How to explore a melodic phrase

Short melodic phrases will pop into my head. I’ll hum them out on my phone then find a moment to get them to MIDI (christ I wish I could write sheet music). All good.

But then I’ll try to explore it: lengthen, change, vary…and nothing nearly as interesting happens. Transposing is fine. But I’m interested in stretching it out and exploring.

My gold standard for this is Fingerbib:

Counterpoint and variation and it’s just this massive journey up and down the F#maj (I think) scale.

Anyone have any tips on how they approach this dilemma? I know I know work and time and practice and patience. Still…advice is always cool.

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There’s no right answer and Aphex at that stage in his career was pushing notes around until he liked the way they sounded.

You can learn a lot from these Bernstein lectures:

A list of basic melodic transformations can be found here: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~sasanr/Music/Music-Theory/Melodic-Transformation.htm

Good luck!

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p.s. hadn’t heard fingerbib in ages, made a little midi piano ditty during lunch after listening:

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Thats really it, but the advice I can give is how you go about learning that stuff and what you put time into.

I highly recommend transcribing and playing songs you like. Learn a new song every day even. When I say transcribe I don’t mean with a pencil and sheet music (though you could if you’d like) I just mean figure the melody out on your instrument of choice, play it, absorb it, sing it, internalize it, and when you do this day in and day out it becomes a part of you and will naturally come out in your music. It’s like a bank.

This same process can be used for harmony and structure–I. E. learning an entire song front to back and knowing why things are the way they are.

David Lee Roth was just on Joe Rogan and he said some really great things. When asked how long it took him to write Running With the Devil his response was basically “Well after about 500 books, thousands of hours of playing songs, 1000 movies… It took about 18 minutes to write”

There is no shortcut. If you hear a melody you like, learn the crap out of it and then analyze WHY you like it. “Oh that’s nice, it starts on a non chord tone and resolves to a chord tone, maybe I should do that” (that’s called an appogiatura btw)

“Oh the shape of that melody is so nice, it’s like an arch” (see: Paul McCartney melodies such as Yesterday, Fool on the Hill, Hey Jude, on and on)

Then as you do this you’ll find your note selection improving. You’ll go from lame, kinda square/cheesy notes to hip, happening notes. I’m learning blues piano right now and have recently developed an appreciation for blues note selection… It can just be so, so hip.

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this clip is a master class in something that often is lacking in electronic music: velocity.

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Good melodies are often highly optimized, even (or especially) when they are simple. This may be one reason why it sounds worse when you change things.

I‘d recommend isolated modifications:

  • keep the notes and rhythm, change accentuations.
  • keep the rhythmic structure and set of notes, but change their order.
  • keep the notes order, but change the note lengths and breaks.
  • keep everything but add intermediate notes, maybe outside the scale.
  • replace some notes with notes outside the scale.

Just jam until you find interesting new sweet spots.

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LOVE that track!

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This is a great page: short and sweet. Just putting the methods in words is already helpful in thinking of different approaches.

Will watch Bersteini. Thank you!

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Ok now you’re just showing off :wink: Nice work!

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very nice :+1:

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Great idea. I worked out “Take On Me” the other day and I was doing new things in my head immediately. I def need to do it more often. It’s just a lot of work for me at the moment. But of course work and patience and more work.

I cam across a guy who puts forward that the integration of “blues tonality” is one of the most biggest developments of music in the 20th century. I’ve been thinking of lessons recently and have been considering between finding a classical teacher versus a jazz teacher. Think I might go for the former.

Amen! It’s amazing how much more interesting a sequence can be with some velocity work.

Great resource to have handy. Nice shout!

I highly recommend watching all the Bernstein Harvard lectures, I’ve sat through them a couple of times and learned a lot.

Another interesting and new (and scary) area is using AI in creativity. I had a 10 minute play around with Google’s machine learning music project the other day and it ‘came up with’ some good stuff. Felt like cheating though: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio.

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These are really good ideas and, piggybacking off the comment on velocity, I wonder how much mileage I can get just employing these “simple” edits. As opposed to trying to get in more notes, just perfect the ones you have (“Before you play two notes learn how to play one note — and don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.” - Mark Hollis RIP)

Coolcool. I like it. Thank you.

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Yeeeaaaahhhh. The only reason I haven’t gotten @mekohler 's (amazing) PolyPhase sequencer yet is because I’m worried I’ll depend too much on it. (Sorry Marcos! :wink: )

But it’s really up to us how much we let AI take over.

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Agreed.

It’s interesting and can be useful for generating ideas but then one could ask why you’re trying to make music if you don’t have any ideas?

:man_shrugging:t2:

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Right. I think we underestimate humanity’s desire for novel creativity: radical ideas eventually enter the mainstream (whether people realize its origins or not). I’ve heard only a couple of the AI generated tracks and there is nothing at all interesting about them. Nothing compared to something like Holly Herndon who is “very much running towards (AI), but on our terms.” (I don’t know what exactly she did with AI for the music below).

Why not use it to support and enhance your productions? I would never then say “why bother learning the circle of 5ths”? That can enrich your edited AI even further.

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Much love for Holly Herndon.

She’s definitely asking some good questions and I’d agree that using AI can add to the creative process but if it overtakes your own input the whole process could become redundant.

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