How to Write Catchy Melodies: A Practical MIDI Guide

A catchy melody gives your listener something to recognise, then a reason to keep listening. You can build that balance with a small set of chord tones, two contrasting rhythms, and one well-placed change at the end of the phrase.

In his lesson How To Write Catchy Melodies (My Secrets Exposed), Niko Kotoulas builds a marimba hook from a piano chord progression, develops its rhythm, and changes the accompaniment around it. This guide turns that process into a practical DAW workflow. You’ll hear stages of his original example and get a separate, playable MIDI exercise to try yourself.

Watch the original lesson

The full lesson runs for just over nine minutes. The embedded video includes the original demonstrations and final arrangement; the short players below focus on individual writing decisions. Niko works in Logic Pro, but you can draw and edit these MIDI patterns in any DAW with a piano roll.

1. Give the melody a chord progression

Starting with chords narrows the blank page. Instead of choosing from every note on the keyboard, you have a small group of notes that fit the harmony happening underneath. These are your chord tones.

Niko begins with G–Am–F–C, plays the progression on piano, then quantizes the recording before working on the melody. Later, he raises the notes by two semitones to match the original song. That gives us A–Bm–G–D, the progression we’ll use throughout the exercises here.

For a simple starting loop, use 4/4 time and hold each chord for one bar. The source project shows 125 BPM. You can work more slowly while entering notes, then bring the tempo back up once the phrase makes sense.

The D chord above puts A at the bottom to keep the notes in a compact register. It still contains D, F♯ and A. In these diagrams, middle C is C4, MIDI note 60. Some DAWs display a different octave number for the same MIDI pitch, so use the MIDI number if the octave labels disagree.

If choosing chords is the part that slows you down, start with one of our EDM piano chord progressions or an editable pattern from the chord pack collection. Keep the progression fixed while you learn the melody process. Changing the chords, sound and lead notes at the same time makes it harder to hear which decision helped.

2. Turn a chord into a line

A chord plays several notes together. A melody gives notes an order in time. That is the first transformation to make: take a few notes from the chord and decide which one comes first, which comes next, and how long each lasts.

In the video, Niko copies the chord material onto a marimba track and removes the lower notes. He then shortens and moves selected notes until there is a melodic line. The duplicated region is a useful guide, but you don’t have to keep all its notes. Leave the original chord track underneath so you can check the harmony as you edit.

1. Create a second MIDI track with a plain piano, marimba or short pluck sound.
2. Loop the first bar of the A-major chord.
3. Choose just two chord tones, such as C♯ and A.
4. Alternate them on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4.
5. Listen with the chord, then solo the melody and sing it back.

For our practice version, use C♯5–A4–C♯5–A4, one quarter note on each beat. This is deliberately small. A memorable phrase can come from how you place a couple of notes, even before you add a wider pitch range.

Use chord tones as reliable starting points, rather than a rule that every note must obey. The key’s wider note pool is D, E, F♯, G, A, B and C♯. Later in Niko’s melody, notes outside the current triad connect or decorate the anchors. For example, his descending ending passes through E before reaching D over a D-major chord. E belongs to the key, but it is not one of that chord’s three basic notes.

If a note sounds uncomfortable, hear it against the current chord before deleting it. A brief connecting note may work well on the way to a stable destination. Holding that same note for a whole bar can produce a very different effect.

3. Give the phrase two rhythmic shapes

The next useful decision is rhythmic. Four equal notes are easy to follow, but four bars of nothing else may feel too predictable. Niko builds a faster response between the steadier bars, then repeats that response later.

Think of your four-bar phrase as A–B–A–B. Here, the letters describe rhythmic shapes, not chord names. Shape A is your steady statement. Shape B answers it with shorter notes, a rest, or a different grouping. The repetition makes the phrase recognisable even when the pitches change with the chords.

Try this rhythm for bar 2: four eighth notes, one quarter note, then one quarter-note rest. Count it as 1 & 2 & 3 … 4 …. The four short notes occupy the first two beats, the longer note begins on beat 3, and beat 4 is silent. That last gap gives the next bar a clean entrance.

You can test the relationship before choosing the final pitches. Tap A on the desk, then B, then repeat both. If the second rhythm feels unrelated, simplify it until it sounds like an answer to the first. You want enough contrast to hear a change, with enough shared pulse to feel like one phrase.

Niko keeps adjusting note lengths, positions and pitches rather than accepting the first version. Follow that approach with one variable at a time: shorten a note, move an entry, listen, then decide whether to keep it. A dense screen of MIDI is not evidence of a stronger hook.

4. Build a four-bar MIDI melody

The chart below gives you an original exercise over A–Bm–G–D. It uses the method from the lesson, with a more compact pitch choice in bar 3 and a descending response in bar 4. It is not a note-for-note transcription of Niko’s hook, so the source audio will sound different.

Set your grid to eighth notes to enter the response bars. A quarter note takes up two grid spaces. Check that the final D in bar 4 begins on the and of beat 3 and lasts one beat, leaving the last eighth-note space empty.

Notice what stays consistent. Bars 1 and 3 share exactly the same timing, but their pitches fit different chords. Bars 2 and 4 both begin with a repeated-note figure, then move away from it. Bar 4 changes the latter half of that rhythm to make room for the descending ending. This small departure is why the diagram calls it B′, a variation of B.

The A over B minor and E over D major are deliberate notes from the D-major scale outside those triads. If you want to hear a stricter chord-tone version first, replace bar 2’s final A4 with F♯4, and bar 4’s E4 with F♯4. Compare the two versions rather than assuming one must be correct for every track.

Now listen to Niko’s developed phrase and compare its repeated shapes with the exercise. Focus on the arrangement of short and long notes. You can borrow that way of organising an idea without copying the original tune.

5. Repeat the phrase, then change its ending

Once four bars work, duplicate them to make eight. Keep most of the second half familiar. Change the final bar so the repeat feels intentional instead of pasted in.

In the source lesson, Niko compares the first ending with the last bar of the repeated phrase. He makes the second ending descend to D, which gives that version a clearer sense of arrival in this harmonic setting. The editor’s bar numbers are 43–50 because the idea sits later in his project; your exercise can simply use bars 1–8.

A descending line is one way to shape an ending, but it does not automatically make every melody sound finished. The final pitch, its relationship to the chord, its duration and the following silence all matter. Likewise, ending on the tonic D is an option, not a requirement for every hook. An open ending may be useful when the phrase needs to loop straight back around.

Try an eight-bar version of our exercise. In bar 4, replace the final E4–D4 movement with a held A4 beginning on beat 3. Duplicate the phrase, then restore E4–D4 in bar 8. Listen to the difference between continuing on A and arriving on D. Keep the earlier seven bars unchanged while you compare those endings.

Then put the melody on loop and step away from the piano roll. Can you predict the repeat? Can you hear the final change? If you need to watch the notes to notice the structure, the difference may be too small—or other parts may be masking it.

6. Make room in the chord rhythm

The melody is only part of what makes the finished example move. In the second half of the lesson, Niko changes the chord accompaniment from a block of sustained harmony into a rhythmic part. The notes underneath stay related to the same progression, but their entrances and gaps affect how the lead feels.

He points out a place where the chord does not land on the downbeat—the first beat of the bar. That missing attack creates space before the chord enters. It also changes the relationship between the chord rhythm and the melody above it.

To hear the idea clearly, compare two simple patterns with the same A-major chord. First play short stabs on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4. Then move those stabs to the offbeats, the “&” after each beat. In the second pattern, leave beat 1 empty rather than adding another hit there.

This chart is a stripped-down comparison, not the exact rhythm in the drop. You can mix onbeat and offbeat attacks once the difference is clear. There is no need to remove the downbeat in every bar: a strong chord attack may be exactly what a section needs. The useful question is where a gap makes the melody easier to feel.

Keep the melody unchanged during this test. If the hook suddenly feels stronger, you have learned something about its accompaniment. You may not need to add any notes to the lead at all.

7. Simplify before adding another layer

Niko’s first accompaniment experiment sounds too busy to him, so he edits it again. This is an important part of the workflow: a rhythmic idea is a candidate, not a commitment. Shortening or removing a few chord attacks can help the lead breathe.

When a loop feels crowded, mute the extra layers and compare the melody with just the chord part. Find the busiest moment in each. If both parts fill the same space with rapid attacks, remove one or two accompaniment hits and replay the loop. Keep the change only if it makes the musical relationship clearer.

Once the first chord’s rhythm works, copy the timing to the other chords and adjust the pitches for each harmony. Check the notes after copying: moving a whole triad by the same number of semitones preserves its major or minor quality, so blindly transposing an A-major shape will not produce the B-minor chord you need.

The final section of the video presents the idea in a fuller production. Use that as a context check, rather than a reason to copy every sound or effect. A marimba can make note attacks easy to hear while writing; your finished track might need a different instrument, octave or note length. Choose those details around the phrase you have already built.

A focused melody-writing session

Give yourself one short session to finish an eight-bar idea. The aim is a phrase you can recognise and revise, not a complete arrangement.

1. Set up the harmony. Enter A–Bm–G–D, one bar each, and loop it with a plain chord sound.
2. Write a steady statement. Choose two chord tones and place quarter notes in bars 1 and 3.
3. Add a response. Create a faster shape in bar 2, then reuse most of its timing in bar 4.
4. Extend to eight bars. Duplicate the phrase and change only the final ending.
5. Test the accompaniment. Compare sustained chords with a few short stabs and deliberate rests.
6. Save two versions. Keep your original, make one focused variation, and compare them after a short break.

If you want a browser-based way to experiment first, Ableton’s free Play with melodies lesson provides an interactive note grid. For a different harmonic mood after this exercise, try our lo-fi chord progression guide and apply the same rhythmic process to a new set of chords.

Common melody-writing questions

Do I need music theory to write a catchy melody?

You can begin with the notes already visible in a MIDI chord progression. Knowing which notes belong to each chord gives you a useful starting palette. Learning the key’s remaining notes then helps you add movement between those anchors. The lesson’s workflow lets you practise both while writing something concrete.

Should a melody always start on the root note?

No. Our first bar starts on C♯ over A major—the chord’s third. Starting on another chord tone can give you a different character while still fitting the harmony. Try the root, third and fifth with the same rhythm and compare them.

How much repetition is too much?

There is no fixed count. Start by repeating a rhythm while changing pitches with the chords. If the phrase becomes predictable, change its last gesture, add a rest or alter one note length. If it feels disconnected, undo some changes until you can hear the shared idea again.

Why does the melody work alone but disappear in the track?

First check the arrangement: overlapping chord attacks, a crowded register or a long accompaniment release can cover the lead. Try muting parts and shortening chord notes before rewriting the melody. Then check the instrument balance and sound choice in the full mix.

Source: Niko Kotoulas, How To Write Catchy Melodies (My Secrets Exposed). Screenshots and audio excerpts come from the original lesson. The labeled practice charts are original MusicCreator teaching examples. The video’s historical promotions are not current offers.