help with melodies?

There's 1001 ways.

Try this one: record the chord progression. When you do, play the whole thing out, like 4 minutes or so. Alternate verse/chorus if you already have chords for both parts.

Then play it in your car or somewhere where you are totally uninhibited. Just live with the sound of the chord progression and sing along like crazy. You do it with other people's songs on the radio all the time. So just live with it for a while. No one said you have to finish it all at once. Turn it up loud and sing like crazy. Something will come out of your mouth that you like. Maybe its just a snatch of a melody that has a good hook, and maybe it even has a couple of interesting words attached to it.

When you hit on an interesting peice of a melody, call your voicemail or something to preserve it until you can get home and work with it. If it has an interesting combination of words attached to it, maybe that will introduce some idea of something interesting to explore in more detail, and maybe that will be a root for your lyrics to spring from.

Most of all don't push it. You have no deadline. Give the thing room and time and it comes out.

yeah, i agree with tiger jam but im usually too lazy to copy it onto CD or whatever to play in my car. Basically I just play the chords over and over and start singing whatever comes into my head. The words themselves at this point are just a vehicle to tease a melody out. Once I have a melody from that I sit down and try and re-write some meaningful lyics.

I know its an old (and possibly false) songwriting myth but legend has it that Paul McCartney originally found the melody to Yesterday by singing 'scrambled eggs, how id love to be between your legs' or something like that.

But in the end its whatever works for you.

oh
bacon tastes good
i saw a skyline yesterday
it was right side driving and everything
thanks

this might help in your quest for melodies. works well for me

"You do not have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your desk
or table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even
wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to
you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your
feet.

-Franz Kafka

Try some random arpeggiations of the chords... ie. fret the chord shapes in a few different positions and pluck the strings in different orders for differing lengths of time (try to play the root note of each chord, when the chords change, for a strong melody)

This should give you some ideas to build on for a melody.. btw it's almost essential to be able to record the progression and be able to play over it while trying out different sounds.

i never have trouble finding melodies. they seem to be self-evident. sometime, they seem cliche the first time you hear/sing them. i often have trouble not accidentally ripping of other people's melodies, though.

i often have trouble not accidentally ripping of other people's melodies, though.
Ditto. I throw out more song ideas than I keep because I suddenly realise why I like it so much - it's just such-and-such in a different key and I hadn't noticed. Bah!

i keep them. it's not like i'm selling these songs. if i play them for someone else, i change them slightly. besides, they often change over time anyway

Aye, I would, I just get locked into the original melody. Once I've recognised the similarity I can't hear my melody again, it's gone just like that - completely replaced by the original. It's like a spellchecker I can't turn off :)

do you write the lyrics first and then try putting it into the melody or what?
also how do you write the chord progression if you think up of a melody first? i always just come out with switching back and forth between two chords and it sounds bad but i can't get it.