This can be useful for people writing soundtracks with leitmotifs as you can figure out how to simplify your own theme in order to make it work in a different moment. Maybe there’s a big final fight that uses the villains theme which is in 6/8 but needs the main theme mixed in which is in 4/4.
Love how you presented the "melodic reduction". That's such a great tool. It's kind of math-adjacent which makes sense to my engineering brain. I never went to school for music theory, but like to write music in my free time, pulling from what I've learned via TH-cam and my 18 years of piano experience.
I've never had a good theoretical understanding of melody - take one theory class for fun that covers the circle of 5ths and ends in cadences - you've explained something, in less than 20 minutes, that's vern eluding me for YEARS! Thank you
@@christopherjobin-official7440 It really isn't much different from what you'd get out of this video, except maybe that you'd get homework and would be tested on your understanding.
I appreciate you noting that composers don't think about melody that way. As a composer, it helps me feel better about struggling with melodic analysis in school. Melody is probably the most ephemeral part of the creative process for me. They kind of just happen and even I sometimes don't know why.😅
Mr. 8-Bit Music Theory, I've got lots of questions about your creative process: You mentioned the use of your intuition in discerning which notes are important- When choosing which song from the soundtrack to dissect for us, do you just listen to the soundtrack and use intuition to pick whichever song catches your attention based off of your intuition? Do you decide the topic of the video before you listen to the music and does that guide the way or do you just listen to the music and if you notice something great, you decide to make a video off of whatever you hear? In your opinion, how important is it to develop this ingenuity for music? Thank you for using that massive brain for the sake of us viewers!
Man I can’t express how helpful this is. I’ve been reading Analyzing Classical Form for a couple weeks and it’s my first time actually analyzing music. There are some examples and practice scores where I have absolutely no idea how to figure out what’s going on harmonically because the melody is all over the place. 12:29 is exactly the kinda question I would ask “which note is the important one here” but I didn’t know about rhythmic displacement (or really any of the melodic embellishments) so that helps a ton.
This is the best visual of listening to parts of a song that I've ever seen, and the explanation and narration is just right. It makes it so that I get exactly what you mean right away, and learning new terms for them is effortless instead of overwhelming or confusing! Absolutely brilliant, thank you a thousand times!
I find the two things that seem to really help for playing by ear, is learning music theory, then for every new thing you learn, do improvisational music that specifically implements the thing you just learned (even if it's just like a new key signature or something). This forces you to think about what exactly is going on in a song, that really helps with eventually playing by ear. It helps create a direct link between "understanding of the music" and "execution of the music", which otherwise can be somewhat isolated skills. Fundamentally, improvisation and playing by ear are kinda the same skill, even if it doesn't seem that way at a surface level examination.
Sing everything you hear, learn to pitch match with confidence in real Time with your voice and then go looking for it on your instrument. It’s not that hard to learn how to play by ear, but you really Need to learn how to play Melodies with your fingers and how to track the points of resonance / resonant intervals with your voice! Harmony is something you DO at the piano, with your voice and your knowledge of theory, but it’s something you have to do, go for, and feel!
@@hahahalala-i1xhonestly from personal experience (and I am far from the only person who feels his way), learning isolated intervals is counterintuitive and a waste of time. Each interval can sound very different in different contexts. If you’re set on doing dedicated ear training practice, learn solfège instead. Solfège teaches you to recognize the sound of each note as it relates to the key (a.k.a the context!). It’s much more synchronous with how our brains naturally process music, and you can start practicing with real music pretty much right away instead of putting yourself through hours worth of drills in apps first. As someone who tried to learn isolated intervals, I improved in _leaps and bounds_ the minute i switched to solfège.
This was so incredibly helpful!!! I’ve been looking for helpful melody breakdowns for months since starting to learn the harp and wanting to write my own music. This was exactly what I needed all along! I’ve learned so much from your channel as a whole. Thank you so much for all you create and share!
I’ve been spending time learning traditional American Appalachian songs, and trying to find a simple melody in the songs can be surprisingly difficult. Usually I spend time on TH-cam trying to find an earlier more basic version, so I can put everyone’s addition in context. This topic you’re covering is so very important. Thank you.
Hey! I love your videos, and you're so freaking smart and talented. I just wanted to say I found it super helpful when you greyed out the embellishment notes but still left them there (at around the 8:20 mark). If you ever do anything like this again, would you be able to do that more often, and/or leave it on screen for longer? btw if other people read this it'd be great to know if you agree. Thank you so much!
My man, thank you so much. I’ve been writing music for around a year without a background in music theory (especially as someone who plays kit), and this literally just tripled how good my music sounds. I feel like breaking melodies down and starting them with only the core notes really helps me understand how and where my melody is moving and, for that, I sincerely thank you ❤
I think this is some of your best work yet! Very thorough explanation, followed by the smooth visual transitions between the reduced melodies and their original counterparts. Thank you! :)
I’m studying music theory and your channel has been a blessing for me. Thank you so much for giving amazing quality videos and completely free, you really deserve an award
Your conclusion at the end -- "This isn't how composers usually write melodies" -- really kind of threw me for a loop. It isn't? Why not? It seems like a great way to go about writing a melody! What do they do instead, and why? Might make a good follow-up video?
Mainly because it's so analytical, working backwards from the final process. When you're writing, your focus is more on the feel/mood and you instead just have all of these embellishments deeply-installed into your muscle memory to call-upon them when necessary. You might only have a vague idea for what key you're in, and the other specific things you do (by feel) can end-up informing which specific mode of that key is being used. This is why some people say they can only write on certain instruments, that different instruments encourage different writing habits in them, and get writer's block when staring at a blank staff. For instance, piano encourages chromatic runs for my joining-embellishments, while guitar and bass makes me want to jump-about in thirds and fourths.
@@kaitlyn__L Even though I have been playing instruments on and off for 5ish years, I've been always struggling to improvise anything, I can only perform something others wrote and it makes me pretty sad. Regardless of playing this much, I've kind of never been able to figure out "mood" or "feel" people are talking about, but looking at the process analytically finally started to make sense. I envy you people who just "get" it intuitively :D
@@kaitlyn__LI genuinely had to pause the video to look for a comment saying this. I thought I was losing my mind. This is a useful video and a huge part of Shenkarian analysis, but this is not how you WRITE music, this is how you ANALYZE music. So many lost souls in the comments talking about how this video will “help them write music” is breaking my heart.
I would love more like this, my favorite videos of yours have always been the ones that offer advice about analyzing and writing music. One relevant question I have: you brought up chord tones - when it's ambiguous, how do you decide what the chords are to be able to know what's a chord tone and what's an embellishment? That's something I struggle with.
I feel like I had a breakthrough with the explanation starting at 8:40 about how the composer adds embellishment while keeping the same melody. It seems so simple but also is really cool how that is done.
This is truly a great explanation of a complex topic. I'm definitely not an expert on music theory, but this is super helpful in also understanding how to play a piece. I typically go through a (not so formal) version of this procedure when I'm playing Bach on my cello, but had never really rationalized it like so.
I genuinely learned a lot from this video. Thanks so much for taking such a close look at this soundtrack and really walking us through it. Understanding the vocabulary and tools for many of things you come to feel and understand on an intuitive but not intellectual level is so helpful. My engineer brain really loves this approach to analyzing music and honestly, I can see how this sort of understanding can assist with composition as well.
Loved this. I found it interesting that there can be subtension that can resolve within chords that aren't the tonic. I've never thought about listening for that.
This is a fascinating method of analyzing and conceptualizing melodies! Thank you for the video 😁 I've been diving back into music and music theory lately, and your videos on chord progressions and drums helped me take some big leaps in my understanding. All of your content is top notch, and I've learned a lot from going through them, usually at least two or three times 😅 it's helped contribute to a deepening of my experience listening to music, and I hope to begin putting principles like these into practice by writing music soon
I have struggled so hard to write melodies in the past, so this video is absolutely life saving. I have never learned so much in 16 minutes. Next time I'm struggling, just... do this backwards. Easy !!
Oh wow, it's so weird watching a video of yours and it's actually something I did a ton in music lessons. Being a wind player, we weren't analysing different ways to make chords or anything. But they _did_ have us practice which notes we could leave-out from a melody and have it still be recognisable. Practically, this was only taught to us so we'd know when to join-in again if you missed a note, had to sneeze, etc. But it's very useful for analysis as well, to pull-out the chord tones and leading tones from all the embellishments. Even to this day, I find myself minimising tunes into a string of motifs/cliches when I whistle/hum them. Of course, it's thanks to the efforts of people like you that I'm even able to understand what's being left behind, in scale degrees. Back then, without really knowing how or why, all I knew was That Way still sounded like the tune we were playing while This Way made it sound like a different composition entirely.
When in doubt you can also reference the bass notes as they usually land on or at least accompany the main notes of a melody. Especially usefull when a piece is littered with arps or embellishments.
logical methods work for my brain waay more easily, so I'll definitely be using these methods for writing melodies, and experiment coming up with other sorts of edits
I never really thought of simplifying music and getting skeleton. now I realize I can just make a simple skeleton that somewhat works and work on top of it
Not having a strong background in music (academically speaking at least, I still consider myself a somewhat decent amateur clarinetist) I found that this is among your easier to understand. Still enjoying all the others videos too, and hoping for more detailed ones about minor modes.
Amazing video! Very straightforward and easy to follow. How do you find the chords for your arrangements? By ear or using some kind of tool? A video going over how to find the chords to a piece would be awesome.
you went through the whole video without mentioning the composer! ryuji sasai, previously of prog rock band novela, who also composed on xak and fray for microcabin, as well as SaGa 3 and final fantasy mystic quest while at square
Treasures of the Rudra is amazing... now that Live-A-Live got a remake, I can maybe hope for this one too!... or even Bahamut Lagoon?! Btw, my favorite song from the Rudra soundtrack is Waiting for the Moon ... got some light Take 5 vibes
I credit your channel as my personal motivation and inspiration for learning about music theory, and falling in love with it as much as I have. So I've been waiting for you to do something like for a long time, and boy is it exactly what I needed to understand some of the gaps left in my personal explorations. I just have on question for you: if this is not how composers write melodies, but analyzers analyze them, how can I then begin the process of writing a melody? My goal for 2025 is to create some melodies for some characters for a novel I'm writing, and I would love to know where to begin. If not from here, then where?
In the West we are all trained to melodies based upon halving the lengths of the strings to get harmonics on a fretboard. Arithmetic means approximate this using 12 semitones. Is it known if melodies using a different number of divisions per octave, such as 9 or 16. Can sound harmonious to perhaps those normally considered tone deaf.
GUIM did an excellent (if dryly technical) melody reduction analysis of Gau's theme from Final Fantasy VI some years ago, check it out! The revealed overall structure is mindblowing in its simple effectiveness.
is the third last chord shown at 7:15 supposed to be flat 6 instead of flat 7? also, excellent vid you really don't miss; i'd never thought of breaking down melody this much
Okay peeps. Just want to ask everyone a question. When you write a song (I write for guitar, bass, and drums), do you write melody first or music first?
Out of curiosity, if two different musicians- both experienced in stripping away embellishments- look at the same piece, is it possible that they might sometimes whittle it down to two different skeletons? If so, then I think I'm starting to get a better appreciation for the phrase "more art than science".
Yeah I think it's the same situation as when you ask what key something is in. Quite often songs are very uncontroversially in one key but other times it's hard to say. Because key is not actually part of the music, only part of the analysis (same with melodic skeleton), the question is less about what it is and more about how do we wanna look at it to take it apart
PLEASE do a video on the track qonquest ablaze from fire emblem awakening. I know you already did a video on another track from the game, but i am going insane because i fail to analyse what the time signature is and generally what's going on in the track.
This melody dissection and finding "structural tones" kinda reminds me of GUIM's videos on melody. ...it's been so long since GUIM posted anything, I hope he's okay.
I came here looking for Game Music Fanfare.....is he still working? Is he still thinking and creating? He's your video editor right? I must hear his thoughts on music.
I'm going to disagree here a bit and say that this method of analyzing a melody is getting to its structural elements but not to its characteristic elements, exactly. I like to think about Over the Rainbow as an example because it's so obvious: first two bars go C, C, B G-A-B C. Leap up, then down with an elaboration. Second two bars: C, A, G. Leap up, then down with a whole note. Third two bars: A, F, E C-D-E F. Leap up, then down with an elaboration. Last two bars: D B-C-D E C. Elaboration, then whole note. If you zoom out, you can see that there are three components, 1 being the leap up then a step down, 2 being the elaboration, and 3 being the whole note. We can reduce this melody, then, to 1 2 1 3, 1 2 2 3. The unity of this melody doesn't really come from its skeletal structure where we pick out the structural tones, even though we could do that and we would end up with, at one note per bar, C B A G F E D C. It's just a simple scale! The functional and characteristic part of the melody isn't this skeletal scale; it's the motivic repetition. Motives are established then repeated, using that skeleton as a guide but giving the melody a strong identity. The issue is that the skeleton itself doesn't do very much for the song. It doesn't make it interesting or memorable. The thing you *want* from a melody comes from the motivic repetition, not the skeleton. The skeleton gives the melody a sense of direction, but the motives are what give it its identity.
Paradox of choice. 6 different notes can be arranged in 720 different sequences. 8 different can be arranged in 40,320 sequences. 10 notes can be arranged in 3,628,800 different sequences, etc. This is without any repeated notes, and without even considering rhythm, which makes the possible sequences almost infinite for just 6 notes.
You're teaching people Shenkerian analysis the same way a parent hides broccoli in a pan of brownies
This can be useful for people writing soundtracks with leitmotifs as you can figure out how to simplify your own theme in order to make it work in a different moment. Maybe there’s a big final fight that uses the villains theme which is in 6/8 but needs the main theme mixed in which is in 4/4.
this is exactly why i clicked on this video
Sincerely, this is the best video on youtube about melody :)
there are not many
Love how you presented the "melodic reduction". That's such a great tool. It's kind of math-adjacent which makes sense to my engineering brain. I never went to school for music theory, but like to write music in my free time, pulling from what I've learned via TH-cam and my 18 years of piano experience.
I've never had a good theoretical understanding of melody - take one theory class for fun that covers the circle of 5ths and ends in cadences - you've explained something, in less than 20 minutes, that's vern eluding me for YEARS!
Thank you
Music academia is such a drag
Of course its been eluding you if you never went to go learn it lmao.
@@christopherjobin-official7440 It really isn't much different from what you'd get out of this video, except maybe that you'd get homework and would be tested on your understanding.
I appreciate you noting that composers don't think about melody that way. As a composer, it helps me feel better about struggling with melodic analysis in school. Melody is probably the most ephemeral part of the creative process for me. They kind of just happen and even I sometimes don't know why.😅
Mr. 8-Bit Music Theory, I've got lots of questions about your creative process:
You mentioned the use of your intuition in discerning which notes are important-
When choosing which song from the soundtrack to dissect for us, do you just listen to the soundtrack and use intuition to pick whichever song catches your attention based off of your intuition?
Do you decide the topic of the video before you listen to the music and does that guide the way or do you just listen to the music and if you notice something great, you decide to make a video off of whatever you hear?
In your opinion, how important is it to develop this ingenuity for music?
Thank you for using that massive brain for the sake of us viewers!
Man I can’t express how helpful this is. I’ve been reading Analyzing Classical Form for a couple weeks and it’s my first time actually analyzing music. There are some examples and practice scores where I have absolutely no idea how to figure out what’s going on harmonically because the melody is all over the place. 12:29 is exactly the kinda question I would ask “which note is the important one here” but I didn’t know about rhythmic displacement (or really any of the melodic embellishments) so that helps a ton.
8bit plays an escape tone:
The little Bill Wurtz who lives in my brain: spiritual 🎶
This is the best visual of listening to parts of a song that I've ever seen, and the explanation and narration is just right. It makes it so that I get exactly what you mean right away, and learning new terms for them is effortless instead of overwhelming or confusing! Absolutely brilliant, thank you a thousand times!
Hopefully this could be useful for playing by ear. I would want to be able to do that one day on the piano mainly.
I find the two things that seem to really help for playing by ear, is learning music theory, then for every new thing you learn, do improvisational music that specifically implements the thing you just learned (even if it's just like a new key signature or something).
This forces you to think about what exactly is going on in a song, that really helps with eventually playing by ear. It helps create a direct link between "understanding of the music" and "execution of the music", which otherwise can be somewhat isolated skills.
Fundamentally, improvisation and playing by ear are kinda the same skill, even if it doesn't seem that way at a surface level examination.
Learning some solos or melody lines by ear helped me a ton when i was first learning to play guitar
Sing everything you hear, learn to pitch match with confidence in real
Time with your voice and then go looking for it on your instrument.
It’s not that hard to learn how to play by ear, but you really
Need to learn how to play Melodies with your fingers and how to track the points of resonance / resonant intervals with your voice!
Harmony is something you DO at the piano, with your voice and your knowledge of theory, but it’s something you have to do, go for, and feel!
work on recognizing note intervals by ear, look up david bennet piano
@@hahahalala-i1xhonestly from personal experience (and I am far from the only person who feels his way), learning isolated intervals is counterintuitive and a waste of time. Each interval can sound very different in different contexts. If you’re set on doing dedicated ear training practice, learn solfège instead. Solfège teaches you to recognize the sound of each note as it relates to the key (a.k.a the context!). It’s much more synchronous with how our brains naturally process music, and you can start practicing with real music pretty much right away instead of putting yourself through hours worth of drills in apps first. As someone who tried to learn isolated intervals, I improved in _leaps and bounds_ the minute i switched to solfège.
This was so incredibly helpful!!! I’ve been looking for helpful melody breakdowns for months since starting to learn the harp and wanting to write my own music. This was exactly what I needed all along!
I’ve learned so much from your channel as a whole. Thank you so much for all you create and share!
I’ve been spending time learning traditional American Appalachian songs, and trying to find a simple melody in the songs can be surprisingly difficult. Usually I spend time on TH-cam trying to find an earlier more basic version, so I can put everyone’s addition in context. This topic you’re covering is so very important. Thank you.
Hey! I love your videos, and you're so freaking smart and talented. I just wanted to say I found it super helpful when you greyed out the embellishment notes but still left them there (at around the 8:20 mark). If you ever do anything like this again, would you be able to do that more often, and/or leave it on screen for longer?
btw if other people read this it'd be great to know if you agree.
Thank you so much!
Strongly agree!
Oooooooooo myyyyyy gaaaaaaaawwwwwdddd sooooooo goood. This is def gonna be one of the vids I send to beginners from now on.
My man, thank you so much. I’ve been writing music for around a year without a background in music theory (especially as someone who plays kit), and this literally just tripled how good my music sounds. I feel like breaking melodies down and starting them with only the core notes really helps me understand how and where my melody is moving and, for that, I sincerely thank you ❤
I think this is some of your best work yet! Very thorough explanation, followed by the smooth visual transitions between the reduced melodies and their original counterparts. Thank you! :)
I’m studying music theory and your channel has been a blessing for me. Thank you so much for giving amazing quality videos and completely free, you really deserve an award
Your conclusion at the end -- "This isn't how composers usually write melodies" -- really kind of threw me for a loop. It isn't? Why not? It seems like a great way to go about writing a melody! What do they do instead, and why? Might make a good follow-up video?
Mainly because it's so analytical, working backwards from the final process.
When you're writing, your focus is more on the feel/mood and you instead just have all of these embellishments deeply-installed into your muscle memory to call-upon them when necessary. You might only have a vague idea for what key you're in, and the other specific things you do (by feel) can end-up informing which specific mode of that key is being used.
This is why some people say they can only write on certain instruments, that different instruments encourage different writing habits in them, and get writer's block when staring at a blank staff. For instance, piano encourages chromatic runs for my joining-embellishments, while guitar and bass makes me want to jump-about in thirds and fourths.
@@kaitlyn__L Exactly this
Normally it's just intuition and good taste
@@kaitlyn__L Even though I have been playing instruments on and off for 5ish years, I've been always struggling to improvise anything, I can only perform something others wrote and it makes me pretty sad. Regardless of playing this much, I've kind of never been able to figure out "mood" or "feel" people are talking about, but looking at the process analytically finally started to make sense. I envy you people who just "get" it intuitively :D
@@kaitlyn__LI genuinely had to pause the video to look for a comment saying this. I thought I was losing my mind. This is a useful video and a huge part of Shenkarian analysis, but this is not how you WRITE music, this is how you ANALYZE music.
So many lost souls in the comments talking about how this video will “help them write music” is breaking my heart.
I would love more like this, my favorite videos of yours have always been the ones that offer advice about analyzing and writing music.
One relevant question I have: you brought up chord tones - when it's ambiguous, how do you decide what the chords are to be able to know what's a chord tone and what's an embellishment? That's something I struggle with.
I feel like I had a breakthrough with the explanation starting at 8:40 about how the composer adds embellishment while keeping the same melody. It seems so simple but also is really cool how that is done.
One of those videos that are just worth gold. Keep making this. Wouldn't object to more videos about structure. We have too many videos about harmony
I picked up my bass yesterday to start practicing my scales and modes again. This is perfect timing for me lol
Thanks for all the awesome videos man. You Rock!
you got me so inspired to work on my music again with new tricks to understand melodies (always the hardest part for me) very good video
Thank you! I've been struggling with melodies for the past couple months
This guy never dissapoint 😌, what an amazing video
Now I have the need to analyze lots of videogame melodies like this!
Surlent's Between the World theme is my favorite from the whole soundtrack. Happy to see more people get to know about the game
This is truly a great explanation of a complex topic. I'm definitely not an expert on music theory, but this is super helpful in also understanding how to play a piece. I typically go through a (not so formal) version of this procedure when I'm playing Bach on my cello, but had never really rationalized it like so.
I genuinely learned a lot from this video. Thanks so much for taking such a close look at this soundtrack and really walking us through it. Understanding the vocabulary and tools for many of things you come to feel and understand on an intuitive but not intellectual level is so helpful. My engineer brain really loves this approach to analyzing music and honestly, I can see how this sort of understanding can assist with composition as well.
Now I wanna go and write a melody
Thank you
As a self taught I thank you so much for this. I can't find your level of clarity even in college textbooks. Keep the good work!
Incredible work on this one. So elegant to pack all of these concepts into the music from this one soundtrack.
Loved this. I found it interesting that there can be subtension that can resolve within chords that aren't the tonic. I've never thought about listening for that.
This is a fascinating method of analyzing and conceptualizing melodies! Thank you for the video 😁 I've been diving back into music and music theory lately, and your videos on chord progressions and drums helped me take some big leaps in my understanding. All of your content is top notch, and I've learned a lot from going through them, usually at least two or three times 😅 it's helped contribute to a deepening of my experience listening to music, and I hope to begin putting principles like these into practice by writing music soon
I have struggled so hard to write melodies in the past, so this video is absolutely life saving. I have never learned so much in 16 minutes. Next time I'm struggling, just... do this backwards. Easy !!
Oh wow, it's so weird watching a video of yours and it's actually something I did a ton in music lessons. Being a wind player, we weren't analysing different ways to make chords or anything. But they _did_ have us practice which notes we could leave-out from a melody and have it still be recognisable.
Practically, this was only taught to us so we'd know when to join-in again if you missed a note, had to sneeze, etc. But it's very useful for analysis as well, to pull-out the chord tones and leading tones from all the embellishments. Even to this day, I find myself minimising tunes into a string of motifs/cliches when I whistle/hum them.
Of course, it's thanks to the efforts of people like you that I'm even able to understand what's being left behind, in scale degrees. Back then, without really knowing how or why, all I knew was That Way still sounded like the tune we were playing while This Way made it sound like a different composition entirely.
RAAAHHH LET GOOOOO 8-BIT MUSIC THEORY POSTED
When in doubt you can also reference the bass notes as they usually land on or at least accompany the main notes of a melody. Especially usefull when a piece is littered with arps or embellishments.
15:42 Wait, is that big guy in the cloak the "strong, melodic skeleton" you were mentioning?
Definitely
logical methods work for my brain waay more easily, so I'll definitely be using these methods for writing melodies, and experiment coming up with other sorts of edits
I never really thought of simplifying music and getting skeleton.
now I realize I can just make a simple skeleton that somewhat works and work on top of it
Oh no, diagramming embellishments is gonna unearth some music school trauma 🤣
Not having a strong background in music (academically speaking at least, I still consider myself a somewhat decent amateur clarinetist) I found that this is among your easier to understand.
Still enjoying all the others videos too, and hoping for more detailed ones about minor modes.
This comment is for the algorithm so more people can get to enjoy this masterpiece of a channel
Very helpful for transcribing music by ear!
14:28 - I believe that is called an inverted turn, at least if you're going by the baroque names for that kind of thing.
Amazing video! Very straightforward and easy to follow. How do you find the chords for your arrangements? By ear or using some kind of tool? A video going over how to find the chords to a piece would be awesome.
5:18 so that’s what the beginning of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme is called!
Surlent's theme is pure wizardry!
Certified 8 bit music theory Banger video
5:18 there’s a Final Fantasy song that starts just like that and it’s making me crazy
Rydia's Theme
Yeah, the "Rydia" phrase caught me right away too.
THANKS! I was sure that it was a female lead theme but it couldn't find it
Bro added arpeggios to his arpeggios
Thank you for this video appreciate this
you went through the whole video without mentioning the composer! ryuji sasai, previously of prog rock band novela, who also composed on xak and fray for microcabin, as well as SaGa 3 and final fantasy mystic quest while at square
Very useful! I will use to analyze my own melodies 😂
Did you say dicking around, lol!🤣🤣🤣
It's a technical term
@ 😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣
Came here to find this too 😂
this is like wt i been searching
Phenomenal video as always, but I do have one question and it might be my mistake, why at 7:15 are both Cb and Db labeled the flat seven of Ebm?
typo, I think it should be VI, VII, i
Treasures of the Rudra is amazing... now that Live-A-Live got a remake, I can maybe hope for this one too!... or even Bahamut Lagoon?!
Btw, my favorite song from the Rudra soundtrack is Waiting for the Moon ... got some light Take 5 vibes
I credit your channel as my personal motivation and inspiration for learning about music theory, and falling in love with it as much as I have. So I've been waiting for you to do something like for a long time, and boy is it exactly what I needed to understand some of the gaps left in my personal explorations. I just have on question for you: if this is not how composers write melodies, but analyzers analyze them, how can I then begin the process of writing a melody? My goal for 2025 is to create some melodies for some characters for a novel I'm writing, and I would love to know where to begin. If not from here, then where?
In the West we are all trained to melodies based upon halving the lengths of the strings to get harmonics on a fretboard. Arithmetic means approximate this using 12 semitones. Is it known if melodies using a different number of divisions per octave, such as 9 or 16. Can sound harmonious to perhaps those normally considered tone deaf.
GUIM did an excellent (if dryly technical) melody reduction analysis of Gau's theme from Final Fantasy VI some years ago, check it out! The revealed overall structure is mindblowing in its simple effectiveness.
is the third last chord shown at 7:15 supposed to be flat 6 instead of flat 7? also, excellent vid you really don't miss; i'd never thought of breaking down melody this much
Yes it is whoops
@@8bitMusicTheory ok, thanks!
1:32 I thought the Naruto Shippuden opening Bluebird was about to play
Great vid on an important topic!
OMG Treasures of Rudras soundtrack? I thought i left music playing in another tab
Another great video on this would be on the many variations on the dearly beloved kingdom hearts main theme
what an amazing way to learn music theory. with vgm
7:10 there are two "bVII" marks instead of "bVI bVII", i think that's a typo lol
Dude how have I never heard of this game before???
Okay peeps. Just want to ask everyone a question. When you write a song (I write for guitar, bass, and drums), do you write melody first or music first?
Is it like a shawty?
I wonder how many takes it took you to say escape tones with your voice falling accordingly without it feeling weird
wait til he hears sinistrals battle theme.
good video
Out of curiosity, if two different musicians- both experienced in stripping away embellishments- look at the same piece, is it possible that they might sometimes whittle it down to two different skeletons? If so, then I think I'm starting to get a better appreciation for the phrase "more art than science".
yes 100%, it happened all the time in my music theory classes. Then we'd argue over who's interpretation was correct haha
Yeah I think it's the same situation as when you ask what key something is in. Quite often songs are very uncontroversially in one key but other times it's hard to say. Because key is not actually part of the music, only part of the analysis (same with melodic skeleton), the question is less about what it is and more about how do we wanna look at it to take it apart
At 7:10 , the Cb chord should be a bVI, not bVII
PLEASE do a video on the track qonquest ablaze from fire emblem awakening. I know you already did a video on another track from the game, but i am going insane because i fail to analyse what the time signature is and generally what's going on in the track.
challenging to understand but thank you
I feel like we're going to run out of new melodies real soon...
This melody dissection and finding "structural tones" kinda reminds me of GUIM's videos on melody.
...it's been so long since GUIM posted anything, I hope he's okay.
I am so mucically illiterate i have no idea what this guy is takkibg about.
... dickin around with c flat to d flat moves for a bit... 🤣
I have no idea how to add chords to a melody, that seems like an impossible challenge
I came here looking for Game Music Fanfare.....is he still working? Is he still thinking and creating? He's your video editor right? I must hear his thoughts on music.
I'm going to disagree here a bit and say that this method of analyzing a melody is getting to its structural elements but not to its characteristic elements, exactly. I like to think about Over the Rainbow as an example because it's so obvious: first two bars go C, C, B G-A-B C. Leap up, then down with an elaboration. Second two bars: C, A, G. Leap up, then down with a whole note. Third two bars: A, F, E C-D-E F. Leap up, then down with an elaboration. Last two bars: D B-C-D E C. Elaboration, then whole note. If you zoom out, you can see that there are three components, 1 being the leap up then a step down, 2 being the elaboration, and 3 being the whole note. We can reduce this melody, then, to 1 2 1 3, 1 2 2 3. The unity of this melody doesn't really come from its skeletal structure where we pick out the structural tones, even though we could do that and we would end up with, at one note per bar, C B A G F E D C. It's just a simple scale! The functional and characteristic part of the melody isn't this skeletal scale; it's the motivic repetition. Motives are established then repeated, using that skeleton as a guide but giving the melody a strong identity.
The issue is that the skeleton itself doesn't do very much for the song. It doesn't make it interesting or memorable. The thing you *want* from a melody comes from the motivic repetition, not the skeleton. The skeleton gives the melody a sense of direction, but the motives are what give it its identity.
Paradox of choice. 6 different notes can be arranged in 720 different sequences. 8 different can be arranged in 40,320 sequences. 10 notes can be arranged in 3,628,800 different sequences, etc. This is without any repeated notes, and without even considering rhythm, which makes the possible sequences almost infinite for just 6 notes.
That's not the point. Example: Sans' theme in 'It's Raining Somewhere Else' is still ripping off Sans' theme in 'sans.' despite using different notes.
Yes, but how many of those sound good?
Also, how did you figure this out?
@@boone99999 permutation formula
I'm curious why this was called a paradox. I don't see a contradiction in it.
The best melody ever is Its a Hard Knock Life. Fight me.
Melody is the hardest aspect of music. No amount of musical knowledge helps.
Your first sentence may be true. Musical knowledge does help though. I just wouldn't say it makes it easy.
@silphv Melody is raw talent
I've written a few melodies
@@silphv I'm proud of those melodies like any composer.
im early