this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)

Music Production

1 readers
1 users here now

This is Music Production. A place to share anything and everything you want about your music making journey! Learning is the goal, so discussion is encouraged!

We have a mirror community at [email protected] !

It's a general instance, and it will provide us with better redundancy in case of outages and hiatuses! Everything I post will pop up on both, and you can cross-post your submissions to the other instance if you like!

Rules are as follows:

  1. Don't share other people's music without commentary, analysis or questions. This is not a music discovery community.
  2. No elitism or bigotry towards other people's music tastes. Be polite in disagreement.

I will update rules as necessary, but I promise we'll stay light on them and only add new ones after discussion!

Here are some useful examples of what a great post would be about:

(in no particular order)

  1. Stuff you made/are making. Get valuable feedback and criticism!
  2. Learning resources - videos, articles, posts on any topic concerning a production process, be it composition, sound design, sampling, mixing, mastering, DAW workflow or any other.
  3. Free plugins, presets and samplepacks. Giveaways and self-made stuff included!
  4. News about production software, releases and personalities.
  5. Questions and general advice about music production.
  6. Essays on your favorite productions. Inspirations and insights!
  7. Your physical analog gear! Let us know how it performs!

Good to know: As a general word of caution, avoid posting complete compositions, mixes and tracks on the internet before backing them up on a remote and reputable server. Even small snippets or watermarked tracks should be posted AFTER backing it up to cloud. Timestamps from cloud services will help you in case of theft. And, as a public resource, lemmy is not a safe place to post your unpublished work, so please make sure your work is protected.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
3
Melodic variation in music composition? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.

Whether I'm sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I'm generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I've created.

The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it's just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that's been slowly tacked on over time.

Alternately, I'll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars... these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don't tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I'm working on.

Interested in hearing your tips and tricks for switching up melodies.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My rule of thumb is to have 3 ideas before I call something a song, but if one of the ideas is weak, I may eliminate it and still have 2 ideas.

Instead of trying to come up with variations on a looping idea, I'll contrast 3 different loops. It's okay if it sounds like you're switching from one song to another. Try to avoid repeating anything more than once. The third repeat legitimized, but it also causes the idea to disappear in the listener's mind.