Mobile Music Production 2.4 - Advanced Melodies

In this video, we will be talking about how to expand and develop your melodies. I am going to make a quick melody right now and I am going to show you some techniques that will help you develop it.

I have a drum loop playing and I am just gonna go through some synth sounds, let’s just make something really simple. I am just going to do half notes and start off with something really simple.

Passing Notes.

One thing we can do is putting pass notes, so you can see between two melodies right here there’s a big interval and you can put a passing note in-between them, kind of like a step ladder so that we transition between notes and it’s less jarring.

Once again using your ears and listening to where you think passing notes are appropriate. A passing note doesn’t have to be in between two pitches, it can be higher or lower all that matters is that it sounds good.

So this section sounds a little boring so I am going to add some Ornamentation.

Ornamentation is a melodic decoration, the feel of the melody feels the same but we are going to add something extra to it to spice up our melody.

Another technique we can do is called suspensions, a suspension is when you extend the length of a note over a strong beat. For example, let's say we doubled the length of this melody, there’s going to be a really strong down beat on the 5th bar, you can extend this note right here like this to create a delayed transition to the next melody line. You can even extend the first note over like this to create more variation.