Sing/humming melodies and extract notes/scale

Hey!

I wonder what helpers we have for this kind of producing. I just realized that not being able to play an instrument and thus be unable to express my inner feelings is being easy when just humming the melody.

I know there is the Tuner in Ableton — but I bet there are far more sophisticated techniques / plugins / helpers?

Just found this also - but I don‘t have the money right now to try it out:

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Record your humming into Ableton Live, right-click the audio clip and choose Convert Melody To MIDI Track.

You can also record any chords you like from any source (not humming, unless Mongolian) and choose Convert Harmony To MIDI Track

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…yesh…pretty much all daws can help u out here…
no real need for special plug ins to do so…

in fact, i’m doing it that way since ages…never forget, the voice is THE oldest instrument in human history…

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totally forgot about that feature - awesome!
Ableton won‘t tell me the scale though.

I wonder how many artists work like that?

Just see what notes are used and look it up.
I think a lot of producers hum or sing a melody into their phones to come up with ideas
I’ve seen it mentioned many times

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Here’s a handy Scale Finder website.

If you’re looking for chords in a scale:

https://www.basicmusictheory.com

For example E minor triads with inversions

Also lots of other useful stuff there…

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Yep… thanks. But using a bright white website is not really fitting into my workflow right now :smiley: I already have a few helpers - like the NDLR to do the heavy memory lifting for me.

You can use the plugin Scaler, which can tell you what scales fit, and also provide chord progression variations that will fit too.

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do you like that scaler program? i’ve been interested but can’t tell if it’s snake oil

hmm, I’m maybe not the best person to ask as I don’t use it that much, nor do I use all of its capabilities. I bought it on sale before Scaler 2 came out, so it was pretty cheap. I’ve never used it for the scale detection stuff nor the performance stuff so I can’t comment on that, more for messing around with chord progressions to see what it interesting (kind of like a software Kordbot, I guess). The preset artist progressions that are in there are probably the most interesting thing for me, seeing what different variations sound like and then using that as a starting point for other things. It doesn’t work all that well for me with external instruments (probably user error!) but it works great with other plugins as a MIDI effect.

I‘ll leave this here.