Do many people have a load of backing tracks but currently without the great melodies you intend? I have way too many. I generally want the chords to dictate the melody and not vice versa. For me the melody does have centre stage, but is there primarily to highlight the harmonic content. I'm guessing a lot of people write like this...does anyone else find melody a bit of a stumbling block?
Anyway, I thought it would be good to share some methods for writing melody. Here's a couple of trial and error methods I use to get melodic inspiration...
guitar
- record the progression and loop it back
- record improv over the top a bunch of times
- cut out all of the decent phrases to create a load of scattered melodic fragments
- even out the chunks to the nearest division of the bar
- drag them to their appropriate places within one or two loops of the progression
- hopefully you should be left with some very nice longer phrases you can tweak and adapt
keyboard
A
- record the progression and loop it back
- transpose a track to put the key scale on the white keys
- continue from point 2 above
B
- record the progression and loop it back
- think of some vocal melody from any old corny pop song
- record the phrasing only (midi)
- alter the notes in your sequencer according to the progression
- (generally speaking, I always seem get good and original sounding results by ripping off phrasing when improvising with any instrument.)
sing
- record the progression and loop it back
- set up a vocal track with an automatic tuner plugin and set everything to 11
(if your singing voice is anything like mine) - Limit the notes as constricively as you want...it's sometimes very interesting to limit notes to just 3, 4 or 5.
- continue from point 2 above
- make sure you delete the original takes, ha
Anyone used any of these methods before? Got any others?