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Melody Thief!?!?


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Thank you for commenting Aurora.  I think you definitely have the gist of what my concerns are as well.  I too think that someone, somewhere along the lines of production will catch a melody similarity.  Hopefully anyway.

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  • 5 months later...
On February 20, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Danidog said:

I was oh-so-very pleased when I posted my first 'song' here. I couldn't have imagined that I'd do so well with the chord progression and melody, because typically, I use a very basic I, IV, V pattern of major chords (yeah, I write and play very basically and simply). On this song, I used majors and minors and man, did that thing sound GOOD to me! Until, David (Hobo Sage) pointed out that my song chord progression and melody was VERY similar to THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD by G. Lightfoot.

 

Now, I live in fear of 'stealing' someone elses melody, I owe David a debt of gratitude for catching that for me (and other things as well...).

 

This is a great site, I'm so happy to have found it and am learning more every day.

 

Thanks to all of you who make this site what it is. 

 

Dont worry about stealing a chord progression, those aren't copyrightable. In fact, it can be a great way to start the juices flowing. 

 

I can usually tell when I'm borrowing something existing because suddenly the process flows differently, and I notice the next note or chord comes more easily and from a different part of my head. I guess anytime the writing comes in any way easy I get suspicious. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Ready for a little surprise?

 

The melody of Fitzgerald was not(!) an original Lightfoot tune! He didn't write it!!  The tune already existed (in the public domain ...) and he set his poem to it.  Which, by the way, is a perfectly-legitimate artistic thing to do, and a thing that is very often done.

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  • 5 months later...

Great thread. I can relate to this topic. I worry about this sometimes too, not because I expect commercial success for any one of my tunes, but just because it's tough to come to the realization that one of your "babies" isn't actually yours. I'm usually not comfortable sharing my work until it's complete, so there are other ways I deal with it. For one thing, I never trust the first idea that pops into my head, because those are the ideas that will have the most danger of being derivative of something else. My initial idea is the starting point, but I revise a lot. If theres a part that sounds a little too obvious, I will change a note here, change an interval there, change the chord underneath. At the same time, the changes I make still need to flow and sound natural, so it's a delicate balancing act. But by the time I finish it, it will have gone through enough revisions for me to be reasonably confident it doesn't sound too much like any one particular song. 

 

Some other things that help:

 

I tend to write lyrics first, because then I'm not starting from nothing. The melody I create will be derived from the meter of the words, so I know I didn't just pull it from thin air.

 

Starting with chords can work well, because again, you know that's the harmonic foundation that will determine what the notes of the melody will be. A lot of popular songs have the same chords, so trying something other than your standard basic chord progressions can sometimes help to avoid melodic similarities between yours and another song. Though a lot of unique songs have been written with just standard chord progressions, so it isn't a necessity.

 

Having a basic knowledge of music theory can be invaluable (and I admit mine is fairly basic), because knowing your scales and intervals, major, minor, diatonic, non-diatonic, etc., and being able to play around with them can make it easier to "construct" melodies, rather than just stumbling on to one and hoping it's yours. It allows you to better understand the different musical possibilities that can be taken.

 

Recording myself helps too, because it gets me off of the playing/singing part of my brain, and onto the purely listening part. I can take a step back and more objectively hear what I've got, and what changes I might need to make.

 

I don't claim to be an expert, but seeing as this tends to be an issue I think about quite bit when songwriting, and I've had to find ways of dealing with it so that it doesn't block me from writing, hopefully some of what I write here will be helpful.

 

Funny, it's gotten to the point now where often I'll hear a song on the radio and think, "this sounds way too familiar; they should have revised that." Lol So clearly, a lot of songwriters--even professional ones--don't worry about this issue as much as I do.

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