3 Different Ways To Make Melodies (No Music Theory Knowledge)

hey guys it's arcade and I'm back with another tutorial and in this one I'm gonna answer the most asked question I guess is how do you make melodies and to make this more interesting I'm gonna show you three different ways you can actually make melodies we found knowing music theory so are we gonna do this in FL studio but you can also follow some of these steps in other dos as well so let's get to it also this video is brought to you by skill share I'm sure you already heard of it but I'm gonna talk a little bit about it later okay so here we are in the piano roll this is where we're gonna spend most of the time first way to make melodies is by using this technique I guess where you fill out the piano roll with notes that are in a specific scale and then you enable ghost notes and you will pretty much see which knows you can go with and which ones are out of the scale so you might have seen this before so the way you do this is you go to the stamp - it's right here or right here and deselect only one when you deselect it that way you can insert the scale multiple times in the piano roll without selecting the scale again and again so as you can see here you have melodic scales these are records and these are the scales so you don't necessarily need to know what a scale is but it's basically a group of notes that go well together don't quote me on this because I don't know music theory myself but that's essentially what it is so so let's start with a really basic one which is a major scale you also need to select which key you want your song to be in so if you select C you'll throw out these notes if you select C sharp you will fill out these notes so let's just go with C because it's really basic and let's click it in each octave so this is really weird so far but but this is just the preparation click on click on the C note in each octave you can see C 7 C 6 C 5 then just extend it as much as you want and it seems like a complete mess this is how it sounds so you leave that alone you clone your sound or put another sound in the channel rack and you disable the first sound of course because you don't want to have that playing you just want the nose for reference so you have the nose here create another sound in the same channel rack in the same pattern it's important to have it in the same pattern and then you open piano roll and you have an empty piano roll click right here on this icon go to helpers and enable ghosts channels like that and now you can see the nose from the other piano roll all the ones that are grayed out are the ones that you can use and if you use only those knobs you will be within the correct scale so there is no way to like have some false notes in there that are out of harmony or whatever so yeah let's test it out also you can create some chords right here so first go to the stamp tool and disable it choose none and then to create the chords basically click on the nodes of your choice like f and to create a simple chord you skip one of the grayed out notes and fill out another note and then again is keep one of the great out notes and put in our note so essentially when I say great out I mean the highlighted ones the darker ones are the ones that you don't want to use and the gray ones are the ones that you can use and if you only stick to those your melodies will actually sound good and to create the chord again just skip one of the grey notes put the Block in a nother of the gray notes and then again skip one of the gray notes and put another and put it on a block or a note in another one of the gray notes I hope this is not too confusing but that's your first chord right there and another chord will be the same thing just put a note skip one skip one there you have it and then another one and another one and you have a chord progression [Music] and as you can hear the last court it's a bit awful so what you can do is just try another one [Music] so again even though you are using this technique and you are only working with the notes that are within the scale that doesn't mean everything will be perfect you still got to listen to it and decide whether that's what you want or not now let's try to put in some melody now an important thing when making melodies is that you don't just want to put notes randomly and follow you know the highlighted notes because that might not sound good let's hear how this one sounds so it's like whatever you know you can hear that the notes fit in but it's not an interesting melody you still got to be creative you still got to do the work one way I recommend doing it is putting in a note that you want to start with and then pressing space and then just listening to it and seeing what note could be next and in what rhythm should the note be because I don't want to just have the nose one after another how about this way or this way and don't be afraid to like have some of the nose of beat I mean if you listen to a lot of music you'll probably already have some ideas what you can do as you can see I made a mistake there so you just move it around and then maybe let's just copy this [Music] so as you can see I'm following the notes that are highlighted and I showed you how to do that and you cannot go wrong with this that doesn't mean your melodies will suddenly sound amazing you still have to have ideas and you still have to kind of recognize what's good and what's not but this will definitely help you stay within the right notes because you don't want to like have some weird-ass note in there like that you know but that cannot happen if you just follow this rule and as I said switch up the rhythm and make sure you are honest with yourself does this sound good or should I switch it up again and see if it can be better but yeah here is the first way you can make melodies and I think we even made a pretty cool melody yeah that's pretty good let's move on to the way number two and that is learn how to play piano and I know what you're thinking wouldn't that mean I would need to learn music theory but not really and this actually brings me to the sponsor of today's video which is Skillshare anyways you've probably heard of Skillshare before it's essentially a site where you can learn new skills by watching videos and watching like full courses that are specifically made to teach you a new skill and if you sign up using my link you'll actually get two months for free and you can cancel anytime so if you want to you can just get those two free months and then cancel and you'll pay nothing and just imagine how much you can learn in two months so if we just go to Skillshare typing like piano you see there is a lot of classes that you can take that will teach you how to play piano for example this one learn piano in 30 days so this is not like your usual youtube tutorial on youtube it's a bit different because a lot of the videos are made for entertainment but on Skillshare everything that you watch is made to specifically teach you a skill I myself used it before to learn some things about FL Studio and music production so even if you type like FL studio a lot of classes come up and if you sign up you can just watch any one of them check it out link in the description now let's get back to the video so as I mentioned learning piano so I mostly learned how to play a piano through watching YouTube videos on how to play certain songs and from that I just kind of figured out some of the patterns I see and started to kind of be able to play whatever I want so hey I let me just show you a little bit here check out this professional set up but if you know how to play the piano it can help a lot you can just kind of play around with some chord progressions and melodies record them and then see what you create it and turn it into a song [Music] you [Music] so yeah that's another way you can make melodies we found our music theory and anyone who wants to become a music producer I will recommend to learn to play the piano at least a little bit it will help you a lot so how to make melodies way number three this one is a bit hard to explain but it's basically just based on hearing that's what I do most of the time when making music I can just make the melody in my head and kind of transfer it to piano roll so this one is all about practice and again playing the piano helps a little bit but also listening to music helps and just trying this out and the best way to practice I think is to actually recreate already existing melodies so let's say like Avicii wake me up [Music] and there you have the melody and now I'll figure out the chords [Music] so yeah I think that is correct maybe it's slightly different but I would have to listen to the song to check it but basically the way I do this is I listen to a song and start trying out different notes right so the first one is this I don't know that it's a so I will maybe try C first and I hear that that's not it that's not it that's not it that's it you know so so yeah you can start just by going note after note but if you have more experience this will be pretty easy to do this I mean some songs are harder than others but but it's definitely a skill that you can learn so if you just practice this try to remake melodies that already exists and make sure to remake them properly like maybe even ask someone else if they can hear any differences and if you do this and practice this you will be able to just think of a melody and then pretty much like remake it from your head so yeah I know this is a bit hard to explain but if I were to give you one tip on how to learn this it will be by remaking already existing melodies but yeah that's pretty much it for this video I hope you learned something new and I guess a bonus tip for this video if you really want to make great melodies is actually learn the music theory and this brings me back to Skillshare if you just type in music theory you'll see a lot of classes that will actually teach you how to learn music theory and again if you use my link that is in the description you will get two months for free and so just imagine how much you can actually learn in those two months so yeah check out the link in the description to get your free trial but other than that thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one goodbye this

Channel: Arcade

Views: 630,204

Rating: 4.92524 out of 5

Keywords: fl studio 20, how to make melodies, melody tutorial, chords tutorial, music theory tutorial, fl studio 20 tutorial, how to make better melodies, learn music theory, how to play piano, piano, music production, melodies, chord progressions

Id: oj1VC_rfaP4

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019