NOTE: This post contains score excerpts and video clips for illustration purposes. If you have trouble seeing or playing the video clips, try Refreshing this page.
Many of today’s musicians are, on some level, self-taught. Some of us are mostly or entirely self-taught musicians, which has become increasingly possible due to the abundance of free information and increasingly-accessible tools/instruments available today on the internet. Unfortunately, many self-taught musicians have a shared weakness: music theory.
Before we dive into the music theory deep end, I want to preface the following information with a few thoughts and notes on the context of these lessons and how you can actually benefit from them. ‘Theory,’ by itself isn’t helpful, but tools and application of knowledge can be indispensable. I believe that most people fail to learn (or fail to remember) music theory because they try to learn/are taught the theory without relevant context or meaningful application. If I want to learn to play pop songs on my guitar so I can sing those songs, do I need to learn anything about scales? No, probably not – and if I try to learn them I’ll either fail out of boredom or I’ll forget what I learn because it isn’t relevant to my goals. If I want to learn how to write a great melody, on the other hand, musical scales are the building blocks for melody and harmony and this information is extremely valuable to understand.
I’ll do my best to explain why each lesson may be useful to you, but you don’t have to use every trick on this list. If there’s a specific effect from the examples below that you enjoy, use that lesson. Try adding it to your next piece, or try adding it to an old piece to breathe new life into it. If you like the effect and understand how to replicate it, it becomes part of your compositional “bag of tricks” and can be called upon later.
Enough context – on to the meat and potatoes! Today, we travel back in time to 1997 (yes, it’s been that long) to dissect the main theme from Final Fantasy VII. This theme is one of the more recognizable RPG themes ever written, and the motif from the piece is sprinkled throughout the entire Final Fantasy VII soundtrack which provides an excellent cohesion between the various different settings and events of the game. This piece is jam-packed with little musical tricks, so put on your learnin’ caps and buckle up. Ready? All right, everyone – let’s mosey.
Cloud’s rallying call-to-arms before he leads his party into a final battle against Sephiroth.
Lesson I: Using Intervals in Melody Writing
Why this lesson is important:
A great melody is priceless, and Final Fantasy VII’s main theme has a simple, beautiful melody. Writing an effective melody is all about balance, and writing a balanced melody can be very difficult when you’re actively trying to write an interestingmelody. What makes a melody interesting is contrast and balance between the different elements within. Intervals are one of those critical elements you need to balance, and if you struggle with consistently writing melodies that you don’t hate you may want to take this lesson to heart.
The Lesson:
An
interval is the distance between two pitches, but not all intervals are created equal. If terms like a “major third,” “perfect fourth,” or “perfect fifth” are completely foreign to you, I would pause here and
watch this video by Joshua Taipale of Ongaku Concept to get up to speed in less than 8 minutes.
I could write pages on this topic, but for the sake of pacing and attention spans I’m going to zero in on the first part of the main melody of this piece and how intervals are being used intelligently. Within a melody, you can move from one note to another either by a step or a skip. Stepwise motion is when the distance between two notes is either a major or minor 2nd interval apart. If looking at a keyboard, if you were to play all of the white keys in ascending order you would be playing in ascending, stepwise motion. To put it another way, if the letter names of two notes are next to each other in the alphabet, it’s a step. Any interval larger than that would be considered a skip.
As a general guideline, melodies should contain mostly stepwise motion. The following 4-bar excerpt contains the main melodic material that the entire piece is built on, including the main motive of the game which appears in many forms throughout this piece and several others. The red lines indicate steps and the blue lines indicate skips. As you can see, this melody contains mostly steps but uses skips sparingly to create the most interesting moments of the melody:
The red lines are “steps,” and the blue lines are “skips”.
There are a few things that this accomplishes. First, it creates contrast within the melody by using a balance of mostly-stepwise intervals and a few intelligently-placed skips. If you wrote a melody that only used steps it would be more susceptible to sounding boring or predictable. If you wrote a melody that only used skips, it would generally be less appealing to most listeners because their ears would have a hard time following the sporadic motion as the melody jumped up and down all over the place. The phrases “variety is the spice of life,” and “everything in moderation,” should both be remembered when writing a melody. For more supporting evidence, listen to the first major melodic phrase of the Star Wars theme (9 steps, 6 skips) by John Williams or the first phrase of Nascence from Journey (12 steps, 5 skips) by Austin Wintory.
Another way to effectively use intervals is to emphasize a specific interval that is less common, more colorful, or larger than the rest. The first two measures of that same excerpt contains the main musical idea that echoes throughout this piece in different forms and creeps its way into several other tracks on the game. The interval between the first and fourth notes are the most prominent/important of the phrase and, arguably, the entire soundtrack. What interval does Uematsu use at the center of the game’s most frequently-heard track, reoccurring musical idea, and – as a result – the hero’s theme? A major 7th, of course. See what he did there?
The most prominent musical idea in Final Fantasy 7 is built around a major 7th interval.
How you can apply this lesson:
Whether you start writing a melody by improvising or simply writing down the ideas that pop into your head, you should see how you’re currently intervals and be mindful of any patterns that arise. You may find that you’re barely using stepwise motion, or that you’re skipping all over the place. Some people unknowingly write melody after melody without ever daring to use intervals larger than a 3rd or 4th, which is the equivalent of painting with only half of the color palette. Unless you’re incredibly clever, using the same intervals all the time will make it more difficult for new melodies to sound distinct from the rest. You can also proactively choose a specific interval to highlight something specific in a video game, like a character’s theme, a dramatic event, or specific emotion that recurs throughout the game.
Lesson II: Basics of Keys, Scales, and which Chords to Use
Why this lesson is important:
If you’re a painter, you need to know which colors work together well. Music is similar, and if you haven’t had any formal music training you may struggle to find which chords and notes ‘work’ as you compose. By understanding a little bit about keys, scales, and the chords that fit together, you can quickly identify the most common chords available to you in the key that you’re writing in. In other words, this helps remove a lot of the guess-work that may leave you hunting and pecking at the keyboard until something sounds right.
This is kind of 3 mini-lessons crammed into one, but that’s intentional because they’re so closely dependent on one another.
The Lesson:
The “key,” or “tonality,” of a piece of music tells you a lot of information before you even hear the first note. If I’m writing a piece in the key of A Major, I know that ‘A’ is the root or home pitch of the piece and the A Major chord is the ‘tonic’ or home chord. Most of the time, a piece in A Major will start and end with an A Major chord or note. The first chord acts as an anchor for the listener, establishing ‘home base’ in their mind before you take them on a musical journey which will usually end with a return to home, as any good journey should. This is another one of those guidelines that is not hard-and-fast rule, but you will find this to be true with most western music from pop songs to Beethoven symphonies.
In FF VII’s theme, the majority of the piece is in E Major and the sections written in E Major will be based on the E Major scale – which means that most of the musical material within that piece will be built with the 7 pitches contained within the E Major scale. As a result, the primary chords used in the E Major sections of the piece are chords that you can construct using those same 7 pitches of an E Major scale. In E Major, your scale contains the following pitches: E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D# and the chords you can build using those pitches are E Major (E, G#, B), F# minor (F#, A, C#), G# minor (G#, B, D#), A Major (A, C#, E), B Major (B, D#, F#), C# Minor (C#, E, G#), and D# diminished (D#, F#, A). While many songs and pieces stay strictly within these constraints, composers will often use this information as the foundation of their piece but explore musical ideas that reach past those limitations.
Most (or all) of a piece written in E Major will use the above notes and chords.
In the 40 bars of music that make up the main/most memorable sections of Uematsu’s piece (0:51 – 3:15 on the OST version), the melody adheres strictly to the pitches available in the E major scale. As for the chords, there is only 1 bar that uses chords containing pitches outside of the E Major scale in this section. Being limited to only 7 notes may sound… well… limiting, but as Uematsu has illustrated: You can color inside the lines and still make amazing music.
Now, all of those letter names can give you a headache if you’re constantly trying to remember which letters belong where. For this reason, roman numerals are frequently used to describe scale degrees and chord progressions. By using roman numerals to describe and think about music, we can focus on the relationship between chords, scales, and music and know that – no matter what key you’re in – those relationships stay the same.
For example, one of the
most common chord progressions in pop music is I – V – vi – IV (upper-case = Major chord, lower-case = minor chord). No matter what key you’re playing and what note/chord you’re calling home, you can play this chord progression relative to your key. Thus, a I – V – vi – IV progression in the key of C Major would contain the following chords: Cmaj – Gmaj – Amin – Fmaj. The same I-V-vi-IV progression in E Major would be Emaj-Bmaj-C#min-Amaj. It’s way easier to analyze music and learn about music theory using Roman numerals because the Roman numerals stay the same no matter which key you’re talking about.
How you can use this lesson:
Whether you compose the melody or the chord progressions first, you’ll quickly establish a tonal center. If a new melody hits you while you’re humming in the shower and you run over the keyboard/guitar afterwards, you should be able to look at the pitches you’re using and determine which key you’re in. Once you’ve established the key, you know which scale to use and which chords belong with that scale as a result – thus eliminating the hunting/pecking method of randomly playing notes and chords until you stumble upon something that sounds like it might fit. You know what fits before you ever put pen to paper or hit the record button.
