Students can add considerable melodic interest to their compositions long before they are able to master advanced performance techniques. In fact, the techniques discussed here can be performed by musicians of almost any age. I've provided audio examples (available at www.metmagazine.com) that use basic sounds designed to make it easy to hear each technique.

FIG. 1: This graphic shows the progression of octave doublings used in Web Example 2. Note that tripling the melody in the final measures produces a thick texture that should be used sparingly.

The most obvious technique for bringing out a melody in a song is to make the melody louder in a mix. This simple, brute-force approach is easy: just keep pushing the fader up until the melody is louder than the other tracks. This technique, however, can sometimes create a cluttered mix, especially when the melody is played in the same pitch range as the harmony. Furthermore, the music may become uninteresting without changes in additional musical elements such as pitch, timbre, and articulation. So if your students choose to use this method, they might also want to experiment with the levels of other tracks until the overall effect is satisfactory.

A more subtle way to bring out a melody is to contrast its pitch range with the pitch range of the other parts in the song. Web Example 1a consists of a two-measure phrase played twice, with a final measure containing a whole note to complete the phrase. In this example, the melody and the harmony tracks use the same sound. In Web Example 1b, the melody is transposed up by two octaves and can easily be heard, even though it is playing at half the volume of Web Example 1a. In Web Example 1c, the melody is transposed one octave down from its original pitch, while the harmony track is transposed one octave up and played at a lower volume level. In both of these transposition examples, the ear gravitates to the pitch extremes and has no problem discerning the melody.

Another method of bringing out the melody without increasing the volume is to double the melody at different octaves. Changing octave doublings produces different musical textures. Web Example 2 consists of a two-measure phrase played four times, again with a closing measure. The melody doublings can be seen in Fig. 1. In the first two measures, the melody is played in its original octave. In the next two measures, the melody is doubled at the upper octave, producing a brighter, more expansive texture. In the following two measures, the melody is doubled at the lower octave, producing a darker, richer texture. In the final measures, the melody is doubled at both the upper and lower octaves, producing a thick texture that should be used sparingly. (A thicker, more organic sound can be produced by playing the doubled parts instead of copying-and-pasting the original track.)

A melody track can also be varied by using contrasting sounds. The most obvious way to contrast sounds is to use sounds with different timbres. In Web Example 3, the bright, reedy sound of the melody can easily be heard over the darker, sustained string chords, even though the melody track is at a much lower level than the harmony track and both tracks are playing in the same frequency range.

In addition to contrasts in timbre, sounds can be contrasted using different articulations. In Web Example 4, the melody and the harmony tracks use the same timbre. The harmony track uses a sustained sound, however, while the melody sound uses a short, percussive sound. Once again, our ears have no problem hearing the melody.

All of these techniques can be used to vary the sound of a melody in a song without requiring advanced performance skills. There are no hard-and-fast rules for their application, and describing and demonstrating them is easy. The hard part is knowing when to use a specific approach in order to create an appropriate effect in a song. When your students can identify the effective use of these techniques in music, they will be in a much better position to create their own sonic magic.

Don Muro (www.donmuro.com) is a member the NYSSMA Technology Committee and the TI:ME Board of Directors. He recently presented the keynote address at the NYSSMA 2006 Music Technology Music Conference.