How to improve your melody with suspensions

About melodic suspensions:

So your melody sounds good. But you’re looking to give it some extra spice and that final bit of interest. We’re going to use suspensions to improve our melody and I find this to be a very elegant and effective way to add interest and colour. There goes quite a lot of music theory and history behind the use of this technique. But in this video I’ll boil it down to an easy and immediately usable technique.

Non harmonic tones or in this case suspensions can happen when the harmony changes but a tone from the previous chord is held or repeated. When the harmony changes the held tone becomes a non-chord tone and this means that this tone is not part of the underlying chord. Traditionally this tone should resolve downwards in a stepwise motion. But as I will show you in this video, you can do a lot more!

You will find out that improving your melodies with non harmonic tones via suspensions is very useful and easy when it comes to composing music and writing a melody. I guarantee that you will often find yourself using this technique to write music or spice it up.

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Timestamps:

Below are the timestamps for the video in case you want to skip to a certain part or want to revisit a step.

00:00 – What are suspensions / Intro
00:48 – Original melody/example
01:15 – Example 1: Adding first melodic suspensions
01:53 – Explaining the first example
02:25 – Example 2: Suspensions and passing tone
03:14 – Example 3: Adding unprepared suspensions
03:58 – Songwriting and composing tips