Have you ever had a snippet of a melody from a song come to you, randomly, and couldn’t figure out what it was? Maybe you fruitlessly racked your brain for hours, days, weeks even, trying to remember where the melody came from. Maybe you played every single song in iTunes trying to figure it out. Maybe you even attempted to sing the melody to friends, or play it on a piano, and ask them if THEY remembered it.
And even after all that…you can’t figure it out. The melody remains a mystery.
And then all of a sudden…out of nowhere…you remember it!
That just happened to me over the past 24 hours or so…for reasons I don’t know, a certain hypnotic, trance like melody came to me, something that I had heard before but couldn’t remember the origins of. At first I thought maybe it was from Final Fantasy VII, so I downloaded every MIDI from that game and sifted through them trying to find that melody. But no luck.
Then, five minutes ago, I’m lying awake in bed and all of a sudden, I remember where the tune is from.
It’s Old Man Willow, by “Elephant’s Memory” - from the “psychedelic party” scene in Midnight Cowboy. THAT movie, of all places, was what I knew it from.
(The opening synthesizer riff is the melody I’m referring to.) It’s an absolutely hypnotic riff.
From time-to-time. Last Monday I couldn’t get the lyrics “walk like a man, talk like a man?” out of my head. When I got home and googled the lyrics I found the name of the song the words belong to.
It happened to me last year. I could remember the melody but not any of the (Latin) words to a creepy-sounding choral work. Finally after a week or two of frustration, I discovered a couple of “query-by-humming” websites, one of which led me to Orff’s “O Fortuna.” I don’t remember which site finally did the trick, but it was one of these two:
It happens quite often for me. Not too long ago I even started a thread on one that had me baffled. It wound up being some soundtrack music from Ocean’s Eleven. Something called Rodney Yates.
This happens to me when I hear one song and am reminded of another song (but which one?!?!). Like, one song will have a particular chord change or scrap of melody that sounds really familiar, and I’ll obsess over where I could have possibly heard that moment before. This most recently happened with a song on Neko Case’s new album (and now I can’t remember which song) that had a particular chord change which (I finally figured out this morning) reminded me of a chord change in Simply Red’s “Stars.” (Yes, yes, I have listened to Simply Red.)
Or, RJD2’s “Ghostwriter” sampled some humming that sounded incredibly familiar, and I went around humming it for days before remembering it was a snippet from Elliott Smith’s “I Didn’t Understand.” (ETA: I just found this page, where you can listen to the comparison yourself.)
Has helpped me a few times. Simply use your spacebar to pound out the bassline.
Most often though, I keep playing the same piece of the song I have in my head. after a while, I will come up with one or two more notes either before, or after the original piece I had
I work on the entire piece now, and un cover a second additional set of notes.
After a while, I get back to where I can tell you the song.
Thats at least how I do it, most of the time.
And no, Im not musically inclined, I dont hit and miss by adding notes at random. It truly just comes to me out of the blue after a while.