How Taylor Swift Writes Melodies | The Artists Series S1E1 

Chloe Marie LMAO

ل

Danganronpa again..

Yeah haha

😅😅🤣🤣 You cool Plus you know about Sadhguru

Cuhloee Soshii, haha cool man :)

I did notice the one note melodies in her songs. I actually didn't like them when I first heard them. By the way I recreated her songs using Jazz chords, I have a video on my channel. Please feel free to check them out.

Jude Nihal Fernando you're amazing

Heey blink

Out of the woods was literally the only one I noticed before this video. I was pretty impressed

Linds Tee yes

Thanks Raymond :)

this is brilliant

Cheyenne Stevenson same sis. SAME.

haha

Basically, because of everything he's been talking about all along the video. Your ears and mind are open now, and you know that there's some kind of message or intention behind any music you listen to. Otherwise, is the cadence of the rhythm, the lack of lyrics and the Implide Tension

😂 it’s very Saw like.

Because you’ve finally realized you’ve been playing into the corporate machine this entire time. Free will? Artistic expression? No.... it’s been the same note this entire time. You can see it. Someone standing at their keyboard, eyes empty, emotionless, just pressing middle C over and over again. You can’t escape it. It’s too late. They turn their head to the left - there! A writer, possible salvation, freedom from the monotony, an escape into a passion and emotional world until you see the “musician” turn and thrust their keyboard over, screeching “NOT ENOUGH AMBIGUITY” and then you see. The writer is chained to the corner. They’re crying, tears streaming off their face. “A-a-a-nd all you need is us, and all you need is us, and all you need is us, and all you need is us, and all...” The droning. Middle C starts again, but the keyboard is still on top of the writer, the musician is standing over them, the same note haunting the room. You look around, trying to find an exit... there is none... the machine has devoured you... and soon enough you will be a musician too. all you nEed iS LOvEeEEE...

Yes I've noticed this too, it's not only from song to song but within each song there's at least 3 if not 4 vocal rhythm changes

Ummmmm…I think the majority of “rap” music's consumers are middle class white folks.

He didn’t state it explicitly but it was kinda implied on the “one-note” or monotone approach explanation where the only distinguishing factor is the rhythm

Thanks Dovydas! :)

whenever you get chance would you consider making a video on Mark Knopfler writing style? thanks

Ikywt ootw I know right!

Ikywt ootw I really like those two albums, but if we look at each album as a whole, 1989 is the best. The songs meld together but have enough individuality to be unique and great on their own. Speak now is similar in that sense but I still think 1989 is written better. RED is a good album and I love many of the songs, but it is not as whole as 1989. It did not stand in one place or genre. That is not necessarily a bad thing but it does set the album behind 1989 which is so strong and straightforward in its presentation.

Luke Hartung I think that's the reason why I love Red. It's an album for all seasons. Songs are from varied point of the spectrum. Plus, I'm the type of person who play an album (or a single song sometimes) over and over, from the first song to the last, until I burn out from doing so and it only took me a few while to get 1989 out of my head.

CheesecakeLasagna I guess it comes down to personal opinion. I agree that RED has more variety. I think that 1989 lasted so long (I played it on loop for an entire year) was because the entire theme was new and full production. The music videos were outstanding. That must be why I liked it so much,

Ikywt ootw yes I agree

@@camara1194 Why the fuck? lmao

they should be

It is now! At Berkelee Music among others

It might be able to be taught at schools but you wouldn't be able to do what Taylor does with this method.... She has a special genius that can't be taught

this should be....i really don't know why deped PH call it a MUSIC subject because here in the Philippines it was just tackling all about the life of the musicians in the classic era and i thought that should belong to history not in Music co's it's fucking useless

(for your own sake I hope you are just being complimentary (together with the 160 people who've agreed with you) - and in reality are awake/aware)

Want some pocket lint?

Pam Rogers of course they are. Their just saying his voice is calming/pleasant I guess

Also, she mentions that all her songs start on piano or guitar

Composers, specially classically trained, write songs solely on piano. That means harmony AND melody. Swift uses piano as accompaniment for her voice, therefore she’s using 2 instruments: a harmonic instrument (piano/guitar) and a melodic one (voice). Playing one note melodies in piano does sound dull and too “simple”. I am not saying they’re bad or wrong, it’s just the way it is on the instrument.

I think I he means the entire song on piano w/o vocals. Without the lyrics to distract you, it would become obvious how stupid af hearing the same key being hit over and over is.

He means JUST Piano. Chords left hand, melodie right hand, not singing.

YASSSSSSSSSSS GIRRRRLLLL YASSSSSS

What's to cover? 4 chords over and over, almost always diatonic.

@@antidote7not quite true, check out hook theory

Gia The Sweet Potato My friends play piano and he told me the same thing hahahahah

Gia The Sweet Potato Yup. painful but true.

hey.. melody ain't dead yet.. soundcloud.com/jonnie-luscombe-music/safe-space-ur-enemys-enemytoo-much-to-think

why do people think the voice and the piano are equivalent instruments... a simple melody that sounds awful on piano can sound great when you sing it with the right accompaniment... please check out my stripped-down version of Taylor's BLANK SPACE on acoustic piano & vocal, thanks & please pardon the promo.

that is so true!! This is the reason why I, as a pianist write classical crossover instrumental music. Because I don't sing, so writing one note melody pop music just doesn't work on the piano..

Aditya Padode Does he?

You're too kind Aditya :)

While we're asking rhetorical questions: Why do they call it "chili" if it's hot?

Ah, but what do you get if you put together a joke & a rhetorical question? Well, to paraphrase Leonardo, Catch me if you Cayenne. Just thought I'd Spice up your're day, I bet you didn't see that one Cumin! Anyway I'm out of Thyme now so TTFN.

Lovin it!

Yeah a good way to tell the song is well written or not is look at the sheet music

Lover is great!! I’m a pop lover and her and Max Martin is a match made in heaven. 1989 is perfect pop music! I love it so much.

good catch. And then there's the "mix up the timeline" trick that got so over-used after "Memento", like confusing the audience was somehow entertaining all by itself. Now they just hide the plot or important details as another artsy technique, like "you're just the audience - you don't count - we the producers know what's going on, and that's all that matters".

@@jameseverett9037 If something actually is going on (?). I got a suspicion that sometimes they just try to make the impression that something is going on, that we - the viewers - are too stupid to understand. Ever heard the fairy tale of the emperors new clothes?

I agree. Guessing puzzles can be quite entertaining. But it does not offer an emotional and moving experience.

I rarely finish movies. I just lose interest. It got so bad I started writing my own screenplay. The only place it will probably ever be seen is on the screen behind my eyeballs. But it’s a darn good movie.

Jim Hess I was just listening to Grace wth.

Jim Hess yessssss

Jim Hess yes he does

@you're totally right talent or not but still need to know how to use them to success right? born with talent and if we do not know how to use them or how to carry them it'll dimmed. no sparks.

les cox ,she really a pain in the arse , gosh the fakeness ,today is fucked 😒

+Samah Sparkfly LOL Bitch please!

Mid-way i already knew who you were talking about

Samah Sparkfly what do you mean??

What you call polished, I call *BASIC* . Taylor Swift's songwriting is BASIC AF. The only thing that's more basic than her songwriting is her singing. I will never understand WHY she's famous.

D3dshotCalamity Great! Yeah, one note melodies are pretty universal :)

under the sea doesn't have a one note melody though, does it?

Holistic Songwriting lucy in the sky with diamonds

Under the Sea is not a one note melody! haha, just google the sheet music.

I'll let my parents know, thank you! :)

Budhi Luhur YOU SAW IT TOO?

OMG I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO SAW IT AKSJS

Budhi Luhur now that you mentioned it... *I CAN'T UNSEE IT!*

I was looking for this comment

This guys than capt lib pants!

sparks fly ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oKar-tF__ac.html amazing that such an up beat song is written in D minor. Look what you made me do analysis: Steve Milton, a founding partner of creative music agency LISTEN who has a master’s degree in musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music, says the chorus is the first thing that jumps out at him. The similarities to Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” landed the band a writing credit, but it’s the variation on the common practice of repeating a phrase that makes “LWYMMD” so interesting. “Swift chose to mix it up in a different way, whether she knew it or not, by borrowing a technique similar to classical Indian music, specifically rhythmic patterns known as talas,” Milton says. “This is something we see jazz musicians tap into, but not so much pop stars. Basically, it involves repeating a sequence of numbers until the phrase lands on the first beat of the measure.” Swift, Milton points out, goes from a six-syllable phrase (“look what you made me do”) to a seven-syllable phrase (“look what you just made me do”), which “requires her to repeat it twice before landing on the downbeat,” a quirk that keeps the song in motion. Milton also cites the song’s bridge, which uses “a very traditional chord progression-Am, G, F, E-known as the Andalusian cadence.” It’s a chord progression that’s been used and popularized by a countless number of songs dating as far back as the Renaissance. The more you know!

www.digitalspy.com/music/feature/a803041/taylor-swift-the-surprising-stories-behind-six-of-her-biggest-songs/

'Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield first heard Swift’s music in the summer of 2007. At the time, Sheffield had a ritual where he’d eat lunch while watching CW Network reruns of “Clueless” and “What I Like About You.” During one such lunchbreak, the CW happened to broadcast Swift’s “Our Song” music video between those sitcoms. “I was in the kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich and totally transfixed by the song,” Sheffield recalls now, via phone from his Brooklyn, N.Y. home. “That chorus just floored me. I googled to see who the songwriter was - I was shocked it was the same person who sang it, which was so unusual for country hits in that era. I had no idea who ‘Taylor Swift’ was but I was already wondering if this brilliant song was some kind of fluke. As it turns out, the girl was just getting started. … “You go back and listen to it now,” Sheffield says of the debut album, “and all the seeds of greatness are already there. She was going to make a great country record, and yet with all the other strains of music that she’s already working in, you can already hear that she’s a pop classicist. A song that cracks me up is ‘Should’ve Said No.’ That’s not a very country song. To me it sounds incredibly like an Oasis song - it’s definitely got the British mod feeling to it. From the very beginning, she wanted to be a country singer but with an unbelievably big appetite for the whole realm of pop music and really wanting to take inspiration from every corner of pop music history.” In hindsight, a Southern accent is much more prevalent on Swift’s 2006 LP vocals, too. … Sheffield’s favorite Swift album is 2012’s “Red.” A lifelong Clash fan, he says this is probably because it’s her most “rock” LP to date, yet he also loves the title track’s disco-banjo alchemy. He first saw Swift perform live on the singer’s “Speak Now” tour. But it was a “1989” show at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium that convinced him that she was operating in rare stratosphere. “As a performer she has that unique ability to make everyone in the audience feel seen,” Sheffield says. “She really communicates that in a way Bruce Springsteen does. It’s like seeing The Replacements in a way. I saw an afternoon all-ages hard-core Replacements show in Rhode Island when I was a teenager, and it was a thing where I felt like the guy onstage was reading my mind and reading my own diary back to me. And it’s funny all these years later, I can still have that feeling listening to a Taylor Swift song. … I tell Sheffield that’s pretty much how fans interviewed for this story described Swift’s effect on them as teenage girls. How personal, how relatable her songs were for them. “It’s funny because I feel that way about those songs too, and I’m three times as old as she was when she wrote them,” Sheffield says with a chuckle. “That song ‘Tied Together With a Smile,’ that’s a feeling she really captures that’s not restricted to teenagers. She was already extraordinarily accomplished as a songwriter at that point. I love ‘Reputation’ and all the pop stuff and production that she does on that album. People understandably get distracted by what a celebrity she is, but just in the songwriting she is such a character. Any time she wants to, she can just sit down with the guitar and write a song that’s just unlike what anybody else does.” Fans who’ve been there since Swift’s early days will be listening. Still hanging on every word. Al.com

behind the scenes end game ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VA7Y_Psp5l4.html

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TPSk2K4crf4.html 1.296 following, finding the chords/rhythm for a song

...Speak Now is not on 1989 though. But you're right of course :)

Sparksflyswift 13 true

i kinda dont agree, because ive listened to a lot of taylor’s music since back then, and mostly her verses are on one note

What OP means is it's not a Taylor Swift style but rather a 1989 style of writing.

Yeah I love 1989 but Speak Now is multiple times better. Clean and This Love are really the only songs on 1989 that I can listen to on loop and not get bored/annoyed but I can listen to all of Speak Now that way.

Thanks Jose :)

Jay cee hey jay cee, great to hear, thank you! :)

oh, and btw, as an aside, i'd argue that the commercial popularity of rap music has given rise to the one note melody. A way for pop music / sung music to borrow some of the energy of rap music.

Never occurred to me but now that you mention it this seems obvious! Obviously, ONMs have been around for a long time (one note samba, anyone?), but you're making a good point saying that the rhythmical nature of hip hop "singing" probably had a large influence on its commercial appeal.

Yep, I think it goes along perfectly with what you were saying in this video. When im writing for an artist who's style is very "soft" and poppy, i'll use more notes in the melodies than if the artist's image is more edgy (think Rihanna, someone like that). Because (like in your movies example) there's something that seems whimsical and light about more notes in a melody and it gets more "serious" and "hard-line" the less notes you use. Just some thoughts ;-)

Completely agree and that's something I do quite a lot as well :) It basically boils down to: the less you say (= the less words/notes you use), the more mysterious you come across. Use more words, give the listener more information and you come across like an open book, as more of a character. Seems like we should be talking more often, Jay! Interested in a Skype session sometime maybe?

Touché ;)

Thanks :)

"modern pop songwriting is incredibly unimaginative and will sound embarrassingly dated in about 5 years." Unless in 5 years they're even LESS imaginative. Which really wouldn't surprise me. It's been going that direction for at least 30 years now.

Agreed, and I hope it falls out of fashion.

Yep, already got something like that planned :)

Ace of Base, Britney Spears, Nsync, Backstreet Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift...on and on and on and on.

@@Holistic-songwriting looking forward

yessss

IKR

Well apparently you haven´t heard Green Light with Lorde, that is masterfully written pop song, and a hit.

Stefán Atli Jakobsson just so you know... Green Light hasn't charted in the top 10 and only stayed in the top 40 for a week. don't be condescending. i haven't said anything wrong about her.

Really! Only in the top 40 for a week, that is a surprises me a lot, it deserves so much better, especially considering what is on the top of the charts these days- Anyways it is a number one hit in the radio where I life, so all is not lost with humanity. Haha don´t be condescending, relax on the interpretations

Lorde does not need a hit to shine through

Marri Marcarelli oh shit almost forgot to recommend a do on lana!

Yeah, I mean, Taylor did.

lol

Liam McIrishman was the ASSHOLE really needed? You may wanna chill down a bit

stale in two posts, yawn

LOL

Hey Pierre! Good to hear :) Love 1989 as well and hope you enjoy the Swift Line and Hook Checklist :)

Finally someone who can respect an artist without dragging them down just because you don’t like her music!! Finally some mature people

The tonic is ambiguous in that it's already the base of the key. There's no interval. It's just there. Without an interval, it doesn't mean a whole lot on its own, besides being "home base" I know plenty of music theory and this made perfect sense to me (shrug)

Look here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IP0wuwJBdMI.html

Carl, you're A dumbness for linking that shitty video.

Peter Greenidge hey, i agree

Gilbzon De lara Also the emotions album

oldschool honey is she even a songwriter? Not hating but curious

+Thy Sovisal she wrote 17 of those nm 1s and self-wrote the whole Butterfly album.

Domagoj Jenjic I mean as a main writer, cause, most of the artists out there with hits like Ariana Grande, Beyoncé and many more, don't seem to be really involved in their songs, they help here and there. But some artists like Taylor Swift, of corse, Adele and Ed Sheeran, they are the main writers of every single songs they've sung. And in Taylor's quote "I will not sing a song that wasn't written by me"

+Thy Sovisal Yes. Most of them are written with her alone + someone who plays piano

thy sovisal....Yes she is a songwriting beast. look at her early interviews, she explains this.

Thanks Barnabás! :) Glad you like 'em!

None of these people can do any science!

Well 1989 is really a bad album to judge Taylor's songwriting abilities with. Practically the whole fandom would agree that Speak Now and Red are her best work.

Great points, it's also easier for people to relate to as almost anyone could sing/chat these melodies

Thanks Hunter! 3 more episodes are already out, more are coming! :)

ikr, she can play practically all the songs on either piano, guitar, or both

and the older albums where D/A/Em/G

@@larrythelizard2972 bingo. Just like ccm

There's actually 6 songs (7 if you include deluxe) that Max Martin didn't write, and 4 that he didn't even produce. Taylor is still the primary songwriter.

Most of her biggest radio hits are credited to multiple writers. All of the Max Martin ones are, as I said, dripping with the techniques/style he uses across the board artist wise. Maybe T-swizz comes in with an acoustic strum along and some lyrics, but a majority of what makes her music marketable is largely the work that's done after the fact. There's a reason her image went from "innocent-pop-country" to "sultry-pop-vixen"

critshazy You’re not wrong about that. I was just correcting you about all 13 songs from 1989 being credited to Max Martin. Her big hits like Shake It Off, Blank Space, etc. are, but she also wrote/produced songs (that weren’t hits) with Ryan Tedder and Imogen Heap. She also has one song that she wrote by herself. I didn’t include Jack Antonoff cause I think Max Martin still had a production credit on those.

Taylor worked with Max and his 'BEATS" because she had specific goals for 1989. Firs,t she" wanted the ALBUM to be SONICALLY COHESIVE." And she "wanted the songs to sound exactly how the emotions felt."

critshazy well with Max Martin at least, I’m pretty sure she comes up with most of the lyrics the majority of the time. If you look at the making of her songs from reputation you’ll see that. But yeah her songs with Max Martin and shellback are always the most mediocre songs on the album