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Trip-hop tips and tricks | Melody-writing help taken from a post on futureproducers.com, and slightly modified/edited for clarity
First, it helps if you have some basic keyboard or piano-playing skills. Most musicians can play a bit of piano. Fire up your sequencer. Lay down a beat or drop in a loop. Practice some chord progressions. Not very complex chords, maybe three or four notes (major triads, minor triads, diminished triads, augmented triads, and various 7th chords and 6th chords- minor, major, diminished, etc). Then jam on some chord changes according to the beat's feel. Finally, choose a sound like a string with a faster attack, or a subtle synth sound. This will be used for your main melody that you're trying to write. After some small practice over the chords, record yourself jamming in real-time (this is best utilized with MIDI, so you can move clips anywhere you want without any glitch in the sound). Don't worry or think about what you are playing during the recording, just FEEL IT. If you record two or three minutes of jamming, you'll have at least some lead melody parts that are useful and interesting to your ears. These could be used as countermelodies (instruments that add to the song's melodic quality, or vocals underneath the main vocal) or lead vocal melodies themselves. Listen carefully to all the sequences and riffs, and extract the parts that you consider are most useful. Save those pieces onto a different track, and then mute the parts you didn't like (but don't delete them, you could find them useful at a later time). Repeat the process again. After recording several takes, listen to everything again, with the beat/main groove playing. Listen for the precise moment to place your favored melodies in the song. Maybe a melody you liked initially doesn't fit over a certain chord change. If that's the case, then move it over to a different chord change, or a different progression, and see how it fits there. No doubt, you'll find something that works, even if it's only a one-measure melody. Melody is definitely one of the hardest things to write when it comes to making music. But it's not impossible. Some of the best melodies come from an improvised jam.
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