Ableton Forum

Happy new year to y'all Live users!
I realize I have the same problem every time I start a track. I make a great drum section. A great bassline when I'm lucky. But then, all I do is try to add other instruments playing the keyboard, and all I produce is naive melodies. Whereas my stuff should be about sound, not melodies, and especially naive melodies! How do you avoid that? How do you start building a track?

Thanks for your help.

Spend more time on your synth, get to know it better, learn how it reacts to you and what all those knobs do, talk to it, take it out for drinks and a film... err. Well. You know. Make friends with it, then it'll come.

Maybe learn to play some songs you like and then just nick stuff?

Naivity is a positive word IMO, BTW:)

Ahhhh the eternal question... how do you right good music.
If I would suggest one thing, it would be to add a chord
track that goes with your bass line. That way when you start
looking for melodic lines, the chord track will keep you in
the right neighborhood. You can always pick from the notes
with in that chord Also when in doubt on where a melodic
line should go, pause then start again either up a third or
down a fourth.

Always, always, always... try and be mindful of what notes you play for your baseline... then you need to try and determine what chord space you might like to play with.

Don't forget to play the black notes sometimes... don't be afraid to tweak parameters on your synth *while* you are playing... if you are stuck for ideas... you can always record whatever 'poor' melody you come up with and run it through the randomizer... don't forget to play with the velocity too.

If you get totally stuck... you can just play say for example c major chords of c, c, e, g... and run the chords through an arp... play with arp settings and see what you come up with. Record those on a seperate midi track... now you can do fun things like transpose notes, extend or shrink sections... whatever.

If you've got the time... you can always do a search on google for midi files... download those and rip out the parts you find most interesting... sometimes running them through the scale can produce interesting results as it tweaks the track subtlely...

Just don't forget... have fun!

At the expense of sounding trite. How about writing you naive melody, redering it, then drop it back in and reverse the clip, or chop it up, or run it through grain delay, or beat repeat or.......

i've been taking jazz piano for about a year and a half and so am always beating my head against this issue when trying to improvise

some things to work on:

1- learning what scales are used over what chord structures

2- copying playing of artists/songs you like (vocabulary building) ( you will find yourself playing things you probably never would when just noodling around, because they are often physically challenging to play, i.e. tricky fingering, big interval jumps, etc)

3- transposing ideas you've come up with or copied into different keys/scales

4- ear training and learning to play what you hear in your head (most difficult for me - not even close at this point!)

5- practice practice practice to make the physical challenge of playing things as small as possible

6- have fun

also, if you've found some notes which work over a part, but sound corny playing as a melody by a single instrument, maybe try splitting those notes around over two or three instruments - each playing only a few of those notes. and playing with the rhythm/arrangement of the notes?

or, see what throwing some of the live midi effects does, like random sent through the appropriate scale?

noisetonepause wrote:Maybe learn to play some songs you like and then just nick stuff?

Lots of good advice here, most of which I've used, but this is one I definitely lean on from time to time. Learn a famous melody, or at least one that you like, then change it, make it your own. Drop parts, add parts, change note order, key, tempo, voicing, whatever. By the time you're done it'll very likely bear no resemblance to the original (a good thing!), but the inspiration has worked its magic.

noisetonepause wrote:Naivity is a positive word IMO, BTW:)

Agreed!

Reverse engineering... If you're not getting where you want with your current method, start over.

It's harder to do, but to me melody is everything. Even minimal melody buried in an insane beat + freakout driven song, melody is still everything. It's what distinguishes that song from every other song there is.

What I would suggest is to write the melody first.

Easy enough to say, huh? One way to go about this is to listen to yourself. Melodies may be lurking around your brain and you may just be missing or dismissing them. They'll pop up in the oddest places, getting on the bus on your way into work, flashing in your mind as you grab a pan to cook dinner. They're easy to miss because they are so utterly simple in essence. So pay closer attention to your own head.

Another way to write melodies is to find them in lyrics. Even if your music is instrumental, you can still uncover endless melodies in words. Vowels and consonants become little songs when placed in a specific order. Again, these melodies are slight and quiet and easy to miss, so look at and listen to your words closely.

The advice about nicking melodies is good advice. Being inspired by another piece of music is what most music is made up of anyhow. You can take something you like from another song and rework it into your own. You know you've done it right when you finish a song and have no idea how the melody could have been inspired by the original song because the end result is so different.

Fidn a cd with recording song you love and take idea. This is how every body does the music

radeon wrote:Fidn a cd with recording song you love and take idea. This is how every body does the music

Oh yeah ?
The DJ culture, certainly... Just buy a copy of Ableton Live and that's it !
Well, I'll be clear and honest, I really love some of the DJ stuff, but to become a musician, all you have to do is to learn how to do it. Class, lessons, all that stuff. Did you hear about practicing ? Making good music takes time (I'm not talking about making big bucks) and learning how to play an instrument takes hard work. It's not like on TV : just do it ! Be yourself ! Become a star in one week just cos' you want it ! The world is yours... and all that crap.

I wanted to throw in that what is cheese really depends on where you stand, and what you like. I would say listen to stuff that does not sound cheesey TO YOU and try to emaulate it.

You'll never exactly copy it anyway, and then you can mould it and make it yours. One more thing is that a track has to take it's own course, because good music magically comes through you, not out of you thinking it up.

...

whats wrong with niave melodies?

if it sounds good, then fuck it

mosca

I'm with mosca... a melody is only naive if it doesn't work in context.. plus, you can always add to it, embelish, the sky's the limit... that's the beauty of recording. Great tips in this thread.. best i can give is keep playing with it, and try to follow the chord progression... cheers.

get 'the idiot guides to music' , its not expensive. get a book on 'counterpoint' too.

then who cares about the naive melody...i like naive melodys if you've got some crazy percussion and sound textures going on , you need something simple...as mortar