Creative techniques to write non-cheesy melodies?

Electronic Music Production // Dark Arts
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[wesellboxes]
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Re: Creative techniques to write non-cheesy melodies?

Post by [wesellboxes] »

Not done it for a while, but take a fairly busy drum loop and covert it to midi. Paste the notes into the piano roll for a synth, pick a scale and start moving adjusting/deleting notes to suit. It's trial and error but a bit more intuitive than starting with a blank palette.

Take any sample, slice it and load it into a drum rack. Move notes around at random, apply FX, resample, rinse and repeat.

WCO4
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Re: Creative techniques to write non-cheesy melodies?

Post by WCO4 »

If you are talking about specifically melodic synth driven melodies then the most I can think of is detuning and distortion & using interesting intervals and sometimes large chords like 11ths
I think of some percussive rhythms as melodies in techno, sometimes just a field recording of a metal clank pitched around or a percussion sample with a chord plugin or resonators on it can make some interesting stabby chord sounds that sound organic and not very cheesy,
https://www.youtube.com/embed/SxYpL5L3RkY
I think its interesting to take anything even a keyboard then get some some weird delays and effect chains and assign random knobs to your midi keyboard and just jam turn a bunch of knobs you can make some pretty crazy sounds then just record that to audio and chop little parts, layer that with other things fiddle around for hours and hopefully a super cool pretty techno melody can be born, a lot of melodies I like in techno are so weird its unpredictable how they were made , not really a "melody" but think Blawan - Why they hide their bodies under my garage. That bassy melody thing is a Didgeridoo i think, the sky is the limit! Sampling can go along way with that one though !
I was just thinking the other day about why the bleep and pingy pitched up sine wave is so effective and "serious" its interesting haha, but yeah I struggle with the same thing, melodies are annoying, had some luck just jamming and cutting a small sample from that though.


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