glennarN

I am personally a fan of a bit of cheese and bombast in my music so this might not go down well with everyone, but Nobuo Uematsu is my god of melodies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwsAG6TrlJk&list=SP1D6BA7E4FFE22EE5 Nobuo is a video game composer but this is an orchestral rendition of one of his pieces, might be more accesible to some. As silly as it may sound, I think video games (especially older ones from the 8-bit and 16-bit era) are home to some of the most memorable melodies in my opinion, I'd check it out if you are not already familiar with video games of that era. That said, they might not make good vocal melodies but if you are just interested in melodies in general, I think they are worth checking out.

@tunesmith: Thanks for your post. The stuff I would consider have been "ripped off" from others are not carbon copies. It is usually a matter of finding out that certain small passages (maybe a bar at most) is similar to something else. Sometimes the phrasing/rhythm of a melody may be identical to something else while the pitches of the notes (relative to the scale) themselves have changed and/or sung over different chords. In one extreme case however, I wrote a chorus that was ripped almost verbatim from another song that I'm not entirely sure that I had heard before. I did not recognise the original when I first heard it, but chances are it might have been something that I've heard only once while not really being focused at the music itself (at work or maybe in some social situation... who knows). The brain is obviously dumb as shit As for your advice of not listening to my favorites... well that's really good advice but the problem seems to be that my writing is mostly similar to stuff from my old favorites or something else that I'm not listening to actively. I'm very able to recognise similarities to stuff that I'm currently listening to and that stuff tends to be rejected almost immediately, though I might roll with it if it is more subtle. I'm not typically genre-bound either, most of my stuff right now is just chords + melody + lyrics so it could really go either way. Listening to more genres however... yeah that sounds like a good idea, I tend to mostly listen to melodic pop/rock/hard rock so new sources might be nice. @Skylark: Funny story, the subconscious sure seems to play some tricks on us Are you perhaps a member of The Offspring? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR6A-Bk9eZQ I sure wonder how they got away with that one...

Hi all, I'm a guy from Sweden who decided to pick up songwriting a couple of years ago. After writing some songs that I was really happy with, I eventually started thinking about trying to get into the business somehow. Sweden hosts a number of great educational programmes for songwriters that are directly connected to the industry and I've been very excited about the possibility of actually making it there. That was until I've slowly discovered that a lot of my better songs contain elements or entire motifs that have been ripped from songs that I've heard but never ever had in my conscious mind while writing them. Typically it is from songs that I haven't listened to in years, but they keep coming up anyway. Typically, all my songs start to develop from discovering some small fragment of melody or a little motif that inspires me to write a complete melody or song. It's as if when I find that certain melody fragment or motif, my mind automatically associates it with something else and it just keeps going from there. The scary thing is that it seems that I'm guided by familiarity (or by hearing stuff that I personally like in my own writing) since a lot of stuff has ended up similar to something else. I find all of this really depressing and it is starting to feel like there is no reason for me trust my intuition and that my inspiration is a bad thing. I do not condone plagiarism in any way, frankly, I am disgusted whenever I discover these things and it ruins my day completely. Has any of you guys struggled with this before? I'm wondering if I need to simply change my mindset, maybe not being so goal/result oriented because that seems to be getting myself into trouble, but that also sounds very un-natural to me since I want to write stuff that I can enjoy myself and that I personally think is really good. I might be making a complete fool out of myself for making a post like this, but any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated... /Michael