The "right" way to write a song.

[Sedaheht]

I write music by ear, I have no practical understanding of chord progression, harmony, scales, or other music theory. I usually start off by coming up with a melody out of nowhere and using that as the foundation for building the rest of the song. Once I have roughly a song's worth of melody, I write down which notes are used and form what I think is called a "scale". From then on I only use those notes when writing the rest of the song's parts, as any other note would sound out-of-place. After painstaking trial and error, using only my ears to judge if everything makes sense, I end up with an actual song.

However, I am aware there is a huge benefit to choosing/knowing the actual chord progression of a piece of music. My question is: How do I get from a melody to full chord progression, and how does this knowledge actually help the song writing process?

As an example, I'm creating a 8-bit/chiptune cover of Gypsy Bard from Friendship is Witchcraft (to help me learn Famitracker). I've essentially recreated the whole song just by listening to it repeatedly, but let's say for the sake of argument that I only knew the vocal part; the melody. Is that melody alone enough to figure out the same chord progression that the original artist used? Or are there many possible progressions that would fit the melody, possibly leading to a similar-but-different sounding song?

I'm asking because it just seems like having this kind of understanding would greatly enhance and expand the songwriting process.

I hope I got my terminology correct.

[Sedaheht]

Also, a slight digression: Does anybody else have the problem where you just cannot think of good melodies while using your audio programs? I come up with ALL my melodies when I'm away from my computer, usually at work. I whistle the tune into the voice recorder on my phone for later use.

[Peak Freak]

Please use the search function of this forum: there are already multiple threads about both of your described problems.