Hello, I’m Michael B from trackinSolo.com. Today, I’m thrilled to share a musical hack that revolutionized my process of creating chord progressions directly from melodies. This journey unfolds in my home studio, surrounded by the tools of my trade: a template loaded with my essential drum patterns, bass, pads, plucks, and, of course, melodies. This setup is my musical canvas, where creativity meets harmony.
Video Takeaway
Discovering a Melodic Blueprint
My adventure into chord creation began with a simple melody, a gift from the innovative Dope Loop AI. This melody, rich with variation, presented itself in three distinct forms. The most intriguing aspect for me was its ability to hint at a chord progression, purely based on its notes. This was my lightbulb moment: if a melody contains at least three different notes, it could potentially sketch out a chord. The realization that melodies could guide chord progressions was both liberating and inspiring.
The Experimentation Begins
Armed with my melody, I embarked on an experiment to craft chords that resonate with its essence. Starting in the comforting simplicity of C major/A minor — the all-white keys on my keyboard — allowed me to focus purely on creativity, without the constraints of complex music theory. My method was straightforward: duplicate the melody onto my pad channel and transform each note into a chord, aiming to create a harmonious bed for my melody to lie on.
The First Draft
The initial phase involved simplifying the melody to its core elements, creating a chord for each bar. This simplification process was not just about reducing complexity but about finding the essence of the melody that could translate into a compelling chord progression. Listening back to these chords, I found a sound that, while basic, provided a solid foundation to build upon.
Fine-Tuning and Variation
As I refined my chords, my aim was to not only support the melody but to enrich it. This led me to experiment with ascending and descending chord progressions, adding emotional depth and narrative to the music. The process was a dance between melody and harmony, each step bringing me closer to a sound that felt both cohesive and expressive.
The Revelation
The most transformative part of this journey was realizing that chords and melodies are intimately connected. By allowing the melody to inform my chord progressions, I found a new way of composing that felt both intuitive and innovative. This approach led to a chord progression that was not only harmonically sound but also perfectly aligned with the emotional contour of the melody.
Conclusion
In the end, this exploration was more than just a technical exercise; it was a journey into the heart of music composition. The hack I discovered — using melodies as a blueprint for chord progressions — has become a cornerstone of my creative process. It’s a method that encourages experimentation, embraces simplicity, and ultimately, unlocks a world of musical possibilities.
To my fellow musicians and producers: I encourage you to try this approach. Let your melodies guide you, experiment with your chord progressions, and most importantly, enjoy the process. Who knows what beautiful music you’ll discover along the way?
If this exploration has inspired or helped you in any way, I’d love to hear about it. And remember, the journey of music is endless, filled with lessons and discoveries at every turn. Let’s continue to explore, create, and share. Until next time, keep making music that moves you.
Full Video Transcripts
Hello, I’m Michael B. from Trackinsolo.com. In this video, I’m going to show you a hack that I use for coming up with chord progressions based on the melody. Let’s get started. I have my template open here that I use whenever I start a song. It has my drums, a snare, and everything I need as far as percussion goes. I have a bass, a pad, and plucks, and a melody. That’s usually what I always start out with.
In the last video, I used Dope Loop AI to come up with a melody. As it turns out, I actually used two melodies. One melody was short in duration, so I decided to use that as my plucks. I have three versions of the exact same melody down here. The first one, I took out the second and the fourth bar to add a little variation to that melody. This one right here, I just took out the fourth bar. And this one right here is the full melody that I got out of Dope Loop AI.
So, my hack is basically, if you have a melody that has at least three different notes, then you can make a chord out of that. Even if you don’t, you could add chords or add notes to the notes that you do have in your melody yourself. It helps if you’re using a melody, a MIDI note generator, that you have at least three notes, three different notes, so you can come up with a chord very easily. But the whole idea of this hack is to use those notes to build the chord. Get something that you can listen to, and in a lot of cases, I end up keeping that chord progression because it sounds good, it supports the song, and I roll with it. Other times, I will play around with what I come up with.
The whole idea here is to use the notes in the melody to come up with at least a draft of what the chord progression is that you’re going to use for the song. So this down here, as I said before, this is the actual full melody. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to go ahead and duplicate it and then I’m going to drop it in my pad section in my template. Just like all the songs that when I start a song, they’re always in a minor C major because it’s all the white keys on the piano or on the keyboard. The reason why I like to do that is because when I’m making music, I don’t want to have to think about music theory. It could take a couple of minutes for me to figure out if a note is out of key or if it’s not in key, but this is just so much easier because I can glance at the keyboard, I know that it’s in that key, and if for whatever reason I want to change the key later, then I can just transpose it into that key. But during the composition and most of the time in the arrangement of the song, what I’ll do is I always start out in that key.
Here’s where I started. I have the full melody right here, and this is just a very simple hack just to get something together that we can listen to. Let’s spread this out a little bit so you can see it better. Okay, here are the individual notes, and this is really simple. Basically, what I do is I take each one of these notes and I make a chord out of it. So, as you can see right here, these are both of these notes are the same notes, so I’m going to go ahead and delete that. All three of these are the same notes. Basically, what I’m trying to do first is, I want to build one chord for each bar. That’s it. That’s the starting point. If I want to change it up later, I’ll change it up later, but the idea again is just to get a chord progression down that you can listen to and if you like it, keep it; if not, make whatever changes to that. But this is a real simple way to get a chord progression together very quickly.
Okay, so all of these three notes or four notes are the same, so I’m going to delete each one of these. These two are the same, so I’m going to get rid of that. These two are the same, get rid of that; these three are the same, get rid of that and get rid of that. I’m just going to come up to my quantize to make things a lot easier, so then this way, it’ll snap to the beginning of the bar. So, we’ll move that there, move this here, and remove this here. The same goes with this, snap that right there. Whoops, snap that right there. Snap pops, yeah. Let’s do this, spread it out a little bit. No, actually, let’s not do that after all because I can’t grab this thing. Let’s go.
Okay, so now what I want to do is, I want to make each of these into a chord that essentially takes up most of the bar, with a little bit of space because there is a release on this pad. So, after you let off the key, or after the MIDI lets off the key, there’s still going to be a little bit of a tail to that chord. So, I just highlighted everything. I’m going to stretch it out, and back here, let’s do this. I’m going to change my quantize so this will snap right into place. I’m going to go with one 32nd quantize, so this will give me the ability to actually… that’s not going to work. Oh, because I’m back to one up here. Okay, this will give me a little bit of room, and then what I’ll have to do is do some of these individually, quickly, as we want all these to be the same length, roughly. We’ll do this one next. Actually, we can do both of these together.
Okay, now it doesn’t look like much right? I mean, there are only real changes here and here, but let’s listen to it anyway because sometimes something like this, that looks sort of unusual, sometimes this will work. Okay, the other thing I want to do is I just want to check my velocity, and my velocity is at 80%. I’ve noticed when you download the MIDI files off Dope Loop AI, they all come back at a 50% velocity, which makes everything sound a little bit dull because when you’re working with velocity, it’s not only the loudness or the volume of the notes, but there’s a little more presence to it when you use a higher velocity as opposed to a lower velocity. Let’s go ahead and listen to this anyway. I’m just going to go ahead and solo it out, and then we’re going to listen to this by itself with pad.
It actually doesn’t sound too bad if you’re not looking for a lot of movement with your chord progression. So, this is where having a template set up is nice because now what I’m going to do is, I’m going to listen to it with drums and I’m going to listen to it with bass, and let’s go ahead and play it to see how that sounds. See, now that doesn’t sound bad. Next, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to play it with the plucks, and then I’m going to bring the melody in after that so you can get an idea again of how chords that you just came up with, and you saw how quickly I came up with them without even having to listen to them or even have to think about putting a chord progression together, and of chords aren’t that important to you, but you want something that’s sort of interesting in the background, at times then, as you could see right here, this was super simple to do. So, I’m going to play it with the melody and the plucks first. It’s going to be with the plucks, and I’m going to bring the melody in after that.
Okay, it really doesn’t sound that bad, and you could roll with that if you wanted to. If not, we can play around with it to make it sound a little more interesting. One of the things that I’m going to go ahead and do is we’ll just keep the original. I’m going to duplicate it first, but let’s just keep the original just in case we want to go back to it. Let’s move this out of the way, and then let’s go ahead and change this up. Now, one of the things you can do to add a little more variation to it is just move it up one whole note. So, if you look at your top notes, these notes are just a little more prominent; they stick out just a little more than the rest of the chords because you’re using such a lower register. These are just slightly a little bit louder than the rest of them or at least they’re perceived slightly louder. So, let’s go up to our next note, which again is a white key on the keyboard, so the next would be B. So, let’s go ahead and go up to that, and then we’ll leave… Let’s leave this one where it’s at, and then we’re going to move this one up again to B.
The second thing that you always have to check is that you’re still in your same key because even though we moved this up one full step into the next note in our key, you know, it’s here F sharp and F sharp, these are not in the key of C or C major A minor. So, this is again the reason why I always start out in the key because it’s just easier that way. Okay, so let’s go ahead and listen to this along first. I’m going to play the chord by itself without anything, and then I’m going to bring in the drums and the bass, and then I’ll bring in the plucks and the melody. So, you can get an idea of what this chord progression sounds like. So, I’m going to just go ahead and solo that, let’s go ahead and mute that, mute that, solo that, and let’s just listen to see what this sounds like. See, it sounds pretty good.
As I showed, I came up with something very quickly, a simple chord progression just based off of the melody, and then, with just moving the whole chords themselves, you can get some variation. Now, the next part that I want to show you is, let’s just go ahead and move this up. This is something that I do a lot of in my songs when I’m doing more of a happy or more uplifting sort of song. I use what I call ascending chords, which you start low and then you go up and then you go up. Sometimes I go up again, but most of the time I come back down, which is usually the same chord in the fourth bar as in the second. By coming back down, you’re setting yourself up to repeat coming back over to your first chord. So, let’s go ahead and do that, and then we’ll go ahead and listen, just like I did before. I will just start out by playing the chord by itself, and then I’ll bring in the drums and the bass, and then I’ll bring the plucks and the melody. So, you can get an idea of what it sounds like with the basic instruments and with the melody and the plucks.
Now, I know for a fact that one of those notes is out of key just because it sounded so horrible. So, let’s go ahead and take a look. And I do this all the time. I’m in such a hurry to listen to what I just did that right here, we got a D sharp, which again, it’s one of the black keys on the keyboard, but we don’t want that. So, I will always try moving it to the nearest key that’s in that key or the nearest note that’s in that key. So, the D sharp, I’m going to bring back down to D. Just quickly double check my other notes, which these were all the same before, and I know that those were right. But anytime something sounds that horrible, check to make sure that each one of the notes is in key because just one note, if it’s out of key, it’s really going to stick out and it’s going to sound horrible. So, I’m going to let’s just start it back at the beginning, and I’m going to play it by itself, and then I’ll bring in the drums and the bass, and I’ll bring the plucks, and then I’ll bring in the melody. See again, it sounds good.
All I did was just make a couple of small changes. I didn’t have to put a lot of thought into any of this. All turned out really simple. The next thing that I want to show you is, you could do the same thing with a descending. Now, when I’m using a pad that is when the chords are in this register, if I wanted to do a descending where I would start here and then I would go down and then maybe down again and then back up to whatever this chord is. If this chord and this chord are the same, then as I said before, it sort of sets you back up to go to the beginning. What I would probably do is instead of going down from here, I would probably just raise this chord up and then go down just because the lower in the register that you go when you have chords that have notes that are this close together, it tends to get really thick and really muddy, and it’s usually not necessarily what I’m looking for.
But what I’m going to do is let’s take what we just did and I’m going to move it aside, and let’s go ahead, and this was our initial chords that we came up with the first time around before we really made any changes, just so we can start back at what our initial chord progression was, based off of the melody. So, as I said before, in this instance, let’s use descending chords, which to me sort of represents like falling or sadness. And I do this or I think about this more when I want to make a sad song, as opposed to what key, what scale it’s in, whether it’s a major or minor. Cause there’s typically, people say that a minor key sounds sadder than a major key. If I hear a song in a minor key, it doesn’t necessarily, to me, sound like it’s any sadder than a song that’s in a major key. However, if I play, let’s say, an A major chord and then a minor chord and compare them, then I can see where they’re coming from. But by just listening to a song, I really can’t tell the difference unless maybe comparing both together, which, you know, who has the ability to do that? When you hear a song, you hear the same song in different keys or from major to minor scale. But ascending and descending chords, to me, have a lot more of an impact on the song for doing that.
So, if I want to use descending chords in this case, what I would do, since this is in a lower register, is I’m going to go up with this. So, I’m going to go one up, and I’m going to go two up. Okay, so we went a whole step, and we went a half step because again, we’re looking at all the white keys on the keyboard. Looking at the keys, we have this one is a D sharp, which is not in the right key. So, I’m going to take this to the nearest note that’s a white key and then bring it down just like that. The next one, since I went up 2, I’m going to go up 1. Checking our keys, this is an F sharp. The nearest note is a G. And sometimes, it doesn’t work. Sometimes you move it up, and it’s just like it works, but it doesn’t sound that great. Well, the note underneath it, like in this case, we already have a note here. But if there wasn’t a note here and I didn’t like the way that this note sounded with this chord, then I would try it again, but I would bring it down here. So, that’s another way to sort of play around with these chords individually to come up with something that feels good.
So, we’re starting up here, and we’re making our way back down. And then, what I typically like to do, not always, but most of the time, these two chords, I usually make them the same because the fourth bar sets you back up to start with the first bar all over again. So, let’s go ahead and make this just like this one. Okay, so these two are the same. We don’t have any sharps showing up in here, so we know that everything’s in the right key. Say deal, I’m going to play this one by itself first, and then I’ll bring in the drums and the bass, and then I’ll bring in the plucks, and I’ll bring in the melody. Again, it sounds good, sounds interesting to me.
The next thing that I want to show, and again, if that’s what you like, you can stick with that. But let’s do this, let’s. I’m going to go back to not the first chord progression that we came up with that matched our melody, but I’m going to bring the ascending chord progression back up. And then now, now that we’ve changed these chords and they’re in the same key as the melody, and they sound good together, they don’t sound wrong, and if you like the mood of what we just played, then as I said before, you can go with it. However, sometimes when you change the chords, if you change the melody to go along with it, it sounds a little bit better.
So, in this instance, we went with ascending chords, so what I’m going to do next is, I’m going to try to mirror what we just did with our melody. So, let me move this out of the way. This was the full melody right here. I’m going to duplicate it because I don’t want to ruin it, and then what I want to do is, I want to mirror these chords by just lifting up the melody. So, this started out at B3. Actually, right, because this should be the same chord that we started with. So, I think that this one is the only one, this chord we’re going to have to change, this chord we’re going to have to change, and this one will mirror that chord, but this chord we should be able to leave alone.
So, let me just go ahead and do this. Okay, so here it is right here. This was supposed to be B3, right? So, we’ve got A, so this one because it’s ascending, we’re going to go ahead and go up. Might help if I give myself a little more room here. Okay, so that was B3. Now, let’s see what this other one was. This one was C4, so this is back to our melody again. This is our top note, and we want C4 for this one. It’s at A right now, so let’s go ahead and pull that one up. That’s B, and that’s C. Okay, it doesn’t look like there’s much movement, chord, and then I play a minor chord and compare them, then I can see where they’re coming from. But by just listening to a song, I really can’t tell the difference unless maybe comparing both together, which, you know, who has the ability to do that when you hear a song? They hear the same song in different keys or from major to minor scale. But ascending and descending chords, to me, have a lot more of an impact on the song for doing that.
So, if I want descending chords in this case, what I would do since this is in a lower register, I’m going to go up with this, so I’m going to go one up and I’m going to go two up. Okay, so we went a whole step, and we went a half step because again, we’re looking at all the white keys on the keyboard. Look at the keys we have; this one is a D sharp, which that is not in the right key. So, I’m going to take this to the nearest note that’s a white key, and then bring it down just like that. The next one, since I went up 2, I’mma go up 1. Check our keys; this is an F sharp, the nearest note is a G. And sometimes, it doesn’t work. Sometimes you move it up, and it’s just like, it works, but it doesn’t sound that great. Well, the note underneath it, like in this case, we already have a note here, but if there wasn’t a note here, and I didn’t like the way that this note sounded with this chord, then I would try it again, but I would bring it down here. So, that’s another way to sort of play around with these chords individually to come up with something that feels good.
So, we’re starting up here, and we’re making our way back down. And then, what I typically like to, not always, but most of the time, these two chords, I usually, they’re the same because the fourth bar sets you back up to start with the first bar all over again. So, let’s go ahead and make this just like this one. Okay, so these two are the same, we don’t have any sharps showing up in here, so we know that everything’s in the right key. Say deal, I’m going to play this one by itself first, and then I’ll bring in the drums and the bass, and then I’ll bring in the plucks, and I’ll bring in the melody again. Sounds good, sounds interesting to me.
The next thing that I want to show, and again, if that’s what you like, you can stick with that, but let’s do this. Let’s, I’m going to go back to not the first chord progression that we came up with that matched our melody, but I’m going to bring the ascending chord progression back up. And then now, now that we changed these chords and they’re in the same key as the melody, and they sound good together, they don’t sound wrong. And if you like the mood of what we just played, then, as I said before, you can go with it. However, sometimes when you change the chords, if you change the melody to go along with it, it sounds a little bit better. So, in this instance, we went with ascending chords. So, what I’m going to do next is, I’m going to try to mirror what we just did with our melody.
So, let me move this out of the way. I mean, move this out of the way. This was the full melody right here. I’m going to duplicate it because I don’t want to ruin it, and then what I want to do is, I want to mirror these chords by just lifting up the melody. So, this started out at B3, are actually right, cause this, this should be the same chord that we started with. So, I think that this one is the only one, this chord we’re going to have to change, this chord we’re going to have to change, and this one will mirror that chord, but this chord we should be able to leave alone. So, let me just go ahead and do this.
Okay, so here it is right here. This was supposed to be B3, right? So, we’ve got A, so this one because it’s ascending, we’re going to go ahead and go up. No thanks. It might help if I give myself a little more room here. Okay, so that was B3. Now, let’s see what this other one was. This one was C4. So, this one, this is back to our melody again, this is our top note, and we want C4 for this one. It’s at A right now, so let’s go ahead and pull that one up. That’s B chord and then I play a minor chord and compare them, then I can see where they’re coming from. But by just listening to a song, I really can’t tell the difference unless maybe I’m hearing both forms together, which, you know, who has the ability to do that when you hear a song? They hear the same song in different keys or from a major or minor scale. But ascending and descending chords, to me, have a lot more of an impact on the song for doing that. So, if I want ascending chords in this case, what I would do since this is in a lower register, I’m going to go up with this. So, I’m going to go one up and I’m going to go two up. Okay, so we went a whole step and we went a half step because again, we’re looking at all the white keys on the keyboard. Look at the keys we have, this one is a D sharp, which that is not in the right key. So, I’m going to take this to the nearest note that’s a white key, and then bring it down just like that.
The next one, since I went up 2, I’m going to go up 1. Check our keys, this is an F sharp, the nearest note is a G, and sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes you move it up and it’s just like, it works, but it doesn’t sound that great. Well, the note underneath it, like in this case, we already have a note here, but if there wasn’t a note here, and I didn’t like the way that this note sounded with this chord, then I would try it again, but I would bring it down here. So, that’s another way to sort of play around with these chords individually to come up with something that feels good.
So, we’re starting up here, and we’re making our way back down, and then what I typically like to do, not always, but most of the time, these two chords, I usually make them the same because the fourth bar sets you back up to start with the first bar all over again. So, let’s go ahead and make this just like this one. Okay, so these two are the same. We don’t have any sharps showing up in here, so we know that everything’s in the right key. I’m going to play this one by itself first, and then I’ll bring in the drums and the bass, and then I’ll bring in the plucks, and I’ll bring in the melody. Again, it sounds good, sounds interesting to me.
The next thing that I want to show, and again, if that’s what you like, you can stick with that. But let’s do this. Let’s go back to not the first chord progression that we came up with that matched our melody, but I’m going to bring the ascending chord progression back up. And now that we’ve changed these chords and they’re in the same key as the melody and they sound good together, they don’t sound wrong. And if you like the mood of what we just played, then as I said before, you can go with it. However, sometimes when you change the chords, if you change the melody to go along with it, it sounds a little bit better.
So, in this instance, we went with ascending chords. So, what I’m going to do next is, I’m going to try to mirror what we just did with our melody. So, let me move this out of the way. I mean, move this out of the way. This was the full melody right here. I’m going to duplicate it because I don’t want to ruin it. And then what I want to do is, I want to mirror these chords by just lifting up the melody. So, this started out at B3, actually right, because this should be the same chord that we started with. So, I think that this one is the only one, this chord we’re going to have to change, this chord we’re going to have to change, and this one will mirror that chord, but this chord we should be able to leave alone.
So, let me just go ahead and do this. Okay, so here it is right here. This was supposed to be B3, right? So, we’ve got A, so this one, because it’s ascending, we’re going to go ahead and go up. Might help if I give myself a little more room here. Okay, so that was B3. Now, let’s see what this other one was. This one was C4, so this is back to our melody again. This is our top note, and we want C4 for this one. It’s at A right now, so let’s go ahead and pull that one up. That’s B, and that’s C. Okay, it doesn’t look like there’s much movement, but there is. And we want this chord and this chord to be the same, so I’m going to take that out, highlight this, because we want it to be the same. Actually, let’s not do that. Let me see what this looks like. Okay, see there is a little bit of a variation. See, if you look at these notes right here and you look at these notes right here, the second and the fourth bar of this melody, they’re not exactly the same. So what I’m going to do is, instead of copying this exactly and pasting that, we want that variation in here. So the top one was B3, the top one here is A3, so all we need to do is just bring this one up, and then it moves because I copied all the notes, it brought it up. And even though again, it doesn’t look like there’s much of a variation, but if you take a look at the first, the top note for each one, it goes up, up, up and then back down. This goes up, up, up and back down.
So now, the melody is actually going to follow the chord progression. So this is something else to try if you’re not happy with the initial chord progression that you come up with. So, once this time, I’m going to play this by itself, smooth these out. I’m going to play this by itself, and then I’ll play the drums and the bass, and then we’ll come in with the plucks, and then our chord progression, which is the pads, I’ll bring that in last. Okay, once again, did you hear how horrible that sound? It’s one of those notes because again, I didn’t check it. One of these notes is not in the right key. So this one, we left alone, these are all… Let me do this so you can see a little better. All the white lines are the white keys on the keyboard, so these are all in key, these right here are not. So this is like I said, anytime it sounds that bad, some of the notes are out of key. This one again, D sharp, I could either go up with this, or I could go down with this. So I’m going to try going up with that, and then if I don’t like it, then the next time I listen to it, I’ll bring it back down here. But right now, we’re just trying to get these chords off of the notes that are out of key. Quick look, everything’s in key, everything’s in key. Okay, let’s try it again. I do this all the time because I’m in such a big hurry to start listening to what I came up with, I always screw up somewhere. So let’s listen to this.
Hey, I’m not super crazy about this. I’m going to play it again and just kind of listen to it because some of these notes, I may change. Another tip that whenever you’re going from one note to another, but it’s a half step like right here, we’ve got E and we have F, that it’s not a whole step, it’s a half step because that’s the way that this key is set up, these are the notes that are in this key. Sometimes it sounds a little funky. So what you can do is, instead of going down a half step like right here, I’m going to go ahead and highlight these and I’m going to go and bring it down there. Cause now we got a whole step going down, we’re not going a whole step down, we’re going a whole step and a half step. But sometimes even doing something like this will make things sound just a little better. It’s not going to sound wrong, and in a lot of cases, it won’t sound really bad. I just found that when you’re going from a note and then you’re going down a half a step, it’s not as pleasing as going down at least one full step, and then in this case, a step and a half.
So, let’s bring it back to the beginning and let’s just let’s do it by itself. Alright, I’m not crazy about this, but I think I might have a solution. Let me listen to this again. Okay, again, I’m not super thrilled with it, but let’s listen to it with the chord progression and see how it sounds. Actually, let’s just listen to both together. We’ve got our melody that we just changed and then we’ve got our chord progression. We’ll just listen to those. And we want this chord and this chord to be the same, so I’m going to take that out. I’m going to highlight this because we want it to be the same. Actually, let’s not do that. Let me see what this looks like. Okay, see, there is a little bit of a variation. See, if you look at these notes right here and you look at these notes right here, the second and the fourth melody, the second or fourth bar to this melody, they’re not exactly the same. So what I’m going to do is, instead of copying this exactly and pasting that, we want that variation in here. So, the top one was B3, the top one here is A3. So all we need to do is just bring this, this one up, and then it moves because I copied all the notes, it brought it up, and even though again it doesn’t look like there’s much of a variation, but if you take a look at the first, the top note for each one, it goes up, up, up and then back down. This goes up, up, up and back down.
So now, the melody is actually going to follow the chord progression. So, this is something else to try if you’re not happy with the initial chord progression that you come up with. So, once so, this time I’m going to play this by itself, smooth these out. I’m going to play this by itself, and then I’ll play the drums and the bass, and then we’ll come in with the plucks and then the chord progression, which is the pads that I’ll bring in last. Okay, once again, did you hear how horrible that sound? It’s one of those notes because again, I didn’t check it. One of these notes is not in the right key. So this one, we left alone. These are all… Let me do this so you can see a little bit better. All the white lines are the white keys on the keyboard, so these are all in key. These right here are not. So, this is like I said, anytime it sounds that bad, the notes, some of the notes are out of key. This one again, D sharp. I could either go up with this or I could go down with this. So, I’m going to try going up with that, and then if I don’t like it, then the next time I listen to it, I’ll bring it back down here. But right now, we’re just trying to get these chords off of the notes that are out of key. Quick look, everything’s in key, everything’s in key. Okay, let’s try it again. I do this all the time because I’m in such a big hurry to start listening to what I came up with. I always screw up someplace. So let’s listen to this.
Hey, I’m not super crazy about this. I’m going to play it again and just kind of listen to it because some of these notes I may change. Another tip that whenever you have, you’re going from one note to another, but it’s a half step like right here, we’ve got E and we have F, that it’s not a whole step, it’s a half step because that’s the way that this key is set up. These are the notes that are in this key. Sometimes it sounds a little funky. So, what you can do is, instead of going down a half step like right here, I’m going to go ahead and highlight these, and I’m going to go and bring it down there because now we got a whole step going down. We’re not going a whole step down, we’re going a whole step and a half step. But sometimes even doing something like this will make things sound just a little better. It’s not going to sound wrong, and in a lot of cases, it won’t sound really bad. I just found that when you’re going from a note and then you’re going down a half step, it’s not as pleasing as going down at least one full step, and then in this case, a step and a half.
So, let’s bring it back to the beginning and let’s just, let’s do it by itself. Alright, I’m not crazy about this, but I think I might have a solution. Let me listen to this again. Okay, again, I’m not super thrilled with it, but let’s listen to it with the chord progression and see how it sounds. Actually, let’s just listen to both together. We’ve got our melody that we just changed, and then we’ve got our chord progression. We’ll just listen to those. Let’s go ahead and put it back to what it was, and then we’ll just go up to our history to make sure that I get it right.
Okay, this one did sound a little bit funky, but sometimes, with the chords playing at the same time because these are based off of our new chord progression that we moved, sometimes since it’s following the chords, it’ll sound a little bit better. So let’s just listen to just our chord progression and our melody. Okay, I can kind of hear in my head some little subtle changes that I wouldn’t mind making, so I think I’m going to bring that one down there. Let’s just bring this one down here as well because, again, the second bar and the fourth bar were using the same notes. It just, there’s just a little bit of a variation because it’s a melody. Okay, so let’s see how this one sounds.
Okay, again, I’m sort of hearing in my head that the last part, I think, I would like it to be a little bit lower in register, so I’m going to bring this down a whole step. And again, remember what I said about when you’re going from one note and it’s a half step as opposed to at least a whole step. Even though there are other notes in between us, these seem to be just a little more prominent when you’re listening to it because it’s a slightly higher register. Let’s go ahead and bring this one down as well. Normally, I probably would have just changed this first and then listened to it, but I just have a hunch that this is going to sound better. So let’s listen to the chord progression and the melody together one more time.
Okay, that works. Well, that’s it. Like I said, this was super easy to come up with just a starting point based off of the actual melody that you have, and then you can play around with it, as I did, by moving chords up or bringing them back down, or if you just want sort of a groove where you go up and then you come back down, and then you go up which sets you back up for here, then you come back down. I’ve done that before, and then if you’re happy with that, you can run with it. If you wanted to play around with it a little bit more, then try changing up the melody to follow the same notes that you’re using for your chords and then listen to that with the chords, and then you could play around with your melody just a slight bit differently to make sure that it sounds good with the chord progression that you just came up with.
So that’s it. If I helped you out, please like, please subscribe, and I’ll see you in the next video.
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About the Author
Michael-B is a Music Producer, Musician, and Formally Trained (and was Certified by the Recording Institute of Detroit in 1986) Recording Engineer. As of to date, He's built 3 home recording studios go back to 1987, where he wrote, played all the instruments, and recorded his music. Michael B is also a Writer, Chief Editor and SEO of TrackinSolo.com