Compose in 1 Week

Learn how to use a free notation program that makes composing easy and your music look pro!

A sequence is a melodic idea that's repeated up or down by step.

Take your melody from bar 1 and repeat it up or down a step in bar 2. Repeat the process again for bar 3. End the sequence in bar 4 with a long note, or with rests to give the melody a sense of breath.

Compose a parallel period, which will make up your A section.

A parallel period is a type of phrase structure, that consists of a 4 bar question and 4 bar answer that mirror each other. Typically the first 2 bars of the question will be repeated for the first 2 bars of the answer. In this particular parallel period, the first 3 bars of the question are repeated in the answer.

Tip: Take your sequence and repeat it again in bars 5-8: simple!

This is a kind of melody where the motion outlines a the notes of a chord. In Adelita, this occurs in bar 4 over an E minor chord. That means you’ll want to use the notes of an E minor triad: E-G-B. You can use these notes in any order.

A sentence is another common phrase structure, with the melodic ideas ordered short-short-long. The "short" ideas are often a repeat of each other, or very similar.

A sentence is often divided as 1+1+2 or 2+2+4. Adelita contains a sentence at the start of the B section:

New register: Bar 13 is the same melody as bars 9-10, but down an octave. This puts it into a different register, producing variety and contrast simultaneously - one of the goals for a composer to strive for!

• Arched Contour: The melodic shape of bar 14 mirrors the shape of bar 11. This is commonly called an arch shaped contour.

• New Chord: Be wary of the C7 chord at the end of bar 14, where you’ll need to adjust the notes to fit the chord (C-E-G-Bb).

We can quickly add harmony to our melody by using the primary chords. These are the I, IV and V chords of a key, also called Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant.

These three chords form the foundation of Western music. What’s extra useful about them is that these three chords contain all of the notes of the scale.

You migh
t notice that the completed harmonization is a bit clunky. The chords fit the melody, but they all contain a lot of notes. We also might want to add some contrasting texture to the chords, so that they’r not all block chords on the first beat. Finally, it would help to have some fingerings in, not only for playability sake, but also for artistic reasons.

We can boil this down into three main points:

1) Simplify

2) Texturize

3) Fingerings

By deleting notes from the chords, we can make a much simpler and playable version of the piece. You can go as simple as you like, right down to just melody and bass line if you want - the choice is yours.

Tip: Try to keep the same number of notes for each chord. So if your first chord contains three notes, then it would generally work well to keep the remaining chords at three notes also. Three can certainly be exceptions, especially at high points or places where you want extra emphasis.

The simpl
ified version could already be a lovely piece as it is, but we can enhance it further. Let’s look at the texture used in ‘Adelita’ first. The first few bars provide an illustration for what happens throughout - the chords are spread across each measure.

Your ch
oice of fingerings can have drastic effects on the playability and sound qualities of a piece. While I can’t provide an exhaustive study of this here, there are a couple of general points to consider:

1) Positions: What position do you want to play things in?

2) Across vs. Along strings: do you want a passage to be played across multiple strings, or along a single string?

While not mandatory, providing expressive markings like dynamics can be helpful for guitarists to read and learn your piece. Ornaments like mordents, trills and appoggiaturas can help spice up a melody. Notice the tasteful and clear use of both expressive indications and ornaments in ‘Adelita’.