writing melodies

[iococoi]

[luke viia]

cute examples of catchy melodies with basic structures

[ZeroZeroZero]

A few things from my experience.

Think of the very foundations of being musical and always strengthen them.  Music should flow out of you as soon as that is your intention (and even when it's not).  

I practice on my wife (insert: "can I also practice on your wife too" joke here)

I make a lot of our mundane talk around the house a song I sing to her.  Just to increase the breadth of that melodic generation from my inside.  An interesting note (no pun intended) is that sometimes I just steal a various melody from an obscure source and to my slight dismay these are usually the instances she asks "did you just make that up" with a nod of approval and I have to laugh to myself. haha suppose I have some more work to do.

Another thing I've found for myself is that If I spend say longer than 5-7 hours doing and intently listening to music, my mind will start to generate it without prompt.  Especially in sleep and around sleeps borders.  Sort of like when you do a repetitive task (say pulling weeds) it's all you can see as you close your eyes at night.  

The hope is that we sit down to open the spout and it comes out. 

I also think we strengthen that by doing it.  Possibly even through various lifetimes.  

 

If you could manufacture it.   Someone would have already.  like that video above with the hard drive, though that comes with it's own stuff to chew on.  

 

 

[vkxwz]

39 minutes ago, Golden Rolli said:

Think of the very foundations of being musical and always strengthen them.  Music should flow out of you as soon as that is your intention (and even when it's not). 

I also think we strengthen that by doing it.  Possibly even through various lifetimes.

I agree that this intuitive side of generating music in your own mind is very useful, it's a much faster and effective way to come up with material you enjoy, compared just banging on keys and recording any parts that sounded interesting. But of course this then requires becoming skilled at being able to recreate something you've heard internally.

I think there are a lot of different possible techniques for getting this going, but starting by looping something simple in your mind and evolving it over time can get some really interesting results, and it's often frustrating that it's so difficult to recreate in a daw or otherwise. One technique I've found effective this: start with the first few seconds of a composition, then listen to it and then imagine how you want it to go after that small part ends, then try to recreate it, once you get that added part right, move on to listening to the whole track(it's important to hear the whole thing) including that part. just keep looping this process until you're happy with the length of the track, this should result in pretty much a whole track that's come straight out of your imagination, in the same way you can get those imagined tracks going on internally.

Rolli can you elaborate on various lifetimes please?

[ZeroZeroZero]

Love that ^ I'll try just that method on my next session

 

I'll say some about lifetimes.

Let me qualify it by saying I have spent 10 years (almost to the day) training under a Daoist priest and my experiences in this regard are my personal direct experiences.  The Daoist framework helps to bring them into view. 

Humans could be said to have various types of ancestrally inherited, personally acquired, and spiritually bestowed patterns of energy.  

For instance I was raised as an orphan and didn't meet any of my biological family until my thirties.  However as a child I was quite musically gifted.  I could learn almost any instrument that was put before me at like 1/10 the speed of anyone else I was around.  I had no idea how I was able to do this.   Found out later in my thirties upon meeting my biological family that I came from 5 generations of musical family members.  Teachers and players all of them the known way up.  

This I would view as ancestrally inherited.  Though in type there are many! And they are both "good" and "bad".

Personally acquired patterns are also diverse and have to do with how you choose to spend or not (being unconscious and habitual is a type of choice don't you know) your mental and life energies.  These build shapes and patterns that can carry through lifetimes.  It's difficult to give more personal examples of this without being just that.  overly personal! ahah.  But deciding to learn something or work to accomplish something would be the example of this.  

 

And talking about truly spiritual matters is not something I'm quite ready to do on a public forum at this point.

 

1 hour ago, vkxwz said:

I think there are a lot of different possible techniques for getting this going, but starting by looping something simple in your mind and evolving it over time can get some really interesting results, and it's often frustrating that it's so difficult to recreate in a daw or otherwise.

I think this is where learning to read music at even the most basic level is valuable.  for instance how easy is it to visualize the words you speak as you're speaking?  Not that hard.  

For me even though with rhythm I can visualize the notes my trouble is in remembering it for long enough to come back form that imaginary realm.  By the time I move my mind to some kind of physical interface it's drifting away like a dream.  

In fact some of the music I've lost FROM DREAMS is the most amazing stuff I think I've ever heard.  it Just haunts me that It was so close. haha

[vkxwz]

1 hour ago, Golden Rolli said:

Humans could be said to have various types of ancestrally inherited, personally acquired, and spiritually bestowed patterns of energy.  

There is evidence for learned information being passed from one generation to the next through epigenetics, so that sort of thing isn't inconceivable. I think it's possible that each of us can be seen as an entity that switched bodies at the time of conception, and only retained the most "general" information known before that changover, call this information deep truths about reality or the priors for more general intelligence, or patterns of energy, whatever. Anyway it's just an idea, I tend to try to match the strength of my beliefs to the strengths of the evidence for them.

About reading music; I don't think that the standard musical notation is the only way or the best way to do this, the goal is compression of information, from sound in your head to "something" that is easily remembered and translated into your medium of choice, and if you're working with synths then musical notation can't really store much info about patches. I think this can be done in a lot of ways and maybe doing it intuitively is best, practicing getting something into and out of this compressed format should help more than any amount of learning what minims and crochets are.

Edited October 22, 2022 by vkxwz

[ZeroZeroZero]

Totally!  a "quaver" is not what it's about.  but mental cognizance of your melody and the subdivision  (however your daw or medium forms that information) goes a long way.   Hence the person earlier in the thread talking about their tracker language and it's relevance to their process.  

As it concerns the sounds in your head in this topic I've found Sononym to be a great app to use if your internal musical imaginings are timbre information more than pitch and tempo based.  

it's a AI sample manager thing ( seems to be a trend as I've heard of a few of these) that I've tried and I love the idea of.  Seems to work great for me to though I'm still in the trail period.  

Experience, practice, reflection! 

 

[YEK]

I would say I just have a really good ear for sound. I grew up playing piano but never learnt theory. When I make my melodies I'll hum something in my head and get that down on the keys.. Or even sing something. I'm not paying attention to what scale I'm using just making sure it sounds good. And of course there might be a slight dissonance since I'm not following the rules but I find a little bit of that in my music (and others) keeps things interesting.

[vkxwz]

2 hours ago, YEK said:

I would say I just have a really good ear for sound. I grew up playing piano but never learnt theory. When I make my melodies I'll hum something in my head and get that down on the keys.. Or even sing something. I'm not paying attention to what scale I'm using just making sure it sounds good. And of course there might be a slight dissonance since I'm not following the rules but I find a little bit of that in my music (and others) keeps things interesting.

Well if you're humming stuff in your head that's 12tet then the dissonance is just your expression, no problem there. And if it's an unintentional effect of forcing your expression conform with 12tet then there is always microtonical for that (easier said than done obviously).

[zero]

I gave up playing/making music for a long time because I always felt frustrated not knowing how to progress in a track. I'd come up with a cool sounding riff, then struggled trying to figure out what to do next. I had some mental standard I was holding myself to, that a track requires A, B, C, etc., and then it is done. that right there is what caused my frustration.

I've come to realize you should have no mental roadblocks such as this when it comes to coming up with ideas, melodic or otherwise. the hard part is turning your brain off and just letting it come out naturally. perhaps this is why a lot of people like getting high when jamming...can be an easy way to get away from your overly concerned thoughts, and just let whatever you need to express come out of you in a more relaxed manner.

anyway, a few years ago I started tinkering with music making again. and like a virus, it spreads and you end up buying a whole bunch of gear. this is the way of the musician lol.

when it comes to generating melodies, I am a strong proponent of the simple is better path. this has already been stated in the posts above, but for me, a simple 3-4 note riff looped is usually how I roll. I should also add that I have no intention really of recording any thing I play, because that too adds an added layer of pressure. I dislike tinkering with all the parameters in a DAW. but that is just me...I know there are others that appreciate being able to fine tune a sound, and enjoy doing so.

so yeah, again echoing what has already been said, but starting with a simple few note melody, and then stopping all sound, let your mind then see what comes next melodically with as least amount of pressure as possible, try and re-create that using keys/buttons/knobs/strings, is probably the best way to go.

[xox]

Melodies are overrated! Only techno matters! 
 

https://youtu.be/JwZwkk7q25I

[DyeMyBlueBlack]

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A technique to help: play one note on a keyboard. where are you going from here? What rhythm? move up one step, move down one step? both these questions decide how the melody gonna go. More: think about rhythm vs harmony. Make a decision and maintain that rhythm and melodic motion until it sounds right to change it up. that could mean four bars, 1 bar, or 1/36 bar.

[Johnny Hawk]

On 1/17/2022 at 12:56 AM, vkxwz said:

Some useful stuff in this thread.

Found this in an aphex interview once: "Everytime you make music, if you’re on form, you should be imaging what you want to hear, which is basically how you want it to be" i don't pretend to know exactly what this means but it sounds more like imagining a melody first, and then creating it in your daw the way you heard it in your head. I have tried to do this a fair bit but like someone said earlier it ends up not being the same as its confined to the piano roll, although some of my favourite melodies i have made have come from this method despite that. Thoughts on this method? Seems like with enough practice you could get to a point where you just imagine the melody, chords, drums etc in real time and then recreate it in the daw immediately after, and surely that would result in more creative / interesting / original music than just noodling or placing down some notes until it sounds right. It'd be the closest thing to recording your internal experience as you imagine the music and for me at least thats the dream.

 

 

 

 

 

i remember him writing some of his classic melodies, and they were either draw or played in randomly, then rearranged until they sounded good

[vkxwz]

20 hours ago, Johnny Hawk said:

i remember him writing some of his classic melodies, and they were either draw or played in randomly, then rearranged until they sounded good

You remember? From what. And yeah it doesn't matter how you get there in the end as long as you are editing it to match what you want it to be. Seems like sean from ae does a lot of "aimless" experimentation and that curation is a big part of how he makes it to the final product.

[Wunderbar]

Doesnt all these criteria u read about making music just make it a slog for you? Just smash your head into your keyboard and have fun.

[Johnny Hawk]

9 hours ago, vkxwz said:

You remember? From what. And yeah it doesn't matter how you get there in the end as long as you are editing it to match what you want it to be. Seems like sean from ae does a lot of "aimless" experimentation and that curation is a big part of how he makes it to the final product.

Exactly, the editing is where the magic happens. I remember from being in the room while he was making tracks.

[TubularCorporation]