I’m also a “noodler” for melodies and one of the annoyances I had with my OP-Z (which was my beloved main music creation tool before developing the Woovebox), is that I found the “keyboard” rather useless for most of my usage scenarios. By far, my #1 gripe being that I needed a solid, flat surface available; it just isn’t handheld friendly. And to be fair, the OP-Z of course doesn’t pretend to be.
As with many things on the Woovebox, there’s method to the madness, and this includes the way you come up with melodies (a video on this is sorely needed, as it is not immediately obvious). At the off-chance you haven’t tried this yet, set your lead track to one of the “follow chord” settings, specifically one of the “trs.x” settings. Note that this assumes you have a chord progression in place that you like.
Now play your sequence and - on the Seq page or in Live mode - observe the behavior of the keyboard.
With the “trs.x” settings you should observe the note pitches shift from underneath your fingers as the chords change (with LgL/“legal notes in the scale” they stay fixed). While this may at first glance seem super annoying/useless, it’s actually incredibly useful for coming up with melodies on a small handheld device. It trades off the necessity - on a traditional device - to hit the exact right button every time in the right scale, for the necessity - on the Woovebox - to hit fewer buttons in a rhythmic fashion.
On the Woovebox, you will quickly find little “islands” - depending on you chosen key/scale - of buttons that you can press in a rhythmic fashion to generate a complex melody or improvisation. For example, the 8-bar melody @ 1:09 in this quick demo track is played exclusively using an “island” of just four(!) buttons (9, 10, 13, 14).
If you want to replicate this to see what on earth I’m talking about here, program the song’s chord progression G-B-E-C, set your lead’s follow chord parameter to “trs.1” and you should be able to replicate the entire melody by only playing key 9, 10, 13, and 14 at the right time.
Likewise, I get to easily “noodle” with more complex chords (like 7th chords - staples for club/lounge and anything more “jazzy”) that are otherwise getting pretty hard to hit playing on a tiny keyboard. It allows me to explore and use/noodle chords I would not have accessed as easily with a traditional keyboard.
Like @rm, I prefer to record melodies live once I got one “noodled-out”, which is a lot easier to do (and memorise) with the mechanism outlined above.
Now, of course, I appreciate some people (like @SonWu) will still prefer having a tiny traditional keyboard and a candybar layout/form factor. Indeed, if that is important to you, then the Woovebox is probably not for you. For the Woovebox it’s something I deliberately moved away from - IMHO a tiny candy bar device with a traditional keyboard just doesn’t work well enough to warrant the realestate, buttons and workflow (in)convience.
Hope this helps anyone!
EDIT: I should also mention that creating a melody this way also lends itself to some really cool auto-improvisation, where playing bars with your melody out of sync with the chord progression yields interesting variations on your melody. It’s like polymeters but at the pattern level.