I’ve been reading a few threads on chiptune forums about people asking how to write decent melodies, or structure songs. So here's a little note on how we (xyce) generally setup and arrange songs, write melodies and some of our thoughts on the entire matter.

First of all I have to say that I mostly prefer chiptune songs that are structured like most normal pop songs. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus and some bridge and solo parts in between if you fancy. You can switch elements around and arrange the song differently but I like parts that repeat so standard arranged songs work out.

A lot of chiptune has incoherent melodies going 'round for two minutes straight. I don't think there is anything wrong with this, and I believe this can work out pretty well, especially on stage, but I prefer the more structured pop-ish songs when just listening to them at home or work.

“Write melodies as if they’re the parts a singer has to sing.”

So about melody. I always keep in mind something joule (check him out, he's awesome) said on IRC when I just started out making chiptune a couple of years back. "Write melodies as if they're the parts a singer has to sing." I know this sounds pretty obvious to most people, but listen to the last (chiptune or instrumental) song you liked (or made), and try to think of a singer having to sing that melody. That probably sounds pretty hard to sing right? It probably is.

I also come across a lot of chiptune that has extremely complex melodies. Again, this is probably very subjective but I think those songs are harder to remember and probably get played a lot less. The reason people like songs is because they're getting a certain feeling when listening to a song and emotionally connect. Melody helps greatly on this matter, set aside people that don't care about melody that much, but just want to hear a 140BPM 4/4 club banger, sure, the melody doesn't matter that much. People that know our music probably understand that we think of melody as one of the most important parts of songwriting, so you can understand why I care about it that much.

So how do we generally write melodies? Most of the time we start out with a pretty basic chord progression. Pick for example four or eight notes, make an easy bass line and add a simple drumloop that functions as a metronome for the time being. If we're happy with our chord progression, we whistle or hum melodies that come up in our heads and translate them to notes in the software we use at the time. Just simple, nothing fancy.

If you have something fun laid out, you can add notes, change placement (go up or down a few bars) or remove parts and try to just jam in some notes (staying in key sounds pretty cool though). Generally fiddling around with your first setup, creates new ideas or patterns. I, myself, after putting down the initial notes mostly mute everything except the drums and fiddle around, then un-mute the chords and bass and edit everything to make it sound cool (and correct). Roel just leaves everything on and plays with the melodies and all. If the melody sounds cool -or at least a little cool- we edit the harmonies and bass to make them stand out more, and try to make them less standard. Harmonies are pretty good for both cool details as for supporting the melody, so we try to do both in most cases. Of course creating elaborate harmonies when you only have 3 channels to work with in total can be a little tricky but trying to be creative there helps a lot.

We follow a pretty standard line of producing when we make music but editing stuff after most of the songparts are laid out happens as well. Basslines can be edited in a pretty late stage of the song to make them more interesting. Chords are a bit harder because I think they're a bit more dependant on how the melody works out in the end.

So that was about it. Just a little note on how we put stuff in our music software and think of melodies and all. I guess finding out how to write music is to each his own but this might give you a good example on how we, as xyce, generally lay down structures for songs and fill in the gaps.

If you have any questions or like us to tell about songwriting with a bit more detail, don't hesitate to ask!