MAKE A SCALE
In one composition class I took one year, the professor just had everyone raise their hands, and then called on each of 7 people to call out the name of a note. He then took these and created a scale by putting them in ascending order. We had to take this and write a song around it. If you are writing a melody, try taking the notes you use, put them into notation form, then figure out yourself what the scale is that you are using. You should then be able to do the arrangement for it by just creating chords using those notes. You can also just write all 12 possible notes onto tiny pieces of paper, stick them into a box, reach in, take out seven and use those. If you are really feeling silly, try using only five, or just do a random run up a scale and use the notes you accidentally hit. Again, there are no rules, here. We are just having fun.
MAKE CHORDS
Once you have your notes in a row, you should be able to figure out what chords you can make from them. The easiest chords will be fifths-take the lowest note, and then count up to the fifth note, and that is one chord, sort of your I5 chord. Do the same thing with your 4th note and your 5th note, and you have your I-IV-V chords. If you like, play around with something that sounds nice adding something in the middle-2nds, 3rds or 4ths, flatting or sharping them so they sound nice with your melody, or just in a progression if you want to just play with chords to come up with a melody. Try to at least write a picture of which note you are playing if you don't know how to write it out in notes, so you can recreate these chords later. This is easy on keys or guitar-just make a little chord box showing which notes you pressed. Eventually, you will figure out what they are called-you can often just go to a site that does that for you-there are several on the web or in composition programs, and then you can just write down their names. Just to make it easy to learn to play the song now, though, the boxes often work great.
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