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.

  • Shadowbait@waveform.socialEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I work mostly by improvising until I find something I like, and then refining it from there. It may help to focus on just the chords first - find the next chord that feels “right” after the A section, and then what feels right after that, and so on. Once you have a chord progression, try to figure out a melody that fits on top of it.

    Sometimes it helps to have a story or subject in mind - what do the A and B sections represent? I.e. if it’s about triumphing over struggle, the A section might represent the struggle and the B section might represent the triumph. Then you have specific feelings you’re trying to convey with each, to help guide you. The listener might never know what it’s about, but knowing it yourself can help focus your creativity.

    When I get stuck, sometimes I go back through old unfinished projects to look for something that feels similar to what I’m working on now, and repurpose those old melodies and chord progressions, usually with some changes to fit the new piece better.