If you love EDM music, and really want to start producing, but you want to get better
at creating melodies and you want to produce melody lines that are more interesting, sound
catchy to the ear, and sound better overall.
In this video, I will be showing you tricks and tips that I’ve learned over the past
10 years as a producer, so stick around.
[How to make better melodies for EDM]
To start off, I do want to mention that this video is going to be a part of a 5-video series
on how to make an EDM track, including the melody, chords, bassline, drums, the intro, etc.
This video, however, will be focused on how to make the main melody itself, or let’s
say the lead, in the case of EDM.
So let’s get started.
I am just going to set the BPM to 128 because I think that’s a good base for EDM.
Now I’m going to select a preset that I like here, and I’m going to be using Serum
for this particular one since I feel that it's good for EDM.
*testing presets*
But you can literally use any plugin and any preset.
But before we start with the melody, what we want to do is to put down our basic chords,
so that when we’re creating the melody, we know that it fits and it’s in ‘synchronicity’
with the chords themselves.
This will also help us not have any ‘off-key’ or ‘dissonant’ sounding notes in the main
melody and will make the melody creation process a lot easier, especially if you don’t have
a super deep background in music theory.
So I think a good way to figure out what chords you want to have for the melody, is by putting
down 1 basic note of the chords down.
And I will later show you how can easily turn that into a complete chord.
And I’m just going to put down 4 basic notes that I think sound okay, and we can later
base our whole melody of off that.
So just playing around with the notes here I think I want to start this with a B note.
This sounds okay to me so I’m just going to put these 4 notes down.
So start off with a B, then a D, then F#, and then E, but even if you don’t the names
of the notes, it’s fine.
So if you’re not familiar with music theory, don’t worry.
Here’s an easier way to play the chords for the melody even if you’ve never studied
or music theory doesn’t interest you.
If we click on the top left here in this panel, then choose “stamp”, we can choose any
of these already ‘drawn up’ chords, and we can just put them down without having to
worry if all the notes are within that scale, and in fact they do belong to that chord.
And I think for this song and melody we’re going to have the chords extended a bit longer,
to 2 bars.
So I think I want to start this with a minor chord.
So I’m going to select ‘minor’ here in the ‘stamp’ panel, and I’m going
to click on the B note, and it will just draw the chord for me.
Next, I think I want to put down a major chord.
So let’s just see, we’ve already put down a B minor chord...
And I think I want to put down a D major chord next.
But I think I want to have this one a bit different, So I’m going to select ‘major
7th’ next, and click on the ‘D’ note.
These ‘7th’ type chords can give it just give it a little bit of extra spark and can
make it just a bit more interesting and unusual.
And many big names like Calvin Harris, Avicii, and more use these quite often.
For the next two chords, I think I want to have a minor and then a major chord.
And I’ll just put them down.
So we have our 4 chords, and now we want to copy and basically extend these chords all
the way down, like this.
So lets see what our chords sound like…
*plays chords*
Okay, so I’m pretty happy with how our chords sound.
So now, we’re going to start creating the melody itself.
And for people that are not that familiar with music theory, the way these basic chords
are going to help us with coming up with the main melody is by knowing which of the notes
belong to that chord, and that way we can draw the notes for the melody a lot easier.
So next we want to go in the panel again on the top left, select Helpers, and then ‘enable
ghost channels’.
And we also want to ‘un-check’ editable ghost, if that mark is checked for you by default.
And as you see, now we can see the notes from the chords that we’ve put down in the background now.
So I’m going to start playing around with the notes and see what sounds good to my ears.
And the base of the notes that we’re going to draw will be on the notes of the background
chords that we’ve put previously.
And the main point of the melody is that we want to make it sound catchy to the ear and interesting.
So to do that we can try arranging the notes down in a rhythm pattern and see how it sounds.
*tests out which notes to put*
So I like these notes and I’m going to put these notes down.
*plays basic note melody*
Yeah, I think this sounds cool.
*plays melody with chords*
So now, I feel like the base of our melody is fine, but it’s missing a bit of spark,
and playfulness.
So now we can just play around slightly and make small alterations to make it a little
bit more interesting.
So even though these last notes do not belong in our ‘chords’, they are not necessarily wrong.
Sometimes if they’re put in the end like this, they can serve as ‘connectors’ and
make the melody a bit more ‘flashy’.
I like this.
Now we can do something interesting with the other parts.
Maybe something like this here.
And on the third part, we can draw something even more flashy and crazy and see if it works.
*plays third part*
I think this works,
And something like this for the last part…
Now let's see how our whole melody sounds.
*plays whole lead melody*
I think I’m pretty happy with how the melody sounds right now.
And this is just for the arrangement side of things, we can still polish this with some
mixing, EQ and such.
And if you want to give it a little bit of a mixdown, we can just add some basic effects
and plugins like an EQ, compression, sidechain, or saturation.
This can be done later on in the track when we have more elements, but sometimes I like
mixing it a little even before, just to see how it sounds.
For EQ we can just remove the low end to around 150HZ like we talked about in previous videos
since this is mainly bass territory.
Add any compressor and I’ll just select this one on this compressor that I have here,
to just compress it and tighten it up a little bit.
We can add a little bit of sidechain to give it some flair and character…
And this will be even more prominent later when we have more elements in the track.
*plays lead*
And we can even add even a little saturation to give it that extra ‘dirt’.
But you can do all these things according to your own taste, and whatever sounds good to you.
So that’s it for this video, for the next video in this series, I’m going to be showing
you how to produce better chords and we’re going to continue producing this track.
So please let me know what you’ve thought of this video, If you enjoyed it please like it,
share it with your friends.
And click the bell and subscribe if you want to see the rest of this series on how to produce EDM.
And as always…
Thanks for watching!