In this live conversation from On Air Fest (Switched On Pop, Episode 463, “Jacob Collier can make anyone sing”), Jacob Collier shares the approach to melody that has shaped his work. The centerpiece is a lesson from his teacher Mike Walker: play a melody, then sing a melody, then close your eyes, imagine a girl appears and sings you a melody — and sing it back. The melody that came out of that imagination exercise had, in Collier’s words, “so much rhyme and balance and order and poetry and symmetry” that Walker declared the lesson over. That’s everything you need to know. The idea is that a good melody is already there waiting to be unlocked — you reach it not by thinking harder but by clearing away the “front-of-mind” clutter and listening from a deeper place: mind, then heart, then gut.
Collier also walks through two practical exercises. The first is additive improvisation — start with one note, then add another, then another, following the thread so the melody develops rather than constantly reinventing itself. The second is constraint-based: limit yourself to a fixed number of notes or a fixed time frame. Throughout, his guiding principles stay simple: keep phrases short, and make sure it’s singable.
The first thing is, I’ll tell you a lesson I was taught about melody. I asked a teacher of mine, his name is Mike Walker, a beautiful guitar player from England. I said, “Hey Mike, how do I make a good melody?” And he said, “Well, play me a melody.” So I played him something. And he was like, “Okay, fine.” Then he said, “Now sing me a melody.” So I sang something. He said, “Okay.”
Then he said, “Now I want you to listen in your imagination and imagine a girl comes up to you, sings you a melody, and I want you to sing back what she sings to you.” So I closed my eyes, went to my imagination, the girl appeared — lovely, great — and then I sort of waited for this character to sing this melody. And there was so much rhyme and balance and order and poetry and symmetry in the melody that came out. And he said, “Oh, that’s the end of the lesson. That’s everything you need to know for a melody.”
It really stayed with me. This was 15 years ago. But there’s this sense that a good melody was already there. You just need to unlock it. And that you also have to kind of get rid of the crud in the front of your brain — work through the cobwebs of front-of-mind stuff and get to what’s really going on.
He was the kind of teacher who’d say, “Play a chord that’s your mother.” (Which chord is that? No, that’s a personal question. Sorry.) Or — I remember talking to Herbie Hancock about his piano teachers, and he started with this guy called Chris Anderson, who was blind and had a kind of bone disease. He was one of the most amazing piano players of all time. Herbie speaks about how he’d play a standard for Chris, and Chris would just say, “Add salt,” or “Less purple.” Stuff like that. And that’s totally my thing.
So anyway, just the sense that underneath the mind is the heart. And underneath the heart is the gut. They all power each other in this direction, and Mike’s exercise went from here to here to here — and the melodies just got better. So that’s one thing I wanted to share.
Another exercise I was taught as a child — which was actually an improvisation exercise — is that a fun way of improvising a melody is to do one note, then add one note to that note, then add one note to those two notes, and one note to those three notes. A bit like that game where it’s like, “I went to the market and I bought a fish.” You’re following what’s going on a little bit. You’re following threads. And I think the best melodies do that. They’re not constantly reinventing themselves. I mean, you can have a cool melody that does that, but that was a really helpful exercise for me in melodic development.
You can also pick a certain number of notes and only work with that number — so, three notes. Like, if we do a bit of a call-and-response thing. (Audience sings.) Well done, everybody. That was great.
As a rule, all my phrases are short. I went into that saying every phrase will be three notes, and I accidentally did five and six. But I like the idea of limiting it to a time frame. You have two beats. I have two beats. And it has to be singable. These are all good principles for melodies.