Music Production: Melodic Concepts Explained

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on Melodic Concepts in music production. I've had plenty of students come to me over the years, asking, How do I create a melody? I'm great at creating beats or maybe baselines. But when it comes to some of the more technical harmonic functions and melody, some of the more theory laden stuff, that's where a lot of students need a little bit more assistance. So that's why I've created this course to make sure that you have a good understanding of how to create a catchy melody that's going to work within your productions. While we are going to talk about some melodic concepts that are more production based, like how to apply swing or keep a rhythm straight, most of this actually is a little bit juxtaposed to the harmony course that I created, where it was more about production techniques around harmony. This is going to be a little bit more about the theory of creating a melody and working them into your productions. We'll be talking about melodic theme rhythmic density, wide versus narrow melodies, and so much more. The idea is to make sure that if you have a production that has pretty much everything but a convincing melody, I'm going to be able to give you a set of steps so that you understand how to fit it in stylistically what you should be doing to approach the right notes and rhythms within your melody and generally just make sure that you massage it into place so that it helps you complete that full produced sound. Now, there are a lot of styles out there. There's a lot of different ways to approach this stuff. I'm going to try to give you something that's universal that you can use moving forward, even if you wanted to explore something classical piano or create a melody for a pop singer or create a chip tune melody or an ostinato for a hip hop beat. Whatever it is, I want to make sure that what I'm giving you is not only timeless, but it's also going to be able to fit its way into whatever style you're producing. Now, there is going to be a class project within this course. So do make sure that you check out the class that gives you all the details for that project. The idea is you're going to take a melody that you've created and break it down discussing how the different tips and tricks that I've given you within this course apply to the melody that you've created. But of course, check out the class that outlines all the details so I can go deep into the weeds of the description of this project. So if you're trying to improve your melody writing as a producer, then this course is totally for you. Make sure that you're ready to apply these techniques within your own productions and really get in that practice that you need to make these concepts second nature. I'm looking forward to getting this started with you. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to take something pre existing and you're going to see how the material from within this course is broken down within something you've already created. So let's say you have a song that you're working on that has a melody already. I want you to just solo the melody. You can maybe go melody and harmony, but we're not thinking big picture production right now. We're thinking the theory of your melody. I want you to take that melody and break down the different melodic concepts that I've given you and how they're used within that particular melody. So, for example, maybe the rhythmic density changes throughout. Towards the end, you're using some chromaticism, and you're also taking note of how you're using things like neighbor tone passing tones, et cetera. You're analyzing your own melody so that down the line, you have the capability to do this with other artists' melodies. If you've always really loved how Chopin creates melodies or how Hans Zimmer creates melodies, after this course and after this project specifically, you'll have the tools to be able to analyze what someone else has done so that you can essentially recreate those same techniques within your own melody. Again, for us to create our own style, we need to identify what we like from other artists and find little ways to essentially steal those techniques and fuse them with other artists techniques so that at the end of the day, we create our own style. Now, bonus points for this project is if you take the melody that you've already created and take two of the techniques from this course that you have not applied within that melody and try to apply it. So let's say within your melody, there's no chromaticism and you're curious to try it out and see how that may or may not improve your melody, you would then re record the melody using some chromaticism and possibly some other technique from this course, as well, too. So taking the pre existing melody, expanding upon it, and seeing how adding some of these other techniques have changed your melody. Once you have things recorded and exported preferably as MP threes, you're going to submit to me a public link either through SoundCloud, through YouTube, use a black background, through Google Drive, whatever it is that you want to use as your medium to share with me, just make sure that you're sharing a public link so that I can easily access your project. From there, I'll give you some feedback as to what I think you did best and areas of improvement. Now, take your time with this. It's not meant to be rushed. I want to make sure that you're happy with what you're submitting, but at the end of the day, it doesn't have to be a masterpiece. So find that sweet spot of I've put some work into this, but I'm happy enough knowing it's not perfect and then submit it. Of course, if you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out and ask. I hope you have fun with this project, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Metal and Magnets: Alright, straight out of the gate, we're going to talk about metal and magnets, how chords and melody relate in a produced setting. Let's check it out. So straight out the gate, I want to mention that I have a drum part and a basic chord progression. You can see our three main elements here are drums, chords, and melody. Melody we've not worked with yet because that's what we're going to be creating together today. But what I have so far is, like, a basic disco house Kana ish drumbeat. And then the chord progression is G minor seven, E flat major seven, C minor seven. So we're in the key of G minor. It is a one flat 64. Now I know that I'm in G minor because that's the chord progression that I created. We could have chose any key, but we're going to want to make sure that our scale mode up here is set to G minor. This is going to help the beginners that are taking this course in particular because it's going to help us highlight certain nodes that are important within our key. So we've set ourselves up in G minor. Let's give a listen to the loop that we have. Also, as a friendly reminder, you can shift click some channels in Ableton, and when you right click assign track color to clips now you can see our clips are yellow on the yellow lane, purple on the purple lane. Enough talking. Here's how it sounds. Okay, so that's our basic loop. We're going to highlight this area. We could just play something in, like, we could hit the record button up here, and then we could play in a melody of some sort. For now, I'm going to do a Control Shift M in this area. If you're on Mac, it's Command Shift M. And now we have this midi area to be able to work within, whether we want to pencil notes or whether we want to play them in both our options now. What's really cool about this is once we have a melody that we've created, we can control, click the harmony to see how the two relate. This is really important in things like orchestral scores, and you see this sort of workflow. It's very prevalent in logic and cue base. And if you do this control click between multiple clips, then in Ableton, you have access to that, as well. So what do I mean by metal and magnets? I want you to think of harmony as a bunch of magnets for your melody. And your melody is like little pieces of metal that want to move towards those magnets. So my first chord I mentioned was G minor seven. I think technically G minor nine. So our notes are G, D, F, A and B flat, which ends up sounding like this. So any one of these notes, if I was to play it up and octave or down and octave, should sound fairly good with this original set of notes because it's the same notes just displaced up or down and octa. So if I'm playing them here and it sounds good and I play them here, it sounds the same, just higher, and then here, it sounds the same, lower. When I say it sounds the same, I don't mean tonally or textually, just in terms of pitch. So if a cluster of notes sounds okay and I can move it down or up in octave, and it sounds okay, what if I just select one of those notes from that cluster? Surely that would sound good, right? It's very safe, if anything, and we can take that single note from that cluster and represent that as our melody. As a more simple version, if I have a C major chord, look at the little midi keyboard just below me here. Here's our C major chord, CEG. If I play a C major chord here, it still sounds fine. So any one of these three right hand notes, which are the same as my left hand notes, I could play. So whether it's C, E, or G, it's going to sound great. So that is the melody landing on one of the magnets. It's landing on one of the chord notes. And when I say chord notes, I mean amongst the entire keyboard. If my chord is C major and I have CEG, then all the Cs, all the Es, all the Gs could work. But keep in mind, a melody tends to want to be up towards the range of the human voice, where our ears are a bit more sensitive. So I'm not saying to play your melody down at the lowest part of the piano, you generally want to be if you're sitting at the piano, your right shoulder is going to represent a great range for your melody. It's sort of in the middle of the treble clef. But that being said, again, these notes CEG they do work everywhere with your harmony. So you'll notice if we know what key we're in, and right now we're just representing in C major. But if we know what key we're in, and you know all the notes in that key or you know, in other words, the scale for that key, then you know the notes that are available. So CEG is playing, so CE or G would be great melody notes. D, F, A and B are the other four notes from this C major scale. So we have to consider if I play a D, it sounds more colorful, and it's going to want to move to one of the magnets, either C. Now it sounds resolved or we have this colorful sound. Up to the E, another magnet. Same thing with F. F is not in our cord. There's a bit more tension, and it wants to pull to one of the magnets. It can pull down or in this case, up. Now, A is, again, not a magnet. It's going to want to pull to G. It could move up to the next C, but that would be a skip, which is fine, or we can just sort of work our way up one node at a time until we reach that point. It's the same thing with the B, the last node. B is not in our ord, so it's going to want to move to a cord tone, one of the magnets, and maybe moving up to C would be a good option, but also moving down a couple notes could work as well, too. Now, there are certain movements that you have to consider that happen more often. Like this D would move down two semitones to C or up two semitones to E. In other words, it's moving a tone to resolve to either of those pitches. But something like F is only a semitone away from E. It's also a tone away from G. So it's closer to the E. Thinking about this analogy with metal and magnets, of course, the F wants to pull to the E a bit more. Two thirds of the time, it's going to want to move to the closer note, but about a third of the time it could move to the other note just as well. Now, having said all that, the B up top is also going to want to move to C because it's significantly closer to C than it is to G. Should it move up one semitone or down four? Even if we work our way down by stepping, it's still pretty far from that destination. So this is all light rules. You can break all the rules as you get comfortable with them, but it's a great starting point. And the last thing I'll say before we dive into our melody here is that you can jump around these chord notes quite a bit and get away with a decent sound. Like a lot of old military music and bugle calls, like early trumpets. Even John Williams scores are influenced by this sort of sound. Those are only chord notes. They're only magnets, and yet it sounds fine. So let's do a little experiment. I'm going to create a bit of a melody, and then we're going to take a look at how the harmony and the melody relate and then discuss this in this metal and magnet sort of atmosphere. Let's give it a shot. In, one, two, three, four. For the sake of what we're doing for now, that should work. I'm going to do a Control A to select O, Control U to quantize. So everything's a little bit more on the grid. So you'll see what I mean when I select this MIDI clip, again, select the top bar area up around here, and then I'm going to control click the harmony. And you can start to see the melody and the harmony and how they relate. As you can see, the melody is represented as blue notes, and the harmony is represented by these purple notes. Again, the colors that we've selected for those individual channels. So Ableton is quite smart at showing us that information. Now, part of the issue is that some of the notes are blocked. Like, you'll notice this harmony note is blocked over this melody note. So if I scroll to where this melody blue line is. It shows me all the melody notes, and I'm just going to click that so that they are now showing over the harmonic information. Something worth mentioning is that all the purple keys on the left here, those are the notes that are within G minor. Remember when we selected G minor up in our scale mode? Well, all these purple notes are going to be notes that work within the key. And you'll notice I didn't pick any notes that are not purple. The purple extends all the way down through the key, so look at this. Purple, purple, purple, purple. It's all purple. If I selected a note that was not purple, one, it might sound a bit too adventurous, but just try to get it to pull to one of the purple notes, especially if it's one of the chord notes. So straight out the gate, I'm just going to move myself up over here so you can see things a little bit better. But you'll notice that we have these four harmonic notes here, and the melody is actually right over this harmony note, and this one's overlapped, and this one's overlapped. You can see I'm starting on these magnets. Now, the chord is a little bit jazzy. But if you're adding some jazzy notes to a chord, those now become available magnets. So it doesn't matter if it's a basic major or minor chord or minor nine or dominant like an alter dominant chord or something fancy like that. It doesn't matter. All the notes in the chord are available as magnets. Now, you'll notice I played it really safe. Everything is purple. Every one of my melody notes is purple. However, not every single melody note is on a harmonic note or one of the chord note choices. So this E flat is a great example here. You'll notice it's on a purple note. It's within our key, but it's not on one of these chord notes here. So what have I done? Shortly after, I've pulled from this E down to a D, down to one of the harmonic note choices. Sure, I do pull it back up to create a little bit of tension. Then we move down to this C, which looks at first glance like it's not landing on a chord note. But that's just for this register. If I scroll down, we'll see there's actually a C within the chord. It is ultimately a C minor chord. There's actually a couple Cs here. There's one here. There's one here. It's just in this octave, there's no C, but the melody note works really safely at this point. And then we resolve a bit of a leap admittedly, but we resolve to one of the notes within our chord. From there, I jump to another chord note. We sidestep to another purple note. It's not in our chord, but then we again settle to finish on one of our chord notes. So we started on a chord note. We ended on a chord note, and one, two, three, four notes were not part of the chord happening in the moment, but they were purple notes. They were within the key, and they at some point, pretty briefly after settled onto an appropriate note. Here's how the melody sounds one more time with all that information in mind. Yeah, the quantizing did the rhythm a little bit dirty. I think I played it with a little bit more sort of groove or flare initially. I'm just gonna go in there and fix that because we might be working with that melody a little bit more. So let's listen to it one more time, just to show you how I would clean up a rhythmic thing like this. That should be here. So it's like Is that this? No. Maybe this. Here we go. Something like this. There we go. Okay, so this is, I think the melody that I had in mind when I played it one more time from the top, just sort of squaring things up a little bit. Now, you'll notice that everything is pretty connected up to this point, and then there's a bit of a pause, and then we finish with this smaller little phrase here. We're gonna talk about phrasing more later. But what I will say is that little pauses in your melody are not a bad thing if your melody is going for, for example, like eight beats or 16 beats. So we've talked about being very cognizant of what is the chord playing in this moment? The chord will change throughout. That's part of chord progression. C major G major, A minor F. There's four basic chords. In the moment that I'm playing my melody, which of those chords is happening is what we want to ask ourselves. And whatever the notes are in that chord, those become available as the magnets that our melody wants to move towards. When we're not on a magnetic note, not one of the notes of the chord, in other words, we want to be on one of the purple notes, one of the notes that's within the key. In this case, we're in G minor, so we want to at least be playing around in that key or scale of G minor. If we're not playing a chord note, we want to eventually pull to one of the chord notes, and we also want to be cognizant and thinking about, am I a semitone away from a chord note? Is it feeling tense or am I a toneaway? Is it a bit more colorful? So those are the basic concepts that I wanted to cover within this class. What we're going to do next is talk about neighbor tones and passing tones. They're already kind of baked into this little melodic example, so we'll keep it going. We'll break it down further, and I'll see you in that next class. 4. Neighbor Notes & Passing Notes: Good. Next up, let's get talking about neighbor tones and passing tones. Neighbor tones being a sort of sidestep to a note that is non chord related and then back to a chord note and passing notes being starting on a safe place, one of the chord notes and passing through a not as safe note to the next safe note. So chord note, non chord note to another chord note. Neighbor notes, passing notes. We're talking about both. Let's jump in. For now, I'm just going to keep my screen up over here. I think it stays out of the way of the MIDI information, and hopefully later there's nothing on the right side that I need to show in great detail, but for now, this feels safe. So as briefly explained in the intro, a neighbor note is basically like you going to your neighbor's house and coming back. Let's say I'm a melody note and I'm starting on a safe chord tone. So the chord is C major, CEG, and my melody note, me, I'm a C. I'm in a safe spot. Well, I might want to move a little bit out of the safety zone, maybe up to the next note in the scale, which is D, or maybe down one note in the scale, which is a B. I can move either way, I can move up or I can move down, but the point is that I return back to my note of safety, the same one I started. Upper neighbor note would move to the D and B. A lower neighbor note would work down to the B and back. So in this example here, you can see we're starting on a chord tone. We go down to a neighbor and back. This neighbors actually safe because this first chord has so much color. There's extra note choices available, but same idea. I would actually consider this to be a more stable note in G minor. This is one of the three main notes of a G minor chord. This is known as a two or a nine. It was in the chord that I played, but it tends to be a bit more of a color. That's kind of its function. So stability, lower neighbor note, and then back up. The same thing is true here, but it's kind of inverse now. My chord in this moment doesn't have an E flat. I'm actually starting on a moment of tension, moving down to a moment of resolution and then back up to tension before resolving to this C. Now, actually, I kind of messed up in the last class. I said that this was more color. As I pulled it over, I showed there's no C. There is a C here. So it was a bit more calculated in the moment that I gave myself credit. Because this E flat is anticipating the sound of the C minor chord. I'm not thinking of this E flat in the moment of the G, and you'll notice the G chord also has some space. So there's really no conflict happening there, but I'm anticipating this E flat going into the next chord. You'll notice that E flat is one of the notes in our C minor chord. So we have this kind of odd neighbor happening here, E flat down to a moment of resolution and back up into what we might call tension. But that's only in relation to this cord here, the G chord. Again, I'm thinking of it as an anticipation for this next chord. So the point here is really to show you that you can have a traditional neighbor tone where you're starting on stability, moving to color, and coming back. You can also start on instability and move down to one of your chord notes and then back. That's ultimately better than just holding a note that's tense the whole time, because you're not going to get that relief or at least temporary relief of moving to a note that works with the cord before you move back. So, honestly, 80, 90% of the time, you'll be doing this first method where you start safe, you dip into danger, you dip into color, whatever you want to call it, and then you come back. You can try it the other way as well, too, but you might find that it takes a little bit of trial and error and experimenting. This worked in particular, I think, because of this E flat that was anticipating this C here. So those are two examples of neighbor notes or neighbor tones, interchangeable terms. We also had passing notes, and we can see somewhere in here a passing note is happening. Can you find it? Is it here? Is it here? But but Bingo. It's over here. So we're starting on a stable note, one of the notes in our chord, then we're moving to a more colorful note, which is still on the purple lane. It's still part of our key of G minor. And then I'm moving down to another stable note. In this case, G, which is also part of our chord. And again, you really want to consider if you have a particular melody note and you don't know if it's in the chord and you're not seeing it lined up perfectly with one of these chord notes, make sure you scroll down and check if there's any other notes available. There are, then it's perfectly fine to be playing that melody note while that chord is happening, and it'll feel like that magnet experience. It will be stable, it will feel settled. Now, something else to consider is that this B flat with the passing note down to G, we could have also gone up to the next available chord note. So from the B flat, I'm passing through another purple note, another note within the key, up to the next chord note. It would sound like this. And that still works, right? Now, I'm going to return it back to where it was just so we keep our initial melody intact. So whether you are doing a passing note down or a passing note up, both will sound perfectly acceptable, but something to consider is that sometimes you'll be on a note that will not just pass through one note to get to the next stable note. Here's an example, C, E and G. We can see on the little keyboard below me that there's one note between each of these blue highlighted notes. But what if I add my next C, and I'm just going to change the patch sound here. So there's our top C. The next note within that chord, like if I do another chord up here, you'll notice that this G to the C has two notes in between. So sometimes you might have to do a double passing note where you're passing through two purple notes that are not a chord tone until you hit that next chord tone. So as an example, if I have this C major chord and G is in my melody, I may want to pass up through two notes before landing on my next stable pitch. Same thing works for C going down, I have two notes I have to pass through. Before arriving to the G. So just something to keep in mind is that every once in a while you get these double passing tones, and that's from the fifth up to the root of the cord or the root down to the fifth if you're just working with basic major and minor chords. In this example that I've given you here, G is the fifth of our chord. C is the root, but you'll notice B flat has been added as one of the chord notes. This is called the seventh. It's a great little jazzy, colorful way to color the chords. So because that's available, I wouldn't have to do these double passing tones. It's like there's a little rest stop along the way that's become available. So again, to recap, neighbor tones, you're starting on a chord note. You're starting on a magnet. You're up to a purple note and back or down to a purple note and back. The purple notes being a note within your key that, in this case, is not a chord note. Now, you can also start on the purple note that is not a chord note and dip down to a chord note and back. And arguably, that's better most of the time than just holding the tension of the non chord note for the sake of pop melodies and for people that don't have very adventurous ears with harmony, you're going to want to make sure you accommodate them sometimes so that you're dipping down into some resolution before sort of playing around with how much tension you add. You're going to want to make sure you accommodate them by dipping down sometimes into moments of resolution, so you're not just holding tension the whole time. For our passing notes, I would say, don't start on a non chord note like we did with neighbor tones. Even that's pretty rare. But with passing tones, I would say start on a safe chord note, work through a note in your key, a purple note, up to the next chord note. You can move up, you can move down. We have upper neighbors, lower neighbors, upper passing, lower passing and remembering that sometimes you'll get these double passing notes between the fifth and the higher root. All of this is contextual. How many notes are in the chord? How colorful of a sound are you going for harmonically. That's going to open up more notes so that they're available within your melody. Also, you might want to have tension. You might want to have a C major chord with F in the melody. That's okay. If you like tension and you're going for something a little bit more adventurous, then that's totally an option. My job here, I believe, is to give you a safe approach, and from there, you can choose to experiment as much as you want. So that's it for this class on neighbor notes and passing notes, in our next class, we're going to talk about phrasing. I'll see you there. 5. Phrasing: This next class is going to be all about phrasing. It's gonna be a shorter class because phrasing is a relatively simple concept. I wanted to discuss phrasing early within this course because it's a really important concept that I think a lot of beginners overlook. But again, this will be a bit of a shorter class because the concept itself is not that difficult. Let's get talking about phrasing. Let's jump in. In short, phrasing is basically the length of your melodic sentence, so to speak. Think about how we break up language. It's in sort of bursts of information. And then we were told as kids that when there's a period, it's a brief moment to pause before going into the next point. We've all heard that person that talks consistently with no breaks, and at some point, it just feels like this wash of information, we have no sort of reprieve or break in between their thoughts, and it ends up sort of diluting whatever they're trying to say. It's the same thing in music. If you're rambling, if you're just playing all over the place with no breaks, at some point, I mean, at the beginning, that might sound great, but at some point, it's going to be like, Okay, they don't really have ideas. It's just sort of a lot of stuff all connected together. We want to show our melodic ideas in bursts of information with some space in between. And you might remember before I was talking about how in this melody, I intentionally left some space here. All these blue notes here would be a bit of a longer phrase. This one here is a shorter phrase. Not all phrases have to be the same length. But generally, you'll notice one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight notes. Let's say for now, as a rule, try to keep your phrases about 12 notes or shorter and on the short end, three notes or longer. Let's give a listen to the melody one more time just to keep it fresh in our mind. So you can hear there's almost this moment of a breath in the melody happening right here. And if you think about singers and horn players, they need to take a breath. So a really good natural sort of resting point within your melodies is when you would need to take a breath anyway. Now, it might sound fine if this was all one phrase, but we want to make sure we limit our own melody writing, whether it be on piano or guitar or in music production to the same sort of constraints that people would have if they're using breath to create that melody. So if I sing through this da da da di dee da da dum. There's like this natural breath that I need to take at that point. Anyway. Part of the reason this phrase is shorter is because I was thinking of it as one long phrase, but I did allow myself a little breath before playing those final notes. I could have held this note and taken a breath here, but let's listen to how that sounds. It feels like when a little kid is talking to you, and they're like, Hey, did I tell you the other day that there was this? And they breathe at the weirdest spots like mid sentence. You want to think about the flow, in this case, of the melody moving up and then back down, we take a breath, and then a little sort of mini bump up and down. We're up. We're down. The phrase is finished. Second phrase is much smaller. And again, it's okay that the second phrase is smaller. Maybe the sentences, Hey, did I tell you that the other day I went to the pawn shop and I ended up buying some roller blades? It was a great deal. So it doesn't always have to be in the case of language that we have medium long sentences or long sentences every time. In this case, just the same as phrasing, we can have mediums, shorts, and longs all combined together. Now, I would encourage you to trust your natural instinct with phrasing to some extent. We've all heard tons of music, and we end up hearing over and over where these phrases sort of naturally resolve or where they naturally take their breaks. I could go through and put a break on this note. I could put a break on this note, and I promise you, all of them would sound weird. There's just this natural inclination to take a break after the contour of this up and down before taking another leap higher that seemed like a natural place to do this. But if I'm being honest, I wasn't considering the phrasing when I wrote this. I've done enough work as a pianist to sort of know how phrasing should naturally feel. So if you're not a singer and you want to go through and ask, is my phrase an appropriate length or is it too long? If you're worried about it being too long, I want you to exhale naturally during the phrase. Not like where you're exhaling all the air quickly, or, like, where you're being really slow about it, but just something natural. Like, maybe something like that where we have some tension, some resistance for the airflow, but it doesn't feel really significant. Let's try that as we're playing through this phrase. Wow, I was right out of breath right around the time that G hit. Again, this is a bit subjective. How much air pressure should you have? I would say about a medium amount of air pressure, similar to when you're speaking that same amount of airflow. But you'll hear this in, like, jazz solos, especially someone who's not playing, like, instrument that requires air, you'll hear this with upright bassists a lot when they're soloing. It'll be bile done, do. Go, do, do, do boo, i do do. And you'll hear these in between phrases on these old recordings. What a great way to naturally feel the phrase length that would be appropriate. We're kind of constraining ourselves in terms of airflow the same way we would if we were a singer. So for anyone out there that reads sheet music, our phrase markings are the same as the legato slurs. They are these sort of black rainbows up above or a little smiley down below a set of notes. Not only do we play those notes smooth and connected, but at the end of that little smile or rainbow or whatever shape we have, that represents to take a small breath, a small break. Even if at the end of that phrase, I have a one beat note followed by another one beat note to start the next phrase, I would still cheat that one beat note a little bit, maybe by a quarter or even half of its value to create the space to start the next phrase. This is all about compartmentalizing your melodic ideas, so you're not rambling, but you're also not creating a bunch of short little ideas. You want to make sure that just like language, melody and phrasing of melody flows naturally but again, trust your natural instincts. You've heard tons of music. You'll have a pretty good inclination for what feels like too long of a phrase or too short. If you feel stuck, follow my advice, try breathing out, and just making sure that you do have a break in your melody at some point if it's a bit of a longer melody. So that's it for this class on phrasing for our next class, we're going to talk about melodic themes. I'll catch you in that class. 6. Melodic Concepts: Good. Alright, let's get talking about melodic concepts. We're going to talk about three different forms, going through question and answer, call and response, and theme and variation. These are three super popular melodic approaches. Let's get talking about them. Let's jump in. So let's talk about question and answer first, as a melodic concept. We're going to use Beethoven's Ode to Joy as our source of analysis. The melody sounds something like this. You'll notice that there's two sort of distinct parts da da, da, da, d, d, d, d, d, d, d d, d, d. There's our question. But, y, bi, bi, we, we, bite, boo. There's our answer. But what makes one a question and what makes the other an answer? Well, we have to consider what key we're in. I was playing this melody in the key of C major. And so we've talked about how C, E and G, when we play a C major chord, are very important notes. Those are our magnets, but the most important note would be the C. We're in C major. C is the home base. It is the star of the show. It is the most important note. As such, finishing a phrase on C feels like that answer. It feels very determined and sure and finalized. But to finish on a question is to finish maybe on one of the notes beside the C, like a B or a D. Both are from the key of C major, and they reside close enough to the C that there's a bit of tension. And then when we repeat our phrase, we can finish on the C as an answer. Now, it doesn't have to be the B and the D. These are just safe note choices. But the idea is it would probably be some slight tension or color to finish the first phrase and a resolution to finish the second phrase. So if we listen, If I finish it there, it does not feel finalized. It feels like this question lingering. Now when I go to the Sea, you can hear even just to finish that phrase with the Sea now feels finalized. To put those two together, give it a listen. It feels finished. So this idea of question and answer really has to do with having two phrases that are similar. The first one ending with a bit of color or tension, and the second one ending with more of a resolution. Now, it's really common to finish the question, not on the first chord. So we're in the key of C major. This This D, he's not considering a C major chord during that moment. I'm gonna change sounds for the sake of adding more harmony. But here's our question. This D is not meant to be happening with a C major ord. It's happening with one of the cords that does have a D. So in its own right, it is resolved in that moment, but it's playing with a cord that kind of represents tension in itself. This five chord, CDEFG the fifth chord of C major, is a great cord to represent tension. It is a gravity. It's lingering up, and it wants to pull down. So G being more tense chord and C being the more resolved chord. What's interesting is you can get away with just those two chords for this whole question and answer within this song. So just watch the little keyboard below me. Our C chord here is our resolution. Our G chord here is our tension. So There's our tense chord with a note that works with it, we're holding a D and our G chord has a D. Now, we're finishing on the C chord and finishing on a C. I could dive too deep down the harmony wormhole at around this point, but what I want to mention is that with question and answer as your melodic approach, as long as you have some tension at the end of the first phrase and a resolution at the end of the second, you're in the right ballpark. There's ways to do this wrong. There's ways to make it sound fantastic. But as an overall concept, it's important to recognize that not every time you finish a phrase, should it sound finalized. There's something nice about this question and answer. It breaks things up so that not everything is always resolved. And if you think about some of the best stories, even kids shows, there's going to be some tension. There's a bad guy. There's some turmoil. There's some mistakes. And generally in the end, things get rectified. The bad guy goes to jail, the mistakes were made up for, whatever it might be. Phrases work the same way. It's nice to have a little bit of tension and then some of that resolution. And the same way our phrasing and melody works with tension and resolution. As I mentioned, the chords do as well. C, in this case, being a chord of resolution and G being a ord of tension. It's mild tension. It still works fine. But in the world of harmony, that five chord, in this case, G major works really well as a resting place for some light tension before resolving back to the one chord, in this case, C major. So that's question and answer, but what is call and response? It sounds kind of similar. Well, if we consider this idea that blues singers quite often will sing a line and then have people respond to it, so something like going to the market, going to the market. Gonna buy some apples. Gonna buy some apples, right? This is the call and the response. This is a fantastic approach if you're riffing a little bit more. Like, I use this approach a bit more if I'm using pentatonic or blues scales. Let's say I'm in C minor and my chord progression is C minor to F minor. I might have something like, It's not the exact same notes, but you'll see it feels like a response to the first call, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and then da da, da, da, da, da, da. Rhythmically, it's the same. So we would call this a rhythmic motif. I'm using the same rhythm, but I'm changing it to a different set of notes. I could also play around with the same set of notes, but change the rhythm a bit. Maybe something like So delaying it a little bit and then going through the full phrase. These are two great ways to do a call and response. A rhythmic motif or a melodic motif. Am I keeping the rhythm the same or am I keeping the melody the same? You could even do both, but with generally register changes, something like So you can see I'm playing the same notes, but just moving down one octave. So call and response is generally about having a shorter phrase that is responded to with a similar rhythm, similar notes in terms of the melody, or everything is the exact same with a register shift. If you don't shift the register, it still works. It's still technically call and response. It's just a bit more boring, I think. It would sound like this. Really, that's just a repeated small, short phrase. To me, it doesn't feel like the classic call and response where we've done something with it. Even in the fields where workers would be singing to one another, you'd have one person calling out and generally a few people responding. Okay, so that's a difference. We have a single voice to multiple voices. The call and response generally wants some sort of a difference in the response, but it wants to also tie itself to the call rhythmically or melodically, most of the time. So if your strength is rhythm, then I would say, keep on the same set of notes and play around with rhythmic variation. If your strength is melodic notes, and I mean, you're taking this course, so I'd imagine you need some help with that. But let's say your strength is melodic notes, then you would change the set of notes for your response, but you would keep the same rhythm because I'm assuming that you don't want to be too adventurous rhythmically, so just change the set of notes you're working with. So let's duplicate our melody channel here, and I'm going to mute the top one, and we're going to create a new melody using call and response. Okay, so we have taking a look, I'm going to do a Control A, select all, control U to quantize. Da da, da, da, da, shifting notes. Da da, da, da, da, da, then we're back. Da da, da, da, da, da, and then D D, D D D deep. Now, why didn't I keep this rhythm outside of just repeating it here and here, why didn't I keep it at the very end? Well, to me, it felt like a good answer. If we consider this to be the question, we have a nice really resolved ditty do, dy do really playing around with the chord notes. This chord is C minor. E flat and C are part of that chord. So most of the information here is very resolved on that chord. We could also consider this part of theme and variation, which we'll talk about next. But the main thing is, you don't want to be too redundant in repeating stuff. We have Okay. Oh, there's a response to it. We're back to the first idea, and then sort of closing off the idea, showing that the melody is coming to an end by variating something. At the end of the day, people like to feel smart. They like to know, kind of, as they're listening to music. Oh, this feels like the end of that sentence, the end of that melody, the end of that phrase, however you want to view. But they want to be able to kind of anticipate things with the odd surprise. Yes, we like being surprised a bit, but we also want to feel kind of clever in knowing where something was going within the music. So if I was to say to you something like, Oh, my God, the craziest thing happened today, you wouldn't believe what happened at lunch. It was the craziest thing ever. Are you ready? At the end, that, Are you ready? That's sort of the setup of I said the same thing Ish three times. That craziest thing happened today. You wouldn't believe what happened at lunch. Oh, my God, it was so crazy. I haven't really said anything past that initial point, but are you ready? Sort of makes you go as a listener. Oh, here it comes. I'm smart in this moment knowing that the story is about to happen now. So maybe that's a bit of an obscure analogy, but thinking about this particular melody and how it relates to language, that's kind of how I would picture this little closing off of the melody. You're not bound to keep in the exact same rhythm every time. We had our call, we had our response. We had our initial call come back and then a closing off of the melodic idea. So that is essentially call and response. That is using a rhythmic motif. Let's try it one more time with a melodic motif. Let's go for it. One, two, three, four. So, we have the same three notes. Dum, boom, boom, but, um, but, uh, m. And then, again, I did some variation at the end to close off the idea. Sort of like a longer question and a final answer. Although I did finish on some color, so it's a bit of a colorful answer, so to speak, but that being said, listen again, we have our initial rhythm. The rhythm changes, it changes again, but I've kept the same three notes. Again, we'll quantize. Let's give it a listen. Now, this tends to sound better when you're adding words in because it just feels like some things are coming in late, but it is intentional, and the rhythm still kind of makes enough sense that it doesn't feel wrong. But with words, you could say something like, went to the club, and I was searching for that special D, but, boom, but, boom, whatever it might be. But with words, all these little repeated set of notes with rhythmic change feels a lot more natural. So something to consider is that creating a melody for an instrument part and for a vocal part, there are some subtle differences. I would go about it the same way, but when you're working with lyrics or words, there's something else distracting the listener. They're listening to the story. So the idea of the simplicity of these three notes repeating gets a little bit sort of shrouded with this idea that, Oh, I'm also listening to this other dimension of the melody, the words. A saxophonist, a guitarist, a piano player, we don't have now maybe a saxophonist will growl on some notes or a guitarist might slam on a distortion pedal or do some bends. We find ways to add more intrigue and interest to our basic melodies, since we're not working with things as complex as words. And finally, we come to theme and variation. Theme and variation is very similar to call and response. We have some sort of a theme where there's a nugget of information played and then it is variated. Maybe that variation is rhythmic variation. We just did that, or maybe it's melodic variation. Maybe we're changing up the notes but keeping the same rhythm. And we did that as well. You can see call and response and theme and variation are very similar. But theme and variation can get a little bit more deep. What if I took the melody and flipped it upside down? What if I reversed the rhythm, so the long note at the end is now the long note at the beginning. That doesn't feel like a natural call and response. It feels a little bit more theoretical and deep. So to me, theme and variation has a lot of overlap with call and response, but it can go a lot deeper where you're really working with pencil and paper and seeing how can I do different variations to this theme that are unique and interesting. And I think the best example of this is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Bump up up, bum, bump up, up, bum, listen to that and see how many ways he was able to variate the theme. He works with different speeds. He initially has the theme moving down. Did did it do? Did do? But then later, D da da da da da doo da da da do. It's moving up higher. So he's thought of all these ways of taking a very short phrase or a theme and variating it. Now, in the class on phrasing, I talked about how we don't want to have a lot of short bursts of phrases. It would be like talking like this all the time. But when you start to do something as interesting as theme and variation, things feel intentional enough and connect so that they still feel like a proper melodic phrase. Think of this as di da dum. That's the main mini phrase, but really data ta da da da dum. That feels like the full phrase that would be sung. So you can have these sort of littler phrases within these bigger phrases. As long as it feels natural and your listener is comfortable hearing these small phrases within this environment, then you're totally fine. I'm not saying you can never play small phrases, but if you do, try to get a bit creative with them using something like theme and variation. So while I do think that our last example sort of works within this theme and variation atmosphere, let's see if I can play something else that works also quite well in terms of theme and variation. Let's go for it. In, one, two, three, four. Okay, so this, I think, works well. So we have our initial theme, which is a note, up, up, down a skip repeat. We've done this in a different register, starting on a different note. We've inverted it. We've gone down down up a skip instead of up up, down a skip, and then we slowed the rhythm down towards the end. These are all in different registers, but the whole time I was considering the chord in that moment. In this moment here, our chord is G minor. Gs and B flats are safe notes. They are magnets, and we have one passing note. Next chord is E flat major. Again, you can see I have E flat and G, which are in the chord and a passing note. Then we go to C minor. Here I'm thinking C minor seven. So we have the seven, which is B flat passing through A down to a G. These notes here are all in the chord and we have a proper passing note. And then to finish, we have C minor, C, passing through D to E flat. These are all chord notes. So three out of our four notes are chord notes with one passing note. So in the moment of coming up with themes and variations and considering the chords that you're playing, some of this comes from experience in terms of playing it on the spot. I got lucky that this was my first time through, and I gave you a decent example. But usually with theme and variation, I would consider more of a pencil and paper approach or working with MIDI information and experimenting until you're happy with the variations you've come up with. The theme you might be able to come up with very quickly, but the variations can be a little bit tough to explore in the moment unless you have a bunch of experience on the instrument. So that's it. We covered question and answer, call and response, and theme and variation. I want to make one small adjustment. When I said on the fourth chord that we were sort of answering, that's not really where you answer. It's usually when you're looped back to beat one. And then as a loop repeats back to beat one, it's like, that final sort of chord. That's generally where you get your answer. But what I was talking about with the call and response, that fourth phrase being a little bit different, is it functions similar to an answer in that it feels resolved in that moment after a little bit of sort of squirly tension. If you want a true question and answer, really look into the basics of perfect cadences, one chords and five chords and melodies finishing on an unresolved note, which would be with the five chord, and the second time finishing on a resolved note, which would be with the one chord. This is all a bit out of context for this particular course, but I wanted to make sure that I was covering all my bases as much as possible. I have plenty of other courses that dive deep into harmony. So I'd recommend if that's something you're interested in, check out chords and chord progressions 101-20-1301, that'll get you really far through this harmony wormhole so that when you come back to these melodic concepts, you have a better framework to be working with harmonically. In our next class, we're going to talk about your melody suiting the style of music that you're playing. I'll see you in that next class. 7. Melody Suits Style: Good. Next up, let's get talking about your melody suiting the style of music that you're producing. So far, the fundamental concepts that I've been giving you derive from Western classical music and quite often find their way into modern pop music. But some styles of music take slightly different approaches when it comes to how they create their melodies. We're going to talk about two specific styles because ultimately, I can't cover every style within this course, but we're going to talk about funk and trance, so let's dive in. So with funk music and also with dubstep, they use a technique called Hocket and a Hockett is basically couple of short notes from every melodic instrument, and together, they create a melody. So it could be as simple as creating a melody like we had in the last class and delegating the first few notes to a guitar, the second few notes to a horn, like trumpet. The next few notes might be done with a vocal scat or a bass part. There's lots of different options. But I'm going to play something kind of fresh, and I'm going to pull in some new sounds altogether. Let's get a bit more synth driven and bring in serum. I'm going to delete the call in response and the theme and variation stuff that we did from last time. I'm keeping my initial melody intact, but I'm going to mute it for now. And now, so I know you can't see a lot of what's happening behind my video here, but I've just created three new instances of serum, and I'm going to go through each and find a sound that I like. So give me a moment, and I'll report back. Okay, so I have three sounds. They're not all leveled. I'd have to probably create the hock at first and then kind of rework the levels a bit, but they sound like this. Second one is much, much, much louder. I'm going to lower it like 5 decibels. And the last one will lower two just as a brief starting point. Now, I am actually going to duplicate this initial chord part so that I have access to play some chords on top of what we already have. And this is really common even in funk to hear, like, De de, de de. Bob, chuk chuk chap. Bit d dot. That little chicken chicka chat on the guitar, that little funk guitar part kind of becomes part of the melody. As you're singing it back in your head, you're doing that little chia chukacha in your head. So I'm going to start with creating a little chord stab on the third chord, let's say. So we'll come in in one, two, three, four. Nothing too crazy. Just stabbing in with a couple of chords. You might call that a chord stab. I'm going to clean up the timing just a little bit. And now let's go down to our first synth and create a part of a melody. Okay, so we have a few notes here. We're going down to our next synth. Okay, you can already start to see how this is kind of coming together. Third sinth. I don't want to overlap the chords too much. I honestly want to hear that again. It kind of worked really well with the, again, call in response of that extra little part that I added. So here's our call response, call, response. So it ends up sounding like this. So this is sort of that hocket approach. Now, if I'm using synthesizer sounds, especially if they're like web sort of synthesizer sounds with heavy LFOs, you're gonna get a sort of dub step approach. I don't have a guitar hooked up right now to show you the funkier approach, but it works the same way. Like, you would have, let's say, saxophone, and then here you have trumpet, and then here you have a guitar maybe a second guitarist playing a funky rhythm and a lead guitarist playing a piece of a melody. Whatever it might be, the instrumentation is the only thing changed. The basic concept of what a Hocket is is still very much in check. My favorite use of a Hocket in dubstep is the song Vancouver Beat Down by Zomboe ZOMBOY. Check out that song. As I'm listening to the drop, I'm always able to play it through my head like a full melody, but there's so many different instruments all making up that overall drop that it is a great example of a hocket within dubstep. In terms of funk, you can check out just about anything by James Brown. I would bet that even the first song you listen to by him would have some use of a Hocket technique. So next up, let's talk about trance. We're going to come up with a really simple trance synth part. So in serum, we have an initialized preset. Just with some sawtooth waves, I'm going to detune them heavily. And already, we're in that sort of transy atmosphere. A couple of things that we can do is we can consider that the velocity sensitivity, how hard I play the note can affect the filter. So I'm going to go ahead and drop velocity to the cutoff. So if I play lightly, versus loudly, the filter will open up more. So I want an initial starting point where when I play lightly, we can hear it lightly, and when I play it louder, you can hear the frequencies opening up more. On top of that, we might add a little bit of reverb. Maybe some delay. And with the delay, let's take down that feedback. I'm also going to change things to eighth notes in both the left and right speakers and bring the mix way down. Something really short. So a little bit of delay, a little bit of reverb, quite a bit of detuning on a sawtooth wave. It's a starting point for a trance synth. What we're going to work with here is something called a homophonic rhythm. I'm going to be outlining the chords that we already had. So G minor, E flat to the C, and I'm also going to be playing the same rhythm for the melody. So whatever my rhythm is, let's say it's da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, I'd be playing something like So my chords are stabbing in, and the melody up above is playing a homophonic rhythm, the same rhythm as the chords. For now, let's mute all the old parts we had a trance is a very specific sounding genre. I don't want the old retro 80s or sort of Wurlitzer sounds. So we're a little bit closer to that trance sound. Although we don't have a trance drum beat, it gets us a bit closer. So let's give it a try. It sounds like this. Now, I might want to consider after I've quantized that setting everything to gatto so that everything is smooth and connected. It's a little too smoothed out, so once I have everything touching, you can just create a subtle amount of separation. And then I really want to throw on an auto filter and just sort of slowly open up that filter over time. So let's try something like this, boom, to boom, turn up a bit of drive. Now, that's the basic idea. And I should mention I'm not specifically a trance producer. I've dipped my toes a little bit into trance and citrance. So my sound design on this synth was pretty elementary, nothing too crazy. And the actual part itself, I'd want to work out a bit more over time. But the main thing here to show you is that the chords and the melody have the exact same rhythm. You could then change to some other purple notes, and just I don't even know how this is gonna sound. Let's just kind of move around to some different purple notes. Still sounds pretty fine, right? So purple notes are your friend. It's the same rhythm as the harmony. And then try to consider what are the notes happening in my chord, and my melody should be outlining those notes fairly frequently. So those are two examples of having a specific approach to your melody based on the style that you're producing. The best thing you can do right now is go out and listen to a lot of the style that you're trying to produce and ask your what is the melody doing? How does it relate to the harmony? How are all the individual instruments working together? In other words, what's happening with the melody and how can I recreate that? Usually, it's one or two simple tricks, and once you understand them, you can really dial in to that particular genre. It's not like it's going to change every single song unless it's something very adventurous, like neoclassical or something like that. But for the most part, you're going to be able to pick up on a couple of simple melodic techniques like hokets and homophonic rhythms and be able to apply that moving forward so that your style sounds more convincingly accurate. So that's it for this class on matching your melody to the style that you're producing. In our next class, we're going to talk about rhythmic density. I'll see you there. 8. Rhythmic Density: Good. In this class, we're going to be talking about rhythmic density. It's just a fun term basically saying how fast are the rhythms? How fast is the rhythm in the verse versus the rhythm in the chorus in terms of what your melody is doing. How fast is the rest of the band playing? If it's my job to create a melody, how fast should my melody be in respect to the rest of the band? These are the types of concepts we're going to be talking about. Let's jump in. So first off, I'm going to extend our mini little song into two sections. The drum beat for now will keep the same. It probably would change between sections, but right now it's mostly the harmony and melody and their relation that we're focused on. So in the second part of the song, I'm going to change the progression slightly, and I'm also going to change its rhythmic density. Listen to the harmony here. Everything's moving quite slowly, right? Like, we have these chords really holding out. What I'm going to do in this second section, and now you can tell this wants to repeat. These are very short sections. In the second section, I'm going to create slightly different chords, and I'm going to play something a bit more pulsed. So the rhythmic density has changed for the harmony. So let's try it out. Something like one, two, three, four. Okay, so there's a bit of a pulse. We're creating some rhythmic interest. Control A, control to quantize all this information. Now, what our melody, I'm going to get rid of this hacket from before. What our melody is doing in relation to this harmony is as things are more flowy and long, quite often that gives us a little bit more room to be more rhythmically dense, to add in some extra notes. But there's a threshold to this. If people are strumming light balllad chords and you're playing a ballad, sure you can play a little bit more rhythmically dense over that. But how far could you go before there's just too much energy for a ballad? So again, this is all style specific, but all I'm saying if a band is doing a lot rhythmically and your melody is doing a lot rhythmically, it's a bit too much to focus on sometimes. If you're doing a homophonic rhythm with the rest of the band, like the trance example from the last class, that might work well, but you have to be able to finesse this properly. Now, slow with slow does work. Fast with fast does work, but if you're worried about over cluttering a song, try contrast. If the band is playing the harmony parts more slow, then your melody has a bit more room to be melodically, rhythmically dense. So back to the sort of 80s sound here, let's say we have something like W, two, three, four. Now, for the next section we might have Now, you can see in both halves of this example, the faster rhythmic density, the slower rhythmic density is contrasting whatever the harmony is doing. Let's listen to it without the drums. It sounds like this. So there's two key things that I'm showing you here. One is that contrast. What is the band doing in terms of their rhythmic density? And my job as a melodic writer is to basically do a subtle version of the opposite. Not every time, it's just a pretty safe approach. And then as we're going through different sections, if you really want to define the different sections, change up the rhythmic density of the parts. Start with your rhythm section like drums and bass. Chords can also follow this, and your melody is quite often going to it gives a great contrast between sections. So people aren't wondering, is this a variation of the verse? Instead, they're going, Oh, no, this sounds like a pre chorus. It's very different than what we just heard in the verse, but it's in the same key. It's following some rhythmic and melodic motifs. It feels connected in terms of it being in the same song, but it feels different in terms of the section. So really, that's it. It's a short class. There's the two angles to rhythmic density. In any given section, a bit of contrast can be a good thing, and between sections, a contrast can be a good thing. Within a section, listen to what the band is doing and do a subtle version of the opposite in terms of rhythmic density. If you have that section laid out and you're ready to move into another section, but you don't know what to do in terms of that rhythmic density, try contrasting it and see how that sounds. So this was not our most intense concept. It's relatively simple, but it's something that I think gets overlooked quite often. Consider what your rhythmic density is doing in any given section and between sections, and as a result, your melodic parts and your sections are going to pop out that much more. So that's it for this class on rhythmic density. In our next class, we're going to start playing the non purple notes, the notes between the notes of our scale or our key. This is represented with the word chromaticism. We're going to talk about chromaticism in our next class. I'll see you there. 9. Chromaticism: Alright, let's get talking about Chromaticism. Playing notes between the notes of your scale. It's gonna sound a little bit more colorful, a little bit more adventurous. Let's jump in. Okay, so let's pick up where we left off. We were doing some rhythmic density contrast between sections and between parts. It ended up sounding something like this. I'm trying to think so, as you can see, there is not a single note in this melody that is not on a purple note lane. In other words, every single note that I chose was within the key of G minor. And we can see that our main key up here is G minor, and every single one of these notes is on the purple lane. So that means that none of this is actually chromatic. Chromatic is going to be represented by these black notes, not necessarily the black keys on the piano, but these black lines that we can see permeating through all of the MIDI information. We could just sidestep any one of these notes to a black note and see how it sounds, but I promise you it'll sound wrong. I'll check it out. Very unsettling. The chords and the melody are not working together. We can't tell what key center we're in, slash what scale we're using. So there's certain ways that we want to approach playing these notes that are not in key. They're not the purple notes. Now, the first thing I want to mention is that chromatic movement works better on upbeats. When we're counting one and two, and three and four. We have our main downbeats, one, two, three, four, and the upbeats and and and and putting these chromatic notes on the end is going to work out a little bit better because they are, after all, the more adventurous notes. So putting them on the less stable rhythm means that the stable beat one and the stable beat two, those are getting more stable notes. The upbeat allows some room for experimentation within chromaticism. So that's just sort of a side note that I want you to consider. But what we're going to talk about is chromatic neighbor notes and chromatic passing notes, a continuation from what we talked about before. Now, I'm not certain that in this class, I've brought up the term diatonic, but diatonic means true to a key. It means you're playing all the purple notes and all the chords you're playing are proper notes within that key. So there's diatonic, true to a key, and chromatic. All the notes can be considered. The approach that we're taking here is going to be diatonic with some chromaticism, some color experimentation with some of these notes that, again, land on these black lines in the midi information. Starting with chromatic neighbor tones, let's take one of the notes that's on a purple note, and we're going to move it up to a black note and back. So this is an upper neighbor tone, and it's chromatic because it's not falling on one of the purple notes in key. Let's give it a listen. Okay, kind of adventurous. It doesn't sound terrible, but it's not necessarily great. You have to really watch where you use chromaticism in terms of styles. If you're doing something like neo-soul, funk, hip hop, RMB, you're going to be able to get away with chromaticism a bit more. Anything inspired by jazz, really. If you're playing something more straight ahead, like a song like this, like an electronic or pop tune, it's going to be a little bit harder to make these notes work to the ears that want to listen to that style. Someone wanting to listen to pop music is not necessarily going to be ready for tons of chromaticism. But again, I digress. I wanted to show you that you could start on a note, for example, that is purple. It is in key, move up or down to a neighbor tone, neighbor note, whatever you want to call it to a non diatonic note, a note not in key. Here's the example of a lower neighbor tone. Okay, so kind of adventurous for this particular song. But there's actually a neat opportunity for us to talk about a chromatic passing tone, and that is here or here. Anytime, really, we're going from a purple note to another purple note with a black in between. This is true to key. This one here is not. This is true to key. So I'd like to try to experiment with this part here and put in a chromatic passing note. Let's give it a listen. Okay, so that's starting to sound a little bit more appropriate. It kind of sounds a little bit video gamey, as well, too. A lot of the music in the video game Mario, which sort of set up lot of other video game music was very jazz influence that used quite a bit of chromaticism. So as you approach this, you're going to feel like you're getting a little less EDM or sort of standard electronic music and dipping your toes a little bit more towards electronic video game styles. Now, this can quickly be overdone. Let's start to fill in a bunch of these notes with chromatic passing notes. It looks like it's always going to be the case that it's moving lower in this section. Here in this next section, we do have an opportunity to do an upper chromatic passing note. So let's listen to this whole thing. It's not going to sound perfect, but this is the basic idea. I liked this more. I think it worked better as a slower sort of chromatic passing tone, one more time. So this is one end, two end, three end, four end. Is one end, two, three d. So here's our three end of this particular beat, and we can see the chromatic note is happening on the end. Part of the reason this sounded quite appropriate. Everything over here was on 16th notes. It was a bit fast and frantic. Nothing wrong with fast and frantic, like flight of the bumblebee, for example, is very chromatic. It's very fast and frantic. But you have to experiment a little bit and explore to make sure that these chromatic notes are, one, not falling on main beats, especially too often. And two, that it just sounds right. Sometimes this looks like it's going to work and it doesn't sound fantastic. Chromaticism can be quite sensitive in terms of what makes it work and what makes it challenge the ear a bit too much. So let's go back and undo a bunch of what I just did all this crazy extra stuff. Whoop, too far. And I would say, let's keep in this little note here just for fun, just for a little bit of extra flavoring. So keep in mind that you can still have upper neighbor, lower neighbor or upper passing, lower passing notes. But in this case, you're not passing from purple through purple to another purple note. We're not staying in the key. We're going from purple to a note that is not purple to another purple note. So we're passing through from being in key, not in key temporarily to in key. And that not in key temporarily note should preferably land on an upbeat on an of a beat. Why don't I create something totally fresh? And I'm going to try to incorporate more chromaticism. And for me, this will be a very natural process because I've played a lot of jazz piano, but then we can break it down a little bit. Let's give it a listen. It might sound something like this in one, two, three, four. Okay, so there's for our first section. It's more chromatic than I would usually play for this style, but you'll get the basic idea. So I'm already breaking a rule here. It's one and two, and I'm right on that two, that main downbeat of B two, and I am chromatic. But this is, from what I understand, one of the most safe chromatic notes to be able to play. I was actually thinking of the G minor blues scale, and that note that I was playing was the blue note. So it's a D flat or C sharp, known as the blue note. That might be a time where you could put it on a downbeat, but I would caution working with this sort of chromaticism on a main beat. But also, this gets to show you that it can sound okay, and it can work. Now, towards the second half, we have. Okay. So again, I'm breaking some rules in this D flat here is, again, on a downbeat. But again, it's, I think, the safest chromatic note to play. I do have another chromatic note happening over here. This is something that you might call an enclosure. I'm basically trying to land on this safe note, and I'm doing it by surrounding that pitch. We have one stable note, one chromatic enclosure leading us to another diatonic or safe note. But this time I'm on the end of the beat. So if this is one and two and three, and four and one, and I'm on the end of that second beat one, in this case. So if you are going to put chromatic notes onto downbeats, try to pick ones that are safe, like ones that already exist in scales. For example, B Bop scales and blue scales outside of the context of this course, but feel free to look into those. There's little moments of two semitones happening back to back, and that little semitone in the middle can be a chromatic note that you play around with on downbeats. We also dipped a little bit into enclosures, this idea of having a target note and surrounding it, a note above a note below and then arriving. Sometimes it could be a note below a note above and then arriving. You can even start to put two notes on the above or the below portions. There's lots of different ways that enclosures can be formed very much outside of the context of this course. It would be for, like, jazz improvisation. I have brought up enclosures in my jazz piano tricks course, but feel free to check that out. You don't have to. It's only if you really want to learn more in particular about enclosures, which is a huge part of that jazz sound. So something to consider is in Baroque music, we had quite a bit of chromaticism. There wasn't full chords necessarily happening with other notes. There was a lot of counterpoint. So single note lines and other single note lines happening generally on like a harpsichord. Think about, JS Bach, for example. If you look at his music, it's just what looks like a really intense melody and another really intense melody and some little notes sort of poking in between what we might call inner voice leading. But things actually did get quite chromatic. I actually found that once classical music came around, Chromaticism, it felt like there was less chromaticism. And I don't know if that's because blocked harmony was being introduced, and the rub of one note against the harmony was felt a bit more. But it sort of took a step back from chromaticism. And then in the romantic era, man, did they ever bring back colors and chromaticism and a bunch of ways of experimenting with the sounds of melody and harmony together? Flash forward, you get a bit further into contemporary piano and jazz piano, and chromaticism was just fully available at that point. One little chromatic trick that I'm going to try to encourage you to try, and I get this from like Chopin and other romantic composers. So you'll play a chord, and this works really well with minor sounds. Let's say we're playing A minor. And in the right hand, you'll play the Fifth. So that top note of the chord. You can play around with semitones on either side of this fifth, and it's a great spot to experiment with chromatic neighbor tones. So it sounds like this. It just sounds kind of sinister, a little bit eerie. It's a really fun area to play around with. Right? It kind of reminds me of, like, a little bit of Chopin, but also Danny Elfman getting towards that darker side of minor. And it's done through chromaticism. Now, quite honestly, the note above the fifth. So above this E, we have an F, a semitone up. That is not chromatic. It's actually part of the scale. But when we go a semitone below the fifth, that's the chromatic note. It's actually the same note that I was putting on to beat one in the example from earlier. But all this is to say, there's certain spots where this chromaticism is going to work best. You want to find out how chromaticism works within the genre that you're trying to create. Is it even allowed? Is it even preferred? And if it is, is it around a certain pitch? Is it used frequently or infrequently, these are the sort of questions you want to start to ask yourself. So that's basically chromaticism in the view of your midi information. We're playing the notes in between the purple notes, and we're being cautious as to how we do it. We're trying to put the chromatic notes on upbeats, which is the and in between our main beats. Unless it's a chromatic note that you feel very confident will sound okay on a downbeat. We've talked about chromatic neighbor tones above or below, chromatic passing tones above or below, and even dipped a little bit into enclosures. So that's it for this class. In the next one, we're going to talk about having a wide versus a narrow melody. I'll see you there. 10. Narrow vs Wide: Two. All right, up next, we're going to talk about wide versus narrow melodies. When we don't move our melody around very much in terms of the jumps between notes, that would be a more narrow melody. But when I'm leaping anything a fourth, a fifth or above, that would be considered a more wide melody. We like to balance out the narrow and the wide, and there's certain ways to go about this. Let's talk about it. So I've created a melody here that goes along with the two parts that we had created before. I'm starting with more rhythmic density because the harmony is doing some simple stuff, and I'm finishing with less rhythmic density because the harmony is more pulsed. In other words, when the harmony is doing more rhythmic stuff, the melody is doing less rhythmic stuff. Also, you'll notice there is a lot of narrow sections within this melody, moving by steps, maybe by skips. And then there are these odd leaps, these big jumps between notes, like this A to this F. But overall, you'll notice that narrow is the winner. Think of this. If I play a melody like this, that's very narrow, but it works. It's very singable. Now, if I try a very wide melody this time, Good luck singing that. That's gonna be so tough. So narrow is the winner at the end of the day. So we want to say, Okay, how can I be like 80 to 90% narrow and use some wide leaps appropriately? So after I've leaped up, what have I done? I've gone into a more narrow passage, and I've returned towards the middle so that this leap is sort of filled out a little bit. That also happens here, as it's sort of a repeated version of the phrase. So the first half sounds like this. So you can see, again, after those big leaps, we are pulling in, and there's really only one large leap within this section. Now, later in the slower section, we are leaping a little bit more. Leaps are a bit more forgiving when we aren't as rhythmically dense. Think about this. Do you want to be leaping between notes often? Probably not. Do you want to do it at a fast pace? Probably not. So you can get away with some more leaps or a wider melody in the moments where you're playing the melody a bit slower. In other words, there's less rhythmic density. The second half of our melody sounds like this. Now, you can also hear the chromaticism that's happening in this little area. This little C sharp, as you can see, it is on one of these black non diatonic notes. It's not happening right on this line here. It's not happening on that downbeat as much as it's more of a pickup note or an upbeat. So, again, this is that fifth of the key, which is a D semitone above semitone below, that sort of chopinsque sort of trick. These leaps here, for example, A, down to D, D is the fifth of the key, and G is the root of the key. So I'm really anchored around some safe notes within that key, despite the fact that I'm leaping a bit more than usual, and it's not a ton. When you think about it, I'm leaping down here, I'm leaving up here, and then I'm leaving back down between these two. So three leaps, but with safer notes and in an environment where things are slow enough that the leaps can still be more singable. The whole thing together sounds like this. So something else to consider is that this leap from this note to this note between the sections is quite large. But there's so much time in between that vocally or on our instrument. We have this time to prepare for that high pitch, whether it be with lip tension and focus on the trumpet or whether it be with vocal tension as a singer. This class doesn't have to be particularly long. Keep your melodies more narrow. Why? So they're more singable. If you're going to be more rhythmically dense, in other words, more notes jammed into a space, this is extra important because unless you have a singer that's very agile and can do tons of leaps at a very fast pace, it's going to be difficult to be fast and leapy at the same time. In terms of adding width to your melodies, generally, it'll be sort of sandwiched between some more narrow sections. Easy singable part, a little bit of agility as a vocalist back to an easily singable part. Also, when you leap up, generally, you'll fill in a little bit downward, and when you leap down, you'll fill in a little bit upward, usually with steps or skips, something a little bit more friendly and easy to sing. Now, this is all if you're trying to create a singable melody you might like the sound of Something like that. Do we call it a melody? I wouldn't necessarily, but if you're looking for sort of a melodically influenced part and you're willing to make it very leapy, I would just say, consider doing that in instrumental music and don't consider that your singer is going to be able to keep up with a melody like that. So that's it for this class on narrow versus wide melodies. It's a simple one. I've given you a great framework to work within. If for some reason, your melody isn't work take a look at how narrow it is and how wide it is and how often you're doing these leaps and how fast your notes are playing. These are all things to consider. And although it's a simple concept, I'd recommend go through this class a couple of extra times because I think this is something that slips through the cracks, and a lot of beginner melody writers might overlook. In our next class, we're going to talk about straight versus swung melodies. I'll see you there. 11. Straight vs Swung: All right, let's get talking about straight versus swung melodies. First of all, do you know what a straight rhythm is? Do you know what a swung rhythm is? And if you do, do you know what styles should generally be played straight and which ones should be played swung? These are the sort of things we're going to talk about in this class. Let's jump in. So if you don't know what a straight rhythm is versus a swung rhythm, allow me to demonstrate in one of the easiest ways with clapping. A straight rhythm would be something like one and two, and three and four end. Notice the numbers are louder than the s one and two and three and four end. When we swing, we elongate the numbers and we shorten the s. The ratio is basically two thirds to one third, but swing can be adjusted accordingly from there. So we end up getting something like one and two, and three and four and. Also notice the ands are louder than the numbers one and two, and three and four, and. These two things the rhythmic adjustment and the way we accent, which notes are played louder, make up the fundamentals of what swing is. Now, in terms of applying groove or swing with Ableton, there's tons of variations. We can have the Jdilla drunk beat sort of feel MPE swing. But at the end of the day, we're talking about melodies and how you can get comfortable playing or programming in those melodies. We will also play around with the groove pool, but I wanted to make sure to mention that straight up the gate. We will also play around with the groove pool, but it's not something we're going to start with. Now, whether your melody should be straight or swung is style dependent. For example, in jazz, the drum beats. Is swung. So we want to make sure that all the other instrumental elements are also swung. It'll sound quite bad if your drumbeat is swung, but you're playing a straight melody or vice versa. So it's kind of agreed upon that the whole band is playing together either in a straight rhythm or a swung rhythm. Now, if you have heavy swing or light swing, how much you adjust that two thirds, one third. Again, that's something the whole band would lock into. If it's something like one and two, and three, and four, and that's a pretty heavy swing. Alternatively, you might have something like one and two, and three, and four and. That's a pretty light swing. It's almost 50 50. But generally, you want to be thinking like, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, where the one, two is light, and the three is more heavy. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. So we're going to kind of go into the deep oceans here. We're going to create a melody that starts on a G. And I'm going to take off scale mode. We don't want to see any purple for right now. We're starting to get a bit more confident, hopefully, with our note choices. I'm not saying by the end of this course or by this point you should be, but let's say you've been doing this for a bit and you're getting more confident, turn those off as soon as you can. It's like a crutch. You don't want to use a crutch after your leg has healed. Put them in the closet, build the strength. In this case, the strength I'm talking about is your music theory, knowledge. So for now, what I'm going to do is create a melody that uses a straight rhythm. This melody is not going to be anything fantastic. It's mostly just going to sort of work up and down through the notes within our scale, maybe with one note holding a bit. So we have something like, nan two, three, and four, and one. Now, something to keep in mind is that you are not playing straight or swung if you're only playing downbeats. Like this, one, two, three, four. Although it sounds pretty straight, everything is very equal. The swing happens on the s, right? So if our drum beat is just boom, boom, boom, boom. You could play straight eighth notes over that or swung eighth notes. So what I'm going to do is it's a little bit sneaky, but I'm just going to and I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, but I'm going to mute this little part here, which is sort of on the fourth 16th note. And as a result of that, we're going to end up getting a much more straight ahead sort of drumbeat, and we'll do that for this back half, as well. Now, the drums sound like this. Okay, there's still an extra litt sound in there. So again, we might even want to get more granular, just to really make sure that I drive the point home that if your drums are straight, your melody should be straight. If your drums are swung, your melody should be swung. We're getting rid of any straight or swung elements from the drums so that I can demonstrate the swung melody in this sort of realm. So it sounds like this. Fine. Just a kick. That's fine for now. I just didn't want to give you a straight drum beat and play a swung melody over top. I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I did that. So what we're going to do now to make this melody swing outside of if you could just play it, like, if you could play something like Then, great. Play it swung. But for now, let's assume that you don't have any keyboard abilities and you're hoping to program everything with the pencil. What I would recommend is you go to the triplet grid. You're going to right click and go Triplet grid, and then you're going to set. It's hard to see, but it's up over this way. So take a look. You're going to set this 64th note triplet to eighth note triplets. And look at how much that makes this grid so much chunkier. We can see the two thirds and the one third very clearly in this spot. Boom, boom, and then there's our next note. Same thing here. We will adjust, same thing here. And we'll do that for each of these notes. And then after you can already tell this is going to swing. Let's check it out. It's quite swung, right? But you can take this and adjust it, so it's a little off or a little bit late on this end to create some pretty extreme swing. And this more extreme swing is actually pretty common from, like, 90s dance music that tick tick tack titi tack tick, tick, tick tack Sort of, like, save by the bell and I don't know, like just really old 80s and into the 90s sort of swing. Very overpronounced, maybe a bit of a pushback to the more basic swing of jazz. But you can see here we're thinking two thirds of a beat, one third of a beat. If you wanted to be more accurate, you would also pull up this and to be a bit louder. Now, this particular synth is not velocity sensitive. It doesn't matter how high or low I put these, it'll always be the same volume. But if you're working with something like a Wurlitzer or Rhodes, all of these short notes, and you can just hold Shift and select them all. If you hold Alt over one of them, you're going to click and drag up, and then you can adjust those s, those offbeats, so they're a bit louder. If the main ones are too loud, again, select all these long downbeat notes. Shift click, hold Alt, and then you can drag down. But again, this synth is not velocity sensitive, so it doesn't quite work with this. If I pull it up to chords, we'd have, you can really hear that some heavy swing. So from there, you might want to adjust accordingly and find that sweet spot that works for you. So something like jazz, soul, neo-soul, hip hop, these are going to be styles that are going to be traditionally swung. Something like disco or funk, you might assume is swung because it's quite groovy, but the swing is pretty subtle. When you get into pop music, it's mostly straight, but sometimes it's influenced enough from another swung genre that it is a bit swung. Rock is going to be straight almost 100% of the time, classical music, same sort of idea. So you want to make sure that you're considering what style am I trying to compose Produce? And is it swung? If so, how heavy does that swing feel? Even something like the pentatonic scale, something like if I play this straight versus swung, I want you to tell me, can you tell the nationality for both of these? Like, how is it changing in terms of the region of music that you're thinking of in your mind? Check it out, something like. Let's try it a bit differently with swing this time. The first way sounds a bit more like traditional Asian music, whereas the second way is going to feel a little bit more like an Irish jig. So even with the same set of notes, whether you are swinging or not is going to determine the style that you're playing. Now, I'm not saying you can't play hip hop straight, and I'm not saying you can't take an approach to classical that feels a bit more swung. In fact, in classical music, when you get into 68, one, two, three, four, five, six, now you're on a grid that could work quite well to swing or to emulate swing. But the big difference here is that swinging is when you're looking at two eighth notes, you're not reading them as equal. So usually when you see two eighth notes, it's one and two, and three and four in little pairs. One end, two end, three, four end. You would know this if you were a jazz musician, but when you see two eighth notes paired over and over in jazz, you don't read at one and two. You read it one and two. So the swing is implied within those eighth notes. Whereas this classical example in 68, it's not technically swung. It is quite literally one, two, three, four, five, six, in terms of how they're thinking of those rhythms. Also, the upbeat, the As are not accented. In classical, it would still be accenting the more downbeats. In this case, one and four, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. The equivalent in jazz or a swung genre would be one, two, three, four, five, six. The third beat of each of those smaller groups of threes would be the accented beat. So now that our drums are pretty neutral. So now that our drums are pretty neutral, let's come up with a straight and a swung part on this first half of the song. It doesn't work on the second half because I'm not swinging these notes when I'm playing this inchin gen chin chin chin chin. On the chords, if I set it to triplet mode, though, I could now adjust that. It would sound like this. Right? So it's gonna be a little bit more swung. But we're not trying to develop a whole song here. Again, I'm just giving examples. So we're going to work with the first half where we're just holding chords. Let's play a straight melody, which I've done plenty of already, but I'll do a straight melody, and then I'll do a swing melody. Alright, check it out. Something like this in one, two, three, four. Pretty straight ahead. I use the pentatonic scale, similar to what I did in the Irish jig sort of example from earlier. Here's a good example of a question and an answer, so there's the question, and there's the answer a bit more resolved. If I was to take that same sort of concept, maybe not the exact same notes, but played swung, it would sound like this in one, two, three, four. Again, different notes, but same scale, the G minor pentatonic scale, and now it sounds like this. The swing could be cleaned up a bit. Don't go and quantize right away because you can see that each beat is broken into quarters. We want to break it into thirds, which is, again, the triplet grid. And I generally recommend that you're on eighth note triplet grid if your melody isn't super fast. So if you want to correct things by hand, this is how you would go about it within this view. But of course, if you go right click quantize settings or just go over into the transform section on the left side over here, you can also set the triplet grid with this little button, eighth note triplets. Now, when I go select all and quantize, it's quantizing to that grid. Let's give it a listen. So, which one did you like more? Did you prefer the straight melody or the swung melody? That might tell you what sort of styles you might want to investigate further in terms of the styles that you might want to produce. If you like the swung melody more, check out hip hop. Check out jazz, check out R&B and Soul. If you like the straight version more, maybe pop, rock or classical is more for you. Lastly, what we're going to do is use the groove pool to create some swing. I'm actually just going to edit undo until we get back to the straight version. I'm going to reset the quantization. So it's on 16th notes and not triplet. It sounds like this. Let's now apply some swing to these notes. We're first going to do it on the back end, and then we're going to do it on the front end where you can visually see the swing. Allow me to explain. So you can go up to the left side here, and you're going to be looking for grooves. And when you select grooves, I'm going to recommend most of the time that you go with MPC grooves. You can see right up here, it says MPC swing and what we're swinging on right now is an eighth note grid. Do you see that this, for example, is one EN. It's our main beat broken up into four, but we're usually not playing any notes on this second or this fourth little square. It's always the first two or the last two, the one or the or in this case, the four and the, whatever beat you're on. So really, we want to be thinking of this as eighth notes in terms of swing because we're only playing eighth notes. Why this is important is looking over on the left side, you'll notice there's swing MPC eighth and swing MPC 16th. One EN to two ENa three ENa four Eanda, one and two, and three and four end. So we're going to take 64, which will have some pretty solid effect. Think of 54 as the least swing and think of what's our highest 74 as the most swing. 64 is somewhere in the middle but pretty noticeable. Now, there's three main spots that you can your groove or in this case, swing once you found the one that you want to play around with. Again, you can feel free to click them and just listen to the swing until it feels like it's swinging the way you wanted to. You can drag it onto the MIDI information itself. You can drag it down to the groove area, which is along the left side of the MIDI information. And once you've dragged it to either of those two spots, if you couldn't already see this groove pool, it now becomes available, but you will usually be able to see this. And that's another place you can drag your grooves too. Can have multiple grooves and then select between them to see which one you like the most. Or if you found one that you like, and then later you decide you like another one more, just drag the other one over top of that first one, and it will replace any elements within your song that utilize that groove. So, in this case, we've brought in MPC 3,864. Again, a pretty noticeable swing. Let's listen to this melody with the now applied swing. So you can hear on these eighth notes that are happening, they're not straight. It's not da, da, da, da, it's d, d d, d, right? We have that swing happening. But are we seeing the swing in the MIDI information? No, we're just hearing it on the back end. It's being played as though it's swung, but we're seeing it straight. This is how that sheet music example that I mentioned earlier works. You see straight eighth notes on the page, but you play them swung based on some instruction that they will give you on the page. Like, they'll say, play your eighth notes swung, that sort of idea. Now, what's really cool is you can also see these changes if just above this little groove area, you select this arrow. This is the Commit button, and when you click it, I want you to watch what happens to all this MIDI information here. I'm going to click it and boom, there's some adjusting. Look at this. This got adjusted over a little bit. This one got adjusted over a bit, so it's not right on that grid. Now, if I turn on triplet grid, take a look. Is this exactly on the line of the triplet? No, it's not. So that tells me that 64 is still not as swung as a standard triplet grid. Now, something to note is that once you do commit the groove, you'll notice that it's out of this little groove selection tool at this point because they don't want you adding swing on top of swing on top of swing. It gets confusing. Always make sure you're starting from a point of a straight rhythm, and then try applying different swings to that straight rhythm. If the swing doesn't work, undo and try different one. If that doesn't work, undo and try a different one. But what you'll notice is that even on the triplet grid, these notes that are being swung are not perfectly on the grid. So, in other words, 64 as a groove is not perfectly on a triplet grid in terms of swing. It's a bit lighter. Let's undo so we have our swing available again, and let's try 68 and then try applying it. Ooh, 68 is a little bit of an overshoot. But again, it's about that two thirds of the way through the beat sort of mark. I kind of like that one is in front a little bit, one is behind a bit, 'cause it's easy for me to do it by hand so that everything is right on the grid. But as humans, we're not perfect. So it's pretty common for us to play on one side or the other side of that beat, as opposed to perfectly on the grid. So you've learned that straight rhythms, one and two, and three and four and accent down beats, and everything is broken up into halfs of a beat. Swing is generally one and two and three, and four and. We're accenting the ands or the upbeats, and we're playing about two thirds of a beat, one third of a beat. What you choose in terms of swung or straight will be style dependent. So you want to make sure that before you start producing, you have an idea if you want to swing your rhythm. Now, one other thing I want to mention is let's go back to our basic drumbeat that we had before, understanding that it sounds almost a bit swung. I don't know that technically it is. Now, as a final point, one more time. We're gonna go back up to a full drumbeat. This time it's swung. Give it a listen. Jack, chip, Jack, chick, jack, chi, jack, check, Jack, chick chat. It's not a perfectly straight drum beat. You can see quite often, you can see some of these notes or these you can see some of these drum hits are not perfectly squared up on the beat. Some of them are like our main downbeats, but it's a little bit swung. It's a little bit groovy. So what I'm going to do is extract the groove from this drum beat. You can do that by clicking down here within this sort of dissected version of the drumbeat or up along this yellow bar, in this case, this top part of the clip, right click on either of those spots, and you're going to select extract. From there, it's going analyze the loop and say, Is there any swing happening? And if so, how is the swing laid out? Boom, we now have a new algorithm over here that we can apply to our melody. We could try it on the harmony, as well, too. I don't think it's going to do very much, but we can apply it there. And then we can apply it over here as well, too. And again, we're looking for this groove area and down to this HKDRM 125. That's the name of the drum beat in case you didn't notice. Now, it should sound pretty locked in with the melody and harmony because everything is working on the same groove. So if you have a loop and there's a groove built into it and you're like, I'm not sure which algorithm I should choose from my swing algorithms, just extract the groove from the beat itself and then apply it to the other parts. It sounds something like this. Now, the swing is really light, but I can tell that things feel pretty locked in. So this is something that you can play around with depending on how much groove you have within your drum beat. If you're not even sure if your drum beat is swinging or not, extract the groove anyway. Apply it to your straight MIDI data. If there was no swing, it won't apply any. If there was, then it will. So it's kind of like really low stakes, one way or another, extract the groove and feel free to use that groove. Where you want to use the groove pool or the swing algorithms in Ableton is if you're doing everything by hand, let's say you're the one creating these loops, then you would go ahead and try things out that. Generally with swing, I don't recommend penciling everything in. I'd say either play it in with swing or play it in straight and then apply some sort of a groove to that. Also, also, if you go over to grooves one more time, you'll also notice there's a genre button up at the top, dance hall, disco, funk, hip hop. So depending on the style that you're creating, there's going to be some swing algorithms associated with those genres. I mentioned that disco and funk don't always swing a lot, but they can. They're kind of versatile that way, especially disco. Disco is very often straight, but it does dip into some swing territory quite a bit, as well, too. That's it for this class on straight versus swung melodies, consider the genre that you are applying all of this to. Make sure that you understand the idea that straight beats will have accented downbeats, one, two, three, four, and swung beats will generally have accented upbeats, the of one, two, three and four. Straight is like half of a beat, half of a beat. Swung is around two thirds, one third, but that can get adjusted based on how swung you want it to feel. More and more of these days, I find myself applying swing, even a tiny bit to my productions. They tend to add a little bit more groove and a little bit more of a humanized sort of feel. I hope you had fun in this class. In our next class, we're going to talk about an astonado based melody. I'll see you there. 12. Ostinato Based Melodies: Next up, let's talk about creating an astonato based melody. An astonato you can think of as a sort of bass part in Latin music is quite often where this comes from. I sort of do do do, do dude, dd do dog, do do do do dog doo. It works like a melody, but it also works a bit like a riff. It is singable, but it's very much lupable and repeated. It's sort of like choruses that have a repeated chant. Is it an ostinato? Is it more just short phrasing in a chorus? It becomes a bit of gray either way, we're going to talk about creating an astonato based melody. Now, these are some of my favorite melodies to create because they're very lupb and they work really well in electronic music. Let's say I take a synth and create a melody that's astonato based. It might sound something like this in, one, two, three, four. And it might just be that repeated. We could apply filtering or other things over time so that we end up getting something like this, but we can find ways to shape the melody or in this case, the ostinato. Can you sing it? Sure, it's singable. It doesn't have to be singable, though. O sonados can also leap around quite a bit, and you can play around with things that way as well, too, because it's repeated so much, although it's difficult for us to sing it in our heads. If it happens enough times, it gets a little bit easier. Maybe something like this, one, two, three, four. So let's duplicate that, and again, we'll use our little filtering trick so that it sounds something like this. So you can think of it like a if, and it works really well in electronic music, but it doesn't have to be necessarily narrow. You can be quite wide with these melodies as well, too. Of course, ostinatos can also be straight or swung. We could take the same groove that we have here, and in the last class, we actually extracted that groove, this HK DRM 125. Let's apply it and see if we can hear much of a difference. But first, I want to quantize the information I have so that the swing is properly being applied to this cleaned up midi information. It sounds like this. The swing is very subtle, whatever we took from this drum beat in terms of extracting that groove. But we can hear that the drums and this instrumental part lock in very well. Now, everything I've played for the most part has been kind of equal note values. You don't need to have all equal note values. You could have something like this, three, four. You'll notice at the very end, I changed things again. It's really common in music to have an idea, repeat it, repeat it, and then change it. Again, we're going to quantize, Bush, and we will add the groove. Let's check it out. This last part is probably going to sound kind of crazy, but we'll give it a try. Even with the leaps, it sounds fine because really what we're hearing is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Dee. Right? These low notes down here feel more like a bass part. They feel a bit disconnected from the melody. Up here, we have what feels like little melodic fragments, but everything is sort of working together. It's like the bass part and the upper notes are all working together. Now, if you do want to add a bass part to this, you need to make sure that your ostinato leaves space for that. Maybe you filter out some low frequencies or maybe you do something like take all these low notes and bring them up in octave. It's gonna sound different, but it might work. It sounds like this. Now, you'll notice that this note here got eliminated. It's because as this note gets pulled up, it slightly overlaps. So you might have to clean things up just a little bit to make sure that you're not getting those overlaps before you go ahead, take the information and bring it up the octave. So just be cascious that you're not overlapping the midi in such a way that it gets rid of some notes. It. It's an ostinato based melody. There's really I mean, it's Pandora's box. It's wide open. Anything goes for the most part with electronic music, especially when you're repeating these little four beat or eight beat loops, even if they're not fantastic, you repeat them enough. Eventually, it legitimizes the sound of that loop. It could be laser sounds. It could just be distorted garbage, whatever it might be. By the way, I love distorted garbagey sort of parts. Anything grimy with lots of distortion. I love that. But that being said, you can get away with a lot when it comes to these ostinatos. So we're not always trying to create the next Phantom of the Opera melody or whatever it might be. Sometimes it just wants to be simple. It doesn't always have to be complex. These are some of my favorite things to play because I just get to riff around and play on the keys. And depending on the sort of preset that you choose, it'll change the type of Ostenato that you play. When I hit a key, do I hear sound immediately? If so, I can be nimble with the way I play my Astanato. But if the sound slowly evolves over time, then I'm kind of forced to play slower parts. If I play too fast, no sound ever gets to be evolved enough to even be heard. So you can let the preset that you choose or the sound design that you've done sort of dictate how the astonao is going to work best. So that's it for this class on astonao style melodies. In our next class, we're going to talk about creating a melody within your comfort zone. We've gone over a lot of different techniques, a lot of different concepts. I want to make sure that whatever you apply at the end of the day is something that you can get working on straightaway, something that you're comfortable with, we're going to have a whole class on that coming up. I'll see you there. 13. Melodic Comfort Zone: For this last class, we're just going to talk like this. We don't need to be in Abelton right now because we're going to talk about you composing within your melodic comfort zone. First of all, I would ask, Are you a good keys player? If you are, try to play more of your melodies on the keys and get away from penciling everything in. The main reason I say this has to do with touch, how loud you play each note. When you're penciling in midi information, everything will be the same velocity, the same volume. And you can change the velocities. To have the intuitive knowledge of how to change them and which should be loud and which should be quiet, it's probably going to create a lot of trial and error on your end. So do try to play some melodies on the piano. If you're not a good pianist or keyboard player, then keep them simple and make it your goal over time to expand the complexity of your melodies. Get influenced by other keyboard players, other singers, other saxophonist, whoever it might be, someone that you are influenced by their melody writing and try to slowly over time, either transcribe or emulate their sound. By transcribe, I mean, literally write out their solos and try to play them the same way. And by emulate, I mean, just listen and try your best to copy their style. So, in short, keep your melodies simple, but practice outside of your comfort zone so that when you're back into a production, you're able to apply some of what you've practiced. Now, over time, your melodic complexity may grow, but it doesn't have to. There's no reason to play fast and flashy. If you want to keep it simple, keep it simple. But your fingers at the keys, the more you play, the more nimble they're going to be and you'll be able to play some faster passages or wider sort of arpeggios or leaps, if you so choose. But again, your complexity can have the potential to grow, but it depends on the style that you're choosing to produce and if you even want to grow that complexity. For me, I kind of had a bell curve of I started off as a simple player. I got overly complex, and then dialed it back in. If I had known then what I know now, I would have maybe just kept my melodies a bit more simple and focused on improving other areas of my production. But at the end of the day, I didn't know that I didn't want complex melodies until I started to play more complex melodies. I like astonados. I like loops. They work well in electronic music and hip hop, which are two of the styles that I like to produce. But when I'm doing an orchestral passage and I need a violin to be doing some flashy run over top, something sort of melodic based, I'm happy that I'm able to tap into some of that more complex melody write here and there when I do need to use it. So figure out what style you want to perform. Write the melody writing out of ten in terms of complexity and try to find your own playing within that sweet spot. If it's an eight out of ten or a seven out of ten, but you're a three out of ten player, practice so that you expand your level more and more towards whatever level of complexity it is that you're aiming for. In other words, produce in your melodic comfort zone, but practice slightly outside of it to help you improve in the low stakes environment of your practice. So that's it for this course on melodic Concepts and music production. We are going to have an outtro video where I will give you a proper goodbye, but I just want to say if you made it this far, congratulations. I hope that your melody writing improves and that you picked up tons of little tidbits of information that will help you move forward as a producer. It's been a pleasure as always. I'll catch you in the outtro video. 14. Outro: Thank you for taking this course on melodic Concepts within music production. By now, you should have a pretty strong idea as to what approach you want to take when you're creating melodies for your own productions. Again, these techniques should span over many different styles. So make sure that you're listening to a lot of the style that you want to produce and see how these techniques are being implemented within that style. Apply each of these techniques many times so that it becomes second nature. And you're not thinking so much about rhythmic density or wide versus narrow leaps or straight versus swung, but rather you have a good understanding of what is needed for that particular production, and you're not overthinking the theory, you're just feeling out the melody, which is where I think we all want to get to as producers or as performers. But at the end of the day, it takes practice and, of course, some good instruction to help you get there. Don't forget there is a class project for this course. All the details are outlined within the class for this project. So make sure you check it out, make sure that you submit a project so that we can connect a bit, and I can give you some feedback as to not only how you did with the project, but also give you a strong understanding of what sort of tricks and techniques you're using within your own melody writing to help you see what your melodic writing style is as a producer. Also, you deserve a big congratulations on getting through this course. It wasn't necessarily simple. There was a lot of theory along the way. But even just in taking this course, you're showing yourself that you're taking music production very seriously and really trying to turn over every rock along the way to make sure that you understand all the components that are needed to make you a great producer. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. One more time, I want to say thank you for taking this course, and again, congratulations. If you have any course suggestions, hit me up, let me know. This was a pleasure. I'll catch you in the next course.