Hello, everyone. I am a relative newcomer to music-making; I have been at it for about six months. I've gotten a basic handle on many of the more important elements of theory, and I have started learning my way around my DAW and taught myself beginner-level proficiency with my first instrument.
I started composing my own music pretty much out of the gate; I wasn't interested in learning how to play other people's stuff, and for now, I am still not. But I am running into a problem that I am having difficulty solving, hence why I am asking for advice here.
I am really struggling to write melodies that don't clash with my rhythm sections. Like, really badly. Especially vocal melodies. Any time I make a chordal and/or percussive section that I like, and then write a melody I like, and then layer them together, I get... well, I don't know what to call it, but good music, it ain't.
So then I will screw around with the rhythm of the melody, trying to make it fit better. But wait; if it was a vocal melody I was working on, that also means that I need to change up the lyrics because now they will sound really damn weird if sung in this rhythm at this tempo... hmmm. You know, now that I have changed the lyrics, I don't think this chord progression quite matches the feeling of the song anymore...
And around and around we go. It's gotten to the point that I have abandoned trying to write melodies altogether, as it's giving me a headache, but I know that if I ever want to actually complete any of these songs, I'm going to need to do some serious work on creating workable melodies for them.
To the more experienced music-makers in the sub... any advice?
I know you said you don’t want to play other peoples stuff, but learning some of your favourite melodies and understanding how they fit with the underlying harmony and rhythm may give you some insight on your own compositions
Yeah, basically making copyright friendly versions of songs I loved was a speed run to coherent compositions
I hadn't really thought of that. It'll probably be a while before I am skilled enough to *play* any of them, but analyzing them should be a good way to learn. Food for thought; thanks!
separating into stages help me,
stay on this stage till you get a song that feels good and sounds good when you play the memo back to some degree.
2) composition stage you work out the chord progression, bpm of the song , key of the song, structure of the song, use reference tracks if needed for the verse/chorus/bridge etc
2.2 ) then record a scratch track to click track of the whole song using a guitar and vocal or piano and vocal ( this will be deleted late just guide for the whole song) contains vocal/melody/chord progression/bpm
3) arrangement , what instruments are going to make up the vibe of the song, what and when they play in the song , this is where you arrange them to work with the the scratch track. now is the time to get the instruments/drums what ever you want to work with vocals and song structure you choose in stage 2.
you can look at similar song and write what instrument they used and what and when they played in the song. basically steal the arrangement. in the arrangement stage we aren't figuring out the key/bpm or structure or vocals/lyrics we did that in the composition stage , if you need to do that go back to composition stage and repeat the steps.
4) you can make a rough demo version of the song, focusing on writing the parts trying out ideas and experimenting. you focus on writing parts and not obsess over performance and sound choices here.
once the demo/rough version of the full son is done
5) now you can re-record the parts this time focusing on a great performance , great recording, checking you are tuning the instruments properly , new strings etc if you want , and figure out the right sound/tone of the instruments , taking time to dial in the right guitar tone or drums kit that fits the song well.
if you doing electronic music you can skip the stage and figure it all out in the daw, but if you adding real instruments or more guitar song you want to figure similar to that so you can focus on song writing , arranging and performing separately , you don't want be writing the song and trying to nail guitar takes at the same time.
Thanks for this. I am largely making my music in my DAW, because while I enjoy playing, I have already picked up on the fact that performance is not my strong suit; lyrics and rhythmic ideas seem to be my biggest sweet spot. I will try to break things down as I work, give me less points of failure along the way and a better idea of what I need to shift in real time. Thanks a lot for this! :)
There's nothing wrong with primarily being a producer instead of a musician, but I just wanted to say, on this point:
This is probably not a good mindset to have. Playing an instrument is difficult for everyone and you have only been playing with music for 6 months with most of that time being in the DAW it sounds like. It's not that it isn't your strong suit. It's just a muscle you haven't spent much time building. I started with music on guitar, and I could just barely play a full song after 6 months with all of my time being spent exclusively on guitar.
I just don't want you to tell yourself that you can't do something because you think you don't have a natural ability, because if I had done that after my first 6 months on guitar, I would have dropped music completely. It just takes work and persistence to get better.
Firstly, I really appreciate this. Second, in my case, the thing that I struggle with the most is feeling self-conscious when trying to do stuff in front of other people. It's a shame, because I would absolutely *love* to be able to get up on a stage some day.
My first instrument is the baritone uke (tuned to the 4 lowest strings on standard guitar tuning, but simpler to play for only having the four strings; felt like a perfect beginner instrument to me). It's been a ton of fun, but I am definitely seeing now why people usually start training in the physical side of music skills early; my hands and fingers HURT after a good long session.
write the music/lyrics first. then put it to a beat
So by music, you mean the melody? Like, start from that place, then work out the chordal and rhythmic structure? Thanks for the tip, I will try to get my head around it. Despite the lyrics always being the first part of a song to come to me, I seem to have a hard time putting them to a melody out of the gate, but that sounds like it at least has a chance to avoid the problem. Thanks!
Yeah- try singing them into your phone’s voice memo when they first come to you. That’s what I do, just to make a note of it, but I can often imagine a melody & beat going too, so I kinda hum/beatbox a little bit around the lyrics. A rough outline of the song emerges & then if I move to my DAW after that, it’s just a matter of laying it down from the map I made on the memo.
Thanks so much for elaborating! I'm really new to all of this, so the insight of experienced people is really valuable. :)
cheers! Yeah the more you keep at it, the more these kinds of kinks work themselves out. It’s all about keeping up the pace & putting the time in. Makes me want to leave work right now & go work on music!
Sometimes, this is what I do:
Make a simple, but well-defined rhythm with a drum track.
Play around making melodies over that simple drum track. Noodle and fiddle and noodle and fiddle until something pops out at me. Grab that thing that pops out and focus on it and get that good bit down in a track next to the drums.
Now I can add a bass if I want or backing chords. It's relatively easy to just whip up some simple chords that A) go with the melody and B) hit the same rough rhythm as the drum track. Get that into a track.
Now, delete the drum track. Want to listen to the melody and the chords, which have retained the simple rhythm. Maybe now I take those and improvise/noodle/play on the drum track while the melody and chords loop. And now I can see that sometimes I want the drums and chords in sync, and sometimes not.
You can go through multiple iterations of this - set one side and improvise and play around on the other till you get something you like. Then delete the other side and reverse it, and play around and improvise what you like on the other side. So long as you keep something steady between your rounds, you shouldn't go too completely off track.
And keep things simple at first, so you have a definite rhythm, and a definite chord progression. Ultimately, you might ditch the backing chords and just keep a bass that asserts that chord progression. Or maybe a backing part that has a counter melody, but it also asserts that chord progression. The Platonic Form of your defined chord progression, if you will, remains in the dna of your piece, even if you ended up deleting the most overt form of it.
I will say that, for me, a lot of the time counter melodies and/or bass lines occur to me as I'm in bed going to sleep after a day of listening to my melody over and over. It's not really conscious, I'll just find myself singing a bass line, or a melody, and it'll strike me that it would go good with the main melody I'd been hearing all day.
Starting with the drum as a way to guide the melody is a thought that frankly hadn't occurred to me. I will noodle around with this concept later; thanks!
I find a non-melodic but pleasing groove really pulls melodies out of me. Maybe even a super simple chord progression can help, that you fully intend to delete after.
I start with my lyrics and fit everything to them.
If the drums are clashing with my melody, then the drums have to change.
Given that I started out as a writer, I feel like this may be the way for me to go, too. Thanks for your input! :)
Sounds like you like to have the chords to help you write the notes for a melody, but you have a hard time fitting the rhythm of the melody to the rhythm of the song/beat. I'd try to strip down the instrumental part to sustained chords that just change on the 1 of each measure. Maybe even with just quarter note kick drums and nothing else. Then write your melody and record that. Then go back and make a rhythm section that compliments the melody.
Also dont be afraid to just keep things simple. I obviously cant hear your ideas, but an issue could be that youre trying to make every single part interesting. Sometimes it sounds better to have some boring stuff to let the interesting stuff breathe. Have you're melody be all over the place and then have the rhythm section keep it super simple and sparse. Or have a really intricate rhythm section and then the melody just be long sustained notes. Etc.
I try to avoid writing anything before I have my melody/theme. Because melody/top line is the most important part of the music that everyone listens to and remembers, everything else is arranged to support that melody.
As I read this and other comments, I kinda suspect I may need to try writing this way.
I started out with chord progressions and loops etc. as many do... I got NOTHING done worth mentioning in many years. My friend at the later time, who's professional musician, told me again and again "melody is the king, if you have a melody, everything else is mechanical work what comes to arrangement etc."
Didn't believe him at first... then I produced one of my best songs by purely having a complete melody and theme and a VISION. No chords, no drums, no bass... only the melodies played on piano with one not at a time... Brought it to him and asked "what do you think? could be make this into a song?" he went "ABSOLUTELY! THIS IS AMAZING!!!!" And he helped me to produce it to my vision and it became something amazing... that's when I learned that truly, melody IS the king.
You can write gazillion different melodies to a particular chord progression, a given melody already IMPLIES the chord progressions you might want to use on it, it implies rhythm etc...
When you have a melody, everything else will fall in place. You'll hear it.
How are they clashing? Like, melodically? Are the notes of your melody in the same key are your rhythm section?
They feel clashy to me, even though I am using exclusively notes in the key of the chords I wrote (I know you don't *have* to do that when writing melodies, but thought it would be simpler to start). It also feels like maybe there's a rhythmic clash. Part of why I am struggling is that I don't even have the full music background yet to be able to articulate fully exactly why they bother me, if that makes sense.
I have also had it pointed out to me that I may need to learn some mixing skills; a friend of mine offline said to me last night that part of what is going on may just be that I haven't put in the work to *make* the parts mesh in the same way that a properly produced piece does.
You don't write them separately, then put them together and see what happens. One is written for the other. If you start with a chords, then you write the melody for that progression. If you start with a melody, then you write the chords to go with that melody.
Again, you don't write things in isolation. If you already have a song, then you write the lyrics to fit the song. If you already have lyrics, then you write the song to fit the lyrics.
You don't separately write lyrics, a melody, a rhythm section, then throw them together and see what happens.
If you already have a rhythm section, then sing over it. Just let it loop. Play it in the car. Sing literally random words over it. John Mayer calls this "ouija boarding". If some words or phrases feel really good, if they stick, then great... work with that. Fill in the blanks to work out the lyric.
Interesting. I hadn't considered singing over it... mostly because I don't like my singing voice and struggle with tonal reproduction (even though I can hear the intervals between different tones clearly, getting my voice to do what I hear is very hard for me, for some reason). But that might be another avenue for me to try. Thanks a lot!
A lot of people are telling you you have to write the melody/chords first and add the rhythm track later, but you really don't. I've written lots of songs both ways. One of my best and most heartfelt songs started life as a 10/8 drum pattern.
The important thing is to let the rhythms you have guide the construction of the rest of the song. It sounds like you are trying to weld together two things you've created separately, and that will only work very occasionally. Most of the time a successful piece of music will be built up layer by layer (even if sometimes towards the end of the process you might end up removing or replacing one of the early layers).
If all you have is drums, try adding bass next. A good bass line can act as a bridge between the drum pattern and a vocal melody that works with it.
I only wrote my first bass part the other day, and I still don't know what I am doing, but it's fun and I feel like I am learning a lot, even if it's all haphazard. I'll try this, thanks for your insight! :)
Haphazard is good! Have fun experimenting.
the melody is arbitrary to the rhythm section if played in the correct key/context.
if the melody is out of key with the rhythm section, it will always sound fucked….not saying that’s a bad thing.
maybe the challenge modern musicians are having is a stubborn rhythm section.
in the old days, you get with your buddies and collectively choose a ‘key’.
soloists would dick around in that key until something repeatable happened…in that key. it was up to the rhythm section (bass, keys, rguitar) to maintain the chosen key.
now
the rhythm section plays whatever key you want, but it’s not going to tell you, “dude what key are you in?” then making the adjustment. it just sounds off key, because it probably is.
It's not harmonically off; the problem is very definitely rhythmic. Since I am writing and producing all of the parts myself, and working within the same key (at least within each section of the song; there are key changes as you go along), preventing the kind of harmonic clash you are talking about is easy. It's the rest of things that feel off. Like, I don't want to maintain the same rhythm as the chordal section, because that would be boring, but every time I try to "mix it up", it just sounds like crap to me.
if you are not mixing recorded instruments with software instruments, it is almost impossible to make a mistake (assuming you set your keyboard to the correct key and mode.) it might not sound at all what’s in your head, but rhythm and melody is arbitrary within the proper context.
another example:
if a band is playing in “C”, and you have a “C” harmonica, literally nothing you can play would be “wrong”.
you can have good harmonica players, and bad harmonica players…but wrong is impossible.