any scalar value) at any time. So as a musician, our melodic job is to create contexts which clearly define the value of the notes being played. This assumes, of course, that we want the notes to have scalar values. For some kinds of music (atonal music for example) that might not be true. We'll discuss that more later.

In the meantime, let's look at some strategies for creating stable and unstable notes. The first thing that I'd suggest is taking a single note and playing it a few times. Really listen to it. What happens to your perception of the note after a few repetitions.

For many people what happens is that the note starts out stable (you're comfortable simply playing it) and then becomes unstable (you want to hear a new note). Practice this a few times. It's a good listening exercise. Next move through scalar patterns slowly, listening to each note and it's relationship to the previous note. Whether you use minor pentatonic scales, arabic scales or japanese scales, comfortably hearing the motion from note to note is important. Listen to whether the newly played note is stable or wants to rise or fall.

After getting comfortable with scalar patterns, begin to add patterns which are still scalar, but which aren't limited to stepwise motion. Begin to add leaps to your patterns, still listening for stable or unstable arrivals on new notes.

Once I've begun hearing contexts comfortably, I start to build a catalog of events related to notes. For example, glissing, bending, hammer-ons, pull-offs etc.

Now begin to incorporate these techniques into your scalar patterns.

These ideas are not about a kind of music. They're about music. They apply to oud music or flamenco or bebop or heavy metal. They're simply things people do with notes. By listening to how oud players or flamenco players or bebop players use these tools and analyzing them in their own contexts, we can find ways of incorporating them into our own context.

In part 3 we'll look at some techniques for incorporating these things and building more complex ideas with them. And we'll integrate some world music into them.

Aric Rubin