How to Make Better Melodies in LMMS

what is up homies my name is felix and i am here back again with another video for you all today and this one i think is gonna probably help out a lot of people because one thing that i get people saying really often is like oh i don't know how to make melodies like i don't know what to do for my melodies i don't have any ideas like and so on and so forth but don't worry because it's totally a normal thing to be struggling with melodies when you're first starting out i was there myself at one point so i know how it feels to you know just be feeling like you can't make any good melodies so yeah hopefully in this video i'll be showing you guys how to kind of spice up your melodies how to make melodies that sound a little bit cooler and make your melodies really stand out from you know the the crowd one thing that i do need to clarify is that in this video i'm not going to be teaching you guys music theory i'm not going to be teaching you like chord theory or any of that stuff i actually do have a video on how to make chords and chord progressions i'll put that down in the description below because i know that video has helped out a lot of people and it'll probably help you to understand a lot of the stuff that i'm going to be talking about today in this video so if you haven't watched that video go and watch that because that'll help out a lot but yeah anyway so they're not going to be any music theory involved in this video but i am going to be just showing you like different things that you can do with lms and different things that you can do like creative wise with your melodies that are probably going to help you out a little bit and making your melodies you know a little bit spicier a little bit saucier you know what i mean so yeah hopefully i'm able to teach you all a thing or two by the end of this video and before we start make sure you guys check out my instagram in my soundcloud which will both be down the description below along with the playlist of songs i produce my beat store my discord all that stuff will be down there go check it out if you wish to do so and yeah now let's get to this video so as you can see i have a little key zone classic on here but this is going to apply for literally anything you can use this for piano melodies for literally stock plug-in melodies for literally any type of melody also before i even start doing anything the one single most important tip that i can give all of you is to literally just be creative like you have to try new things you can't get stuck into you know a typical way a typical you know method of doing things you have to really think outside the box when you're making your melodies i try to experiment with new things new plugins new sounds stuff like that that's probably the most important tip that i can give you because if you keep a closed mind on the way you make your melodies and the way you make your beats you're probably not going to improve very much and you're probably not going to get a whole lot better with your melody making or your beat making and stuff like that so yeah that's probably my most important my number one most important tip that i can give all of you but now i'm actually going to show you what you can do to spice up your melody and make it sound really cool so we have this little melody going on right here this is a super super simple melody but you know some of you might be at the point where you're making stuff like this and we're gonna basically start with this little melody and we're gonna make it into something that sounds really cool so yeah as is this sounds like this and then that's just basically going to repeat over and over and over but that's going to get super repetitive so we don't want a repetitive melody we want our melody to be like around eight bars ish that's like a pretty good length third melodies because it's not too long to where it's gonna be like you know all over the place but it's not too short to where you're just gonna keep hearing the same thing over and over and over so yeah we need to take this and we need to spice it up quite a bit so the first thing that we're gonna do with this that i know a lot of you guys already know because i do this in a lot of my own videos is we're going to select all of these bottom notes and we're going to bring them down here as base notes and basically what this is going to do is it's just going to kind of fill out the chords and make them sound a lot fuller and a lot more rich i guess you could say i'm going to hit ctrl and shift at the same time and then i'm just going to drag over this i'm gonna drag over this and drag over all of these and now i'm just gonna hold down shift and we're gonna drag this over and now drag it back and now we can hold down control and then press down on your keypad so now we have these bass notes and it's gonna sound like this [Music] so the next tip that i have here is to adjust the velocities of some of your notes so if you were to play a piano on your own like a real piano you're kind of going to play every single note at a different volume so what i like to do first of all is take all your bass notes so make sure you keep them selected and then just click down a little bit because the bass notes are kind of naturally going to be a little bit louder and you want them to be tucked a little bit underneath the main chords and then also what you can do is you can zoom in a little bit and now we can hold down ctrl and select this one and now you'll be able to adjust the velocity of just this note here put it like maybe just below 100 and then you can do the same with all these maybe this one will be a little bit lower than the bass note maybe this one will be right here and you actually might not even be able to tell the difference but it is going to make a little bit of a difference and make your chord just sound a little bit more human if you know what i mean you can do that with all of these you can adjust the volumes a little bit just like this just to keep things sounding you know not completely robotic one other thing to keep in mind is that this chord progression right here is pretty basic as far as the type of these chords so like i said i'm not going to go into you know chord theory or music theory or anything like that but one really important thing that you should do which probably most of you already do when you make your melodies because i've put it in my more recent tutorials but scale highlighting is super super important so this scale right here is going to be the c major scale or the a minor scale and the reason i know that is because these are all white notes and if your melody uses all white notes it's either going to be in c major or a minor but don't get too caught up on that right now what you really should do is you should start off by going to scale highlighting and then picking whether you want major or aeolian is minor or harmonic minor is kind of the more spooky sounding scale or you know whichever one you want to use you just click it so i'll just do aeolian then you go to whichever note you want to highlight and you go right click and then do mark current scale and now all the notes that are highlighted over here are going to be in the scale of d minor but however our melody is in the scale of a minor so once i mark this all of these notes will match up with the notes that are highlighted so this right here is probably honestly the most helpful feature in lms this is probably going to help improve your melodies by like 10 times if you choose the scale that you want before you make your chords everything that you put down is going to be in key if you put it in these highlighted notes so you're not going to have to struggle with figuring out is this note in key is this chord and key stuff like that it's going to be all laid out for you nice and easy and this is going to really help when we get into making you know melodies like counter melodies like this and not just chords because you'll be able to know exactly what notes you can use for your counter melody so yeah scale highlighting is literally such a helpful thing and i recommend that everyone everyone ever uses it so that's going to bring me to my next tip which is making your chords a little bit more spicy a little bit more interesting so as i mentioned right these chords are pretty basic they're not anything crazy like this is just a simple c major chord this is a simple a minor chord this is a simple g major chord this is a simple f major chord so without going into too much music theory and stuff what you should do is you should really just play around with adding notes on top maybe adding notes in here and this is going to make your chord sound much much different than just a simple c major chord as you can hear right here and you might like the way that chord sounds you might not but either way it's good to just play around with it so let's say you don't like that let's say you want to adjust some of these notes so let's bring this one down and then maybe let's put a g in here so we're going to play this chord and see how this sounds and i like the way that that chord sounds a lot so let's just leave it like that so yeah basically we just took a simple c major chord and then we turned it into something a little bit more interesting by adding you know a couple different notes and this chord does have a specific name but you might not even know what the chord is called and that doesn't really matter as long as it sounds good it doesn't really matter what the chord is called or anything like that i think that's the reason that people say you know music theory is not really important because if it sounds good then it sounds good you don't really have to get too caught up on the names or you know the labels for things anyway so we just made this new chord it sounds pretty cool but now we're gonna have to make all these chords into something cooler too i mean unless you don't want to unless you like the way that a certain chord sounds you can just keep it however you like how it sounds but the purpose of this video is to you know spice everything up so what i'm going to do is i'm going to you know place a note here maybe and then i think maybe i'll place a note that's higher up like right here so yeah let's hear how these two chords sound together now [Music] so i think that sounds really good that adds like a really emotional feel to this chord progression and we did that just by messing around we didn't have to know any music theory or anything like that all you had to do was just you know place some notes down and see how it sounds one big tip that i can give with this however is that you don't want to overdo it like let's say i go like this and i'm like just adding a bunch of stuff like here and there this is really not going to sound good because these notes are all smushed together like let's see how it sounds as you can hear it just sounds really gross it doesn't really sound right it sounds just off you know and we don't want chords that sound like that we want these quartz to have you know a little bit of flavor but we don't want them to be really crazy and all over the place because i know a lot of you probably know that you can really overdo it with your melodies your you know counter melodies but you can also really overdo with your chords as well if you add just a bunch of notes in your chords it's just not going to sound good in a lot of scenarios sometimes less really can be more so let's say i have this chord here and i like how it sounds but i just want one note on top of it let's say i just put a note here and now let's hear how this sounds [Music] as you can hear that sounds good and we didn't even need to add a whole bunch of crazy chords we didn't even need to do you know stuff like this we can just have a pretty simple chord here and it's going to sound good with the other ones but another thing that you should keep in mind is that even though you're using all highlighted notes you're using all notes that are in the same scale some notes might just still not sound good like if i do this this probably isn't going to sound very great this is going to be kind of a gross chord so i'll play this like this real quick [Music] as you can hear just sounds a little bit off just doesn't really sound right and that's why i say you really need to play around with the notes that you're choosing because if i were to do this this would sound a little bit better [Music] as you can hear that sounds better than the other chord we have and it's literally just a one note difference but that's why i say that it's important to play around and you know just mess with stuff and experiment because if you don't know music theory you're not going to know exactly why this note doesn't sound good and you're not going to know right off the bat to not place this here but again that's not super important because if you don't know music theory you can literally just play around with it and you'll eventually find something that sounds good so now that we have these three chords done we can move on to this last chord here and we can spice this one up a little bit as well and for this one i'm actually going to do something a little bit more creative i'm going to go control and i'm going to select these two and now i'm just going to do control up and without going into too much music theory this is basically an inversion of the same chord so as you can see these are the same notes right this is an a note and this is an f note and down here it's an a note and an f note as well and then this c right here stays the same the whole time so clearly this is the same chord except for it's just arranged in a different way and that's one thing that you can do as well is you can take notes like this pitch it up and now this is going to be you know the same chord but it's just going to sound a little bit different and we can do that here too we can do that with this top one bring it down literally just get however creative you want to get and you can you know see what sounds good see what doesn't and that's a really good way to teach yourself you know what patterns sound good what notes sound good with certain notes and things like that just you know little stuff like that is really important to kind of you know play around with and learn when you're first starting out as a beginner so yeah as you can see here we have this chord so yeah now if we wanted to we could do is we could just copy these same notes back here we could put an a note and an f note back down here and now this will be you know a whole new sounding chord entirely as well so i think for this chord i'm actually just going to take away this top one because i kind of want the melody to go up a little bit and then down like this and that's kind of one thing that you should keep in mind when you're making your melodies is that you can either have ascending patterns you can have descending patterns and basically that means that you know the notes are going up which is ascending or they're going down which is descending so yeah that's kind of an important thing when you're making your melodies because as you can see by the base notes it goes down down down down so this is a descending pattern but let's say i wanted to you know when i make the second half of the chords i could bring it back up and then you know it would go back down so it would kind of just be like down and then up again so yeah it's important to have stuff like that kind of in the back your mind when you're making your melodies to be kind of aware of what you're doing and just kind of be aware of the patterns that are within your chords and within your melodies and stuff like that so yeah basically now we have our interesting little chords you know we spiced up our chords quite a bit now we can actually do is we can zoom in a little bit so we can go to 200 and now we can hold down on alt and we can drag these chords over a little bit and basically this is going to strum our chords and we don't have to strum it exactly we don't have to do it from like shortest length to like longest length up here but we can just do you know something like this and this is going to make your chord sound like super humanized it's going to be like basically as if somebody played it on the actual piano as you can hear that's kind of the way somebody would play a piano chord if they were you know actually playing a piano which is a pretty cool thing to do and it adds you know just a little bit of spice to your melodies also one thing to notice is that when you do this it's going to drag these notes into where the chord starts so what you can also do is you can hold down alt and then drag these back a little bit because some plugins are gonna mess up when you have certain notes playing over other notes so usually i like to just drag these back a little bit same with these ones and i usually don't like to do this for the bass notes i usually leave the bass notes pretty much the same most of the time you usually just want to do this with the actual notes of the chords not the bass notes alright so i just went in and kind of randomly adjusted all the start times of all these notes and now it's going to sound much more human and these piano chords are going to sound very unique now [Music] so like you heard these chords have a whole new feel to them and they're you know pretty new and fresh now so another thing that you might notice about these chords is that they're still really really basic as far as the rhythm goes so what i mean by that is that each chord just takes up one whole bar and then at the start of the new bar another chord comes in and that's fine honestly there's nothing wrong with that if you want to have your chords be like that that's perfectly fine but after a while that kind of gets old so it's important to kind of mess around with the rhythm of your chords and what i mean by that is by let's say i wanted to let's shorten all these so the way i did that is that i just did control and then i just clicked on the side and i adjusted the length here so if we wanted to create you know kind of a fresh new rhythm here we can do is we can drag that to there and then control and click over all these and now put this one here and now we're kind of going to have a different swing to our chord progression [Music] so yeah that kind of minor adjustment with the timing of the chords you can make your whole flow of your melody just sound completely different and then we can just do the same thing here and this is going to be basically a whole new pattern and now this is going to be super basic and your chords are actually going to have a little bit of a rhythm now and what you can actually do too is you can add in maybe more chords here if you wanted to let's say you wanted to repeat this one so we can just do shift and then click this over and now we can shorten it and this is just the same chord as we have here but this is going to give it some extra you know added bounce as well and then we can do the same with this one just the same way shift and then do this and then drag it and now we have basically a whole different bounce [Music] so yeah i think this is sounding pretty cool now and these aren't just the basic chords that we started out with in the beginning and you know now that we have these duplicates of these chords if you want to spice it up even more you can get rid of maybe this top note maybe change this one to here do something like that and now this is going to give it a whole different feel entirely basically our melody just went from having four chords to having six chords and we didn't even have to create new chords or think about new chords to make we basically just duplicated these two chords over and then moved one note and cut out another note and that's all we had to do to give it two new chords and honestly we didn't even need to do a whole lot of work to get it to sound cool so now basically the next piece of the puzzle the next component to your melodies that's really important is the actual melody part because the chords are the harmony and then the notes up here are going to be the melody so usually when i'm saying melody i'm referring to the whole thing i'm referring to the chords i'm referring to you know these notes up here which are actually the melody but if you want to get really technical about it the melody is actually just the the notes up here but usually to avoid confusion i'll call this the counter melody so i'm gonna call this the counter melody from now on so yeah we have our chords and then we're gonna have the counter melody up here and the counter melodies are one thing that i see people struggling with really often so i'm gonna give you a few tips on how to do your counter melodies right here as well so we're gonna make this counter melody from scratch and the way that we're gonna do this is we're basically just gonna click in random notes up here and then we're gonna listen to it and adjust it as we see fit so let's listen to it as it is so these two notes are already sounding fine and i literally just place these at random so for me when i hear this and i keep playing it i hear more notes in my head that i'm thinking that i want to place down so for example i'm going to listen to this and i'm going to hum you the notes that i hear in my head [Music] so ignore my horrible little vocalization there but those are the two notes that i hear continuing the melody in my head so i'm going to basically click around until i hear those notes that are in my head so the first note is duh so i'm going to click around [Music] as you can hear that's the note that was in my head so now that we found that we can do the next one which is duh and we're going to go like this as you can hear we found the next node and now this is basically going to be exactly what was in my head onto the screen there you go that's literally what was in my head so i just took what i was thinking about and i put it onto the screen and all i had to do was just hum the note that i was thinking about and then find it you know in the piano roll and honestly that wasn't even that hard but for people who may you know not hear something afterwards you might be you know just completely stumped for what you want to come up with what you can do is you can kind of think about the way that you have your base pattern right so your base pattern is kind of a descending pattern so naturally if you have a descending chord progression or a descending you know pattern with your bass notes probably one thing that you know will sound good with your counter melody is a descending pattern as well because it's kind of just going to go hand in hand with your chords so if i were to just you know basically do this the whole way across it would be pretty basic but it's honestly probably going to sound good [Music] as you can hear it sounds good because it's descending it kind of just keeps the whole you know flow of your melody going and honestly you could just leave this how it is copy this over and start working on the next four bars but usually one thing that i like to do is i like to put a couple notes up here to kind of transition into the next four bar so you could do notes that are up here like i could do something like this and this is going to sound good as well so let's listen to the way this little end transition sounds [Music] so as you can hear it sounds pretty okay because these three notes kind of lead back into your first chord that you have here but also what you can do is you could do kind of a little pattern that goes up like this maybe and this might sound good as well [Music] and honestly i think for this it would sound better for this to be one up higher just put all these up higher because it's going to end on a note that's one higher than the note that we have here that's just kind of going to lead it up a little bit and then bring it right back into the chords and that'll kind of just tie the whole thing together as well [Music] so just like that it sounds good and as i'm showing you there's a million billion bajillion different ways that you can do this you could do literally something like this i could go like that honestly just experimenting playing around with stuff seeing what sounds good what doesn't sound good it's just part of kind of finding your style you know with making melodies and making beats and stuff like that because honestly there are some things that you just can't watch tutorials on there's some things that you really just need to experiment with and figure out for yourself and that's honestly you know sometimes the best way to learn but yeah so enough of that i'm just going to go up here and then i'm going to do the original pattern that i first had like this so one thing that i'm also going to show you guys is something that i've done in my videos before and this is you know making this little effect that kind of goes like this it's basically just like one note really quickly leading into the other note it's kind of like a strum almost like the way that we did here but it's with basically just one note so it's important to not use this all over the place because this is something that can be really easily overdone as well you really don't want to just spam these all over the place because then it's not going to sound good it's kind of going to ruin the effect that this little roll thing has so i think for this melody i'm going to put it right here and the way that you do it is you basically just hold down alt you click the note that you want to do that effect on and you you know drag it over a little bit and then you just click one highlighted note below it and then you're just gonna drag this down and then you're done now we have the effect that we want it's a super simple thing to do but it adds a whole lot to your melodies it just gives it a little bit of flair and just makes it sound really nice so one thing that i also noticed is that i'm hearing another note in my head when this part right here plays so what i'm hearing is and the same as we did over here with these two notes we're just going to find that note that i hummed so done there it is right there that's the note that we wanted so [Music] that was the note that i was thinking about in my head and once again we just took the note that was in our brain and popped it onto the screen and we have exactly what we wanted so you know that's pretty cool so yeah honestly at this point i think this is sounding pretty good what we can do now is we can do control a and now we can click shift drag it over and now we have a complete copy of these four bars over here and now we're going to add a variation and i do this in pretty much all of my tutorial videos but i never really explain like what i'm doing so right here i'm basically just going to explain what i'm doing so we're going to go down to 50 for this one to really you know see the whole thing so i'm gonna play this right and i'm gonna kind of show you my thought process here so once it gets to here once it plays the next chord most people's ears are probably trained to hear the same thing so we want to do is we want to spice it up we want to change this beginning part a little bit but we don't want to change it too much we probably don't want to put a note like way down here or something because this is going to be too different you kind of just want to keep a similar counter melody but just have it be a little bit different so i'm going to bring this up probably usually in the second half of my melodies i like to bring them up so i'm going to take this note and i'm going to bring it up to here and then i'm also going to add that little you know little roll effect that we did before and now this is going to sound like this and now the next note that i hear in my head after this one is going up so i want this melody to ascend now instead of descend and this is just going to add like a whole new switch up and most people naturally are not going to be expecting that they're going to be expecting to hear you know the same thing over and over but we want to do is kind of you know trick your ear a little bit while also keeping the pattern the same and you honestly could just do this right here but what i'm hearing in my head is this note these two notes going way higher up so the note that i think i'm hearing is an e so we're going to listen to it and hear how this sounds and that was the way i was hearing it in my head and for me i don't really need to hum it because for me i kind of know at this point what note i'm thinking of because i recognize kind of the similar patterns that go on when i make melodies you know just a similar little micro patterns i guess you could say but for you if it helps you should totally hum it out and then you know try to find the notes also one minor thing that i like to do is always turn this off because i find that really annoying like when you're trying to play the melody over here and then you play it and then it snaps all the way back to the beginning i just really don't like that but also as you notice this is continuing that kind of ascending pattern and then you know kind of ascends the sends and sends and then it kind of starts going down again and now from here i want to just have it keep going down so these two bars right here are basically just a slight variation from descending to ascending and then we're just gonna have it go right back into the similar flow that we had before also one really important thing when you're making like specifically eight bar melodies is that you want to keep the rhythm the same in your counter melodies so one thing i'm not going to do is i'm not going to you know move this over you know move this one over and then mess up the whole rhythm that we have over here you kind of want each four bars in your melody to mirror each other just a little bit that's one thing that you really don't want to do is just mess up people's ear for the rhythm of the melody the rhythm should be pretty consistent but the notes that you use within the rhythm should change and vary so that it doesn't get too boring and repetitive but you want people's ear to be able to catch on to something and most of the time you're going to use the rhythm to help people catch on to you know something in your melody so now i'm going to finish out these last two bars and i am going to pull a little bit of a wild card and this totally goes against what i was just saying before but i am going to change the rhythm here because i want it to be kind of a more spaced out more stretched out rhythm that leads into the end to wrap the whole thing back together so basically the notes that i'm hearing in my head right here sound like this [Music] so now let's go and find those notes so it was that right there is that one and now the next one and then we have done just like that one so there we have the melody that we had in our head and this right here is going to really change up the rhythm as you'll be able to hear in a second [Music] and like i said before for the people who don't really hear anything in their head they don't hear any you know notes continuing and you can look at it and notice that it goes right back to a descending pattern like i mentioned before i wanted this to go up be ascending and then be descending again until it closes out and now i have a couple more notes in my head that i'm thinking about and i'm gonna keep the same rhythm so i'm gonna have these three notes like this but i'm just gonna change what notes they actually play so the only place where i change the rhythm on the you know next four bars was right here just these three notes other than that all the rhythms are the same so yeah i'm going to delete these last three notes and i'm going to place them back in once i figure out the notes that i want to play you know to close it all off that's what i'm hearing in my head so i'm going to do that right now then [Music] done so right there just figured out what i was hearing in my head and now we're going to play it and hear how it all sounds [Music] and again you can see the descending pattern continues and then right at the end it boosts it back up just to lead it right back into the beginning of the melody so yeah we basically just created this whole melody and i you know broke it down for you guys showed you how to do it and now i'm gonna play the whole thing and we're gonna hear how it sounds so yeah basically we just created a very you know melodic and emotional chord progression right there and the examples that i showed you of you know the notes that i'm hearing in my head might be completely different from the notes that you're hearing in your head because as you know everybody's brain is just wired in a different way and essentially what you see on the screen is just the way that my brain thinks but your brain might just come up with a whole different thing entirely and that's fine because whatever you think sounds good is whatever you should make because if everybody made melodies the same way if everybody made the same music music would be no fun to listen to it would just be boring and repetitive and it would just be the same stuff over and over so that's why it's really important to be original and just you know do what you think sounds best in the long run also one thing i do a lot that you guys see in my videos is that i'll take my melody whatever melody i made and then i'll pitch it up or i'll pitch it down to see if i can kind of get a different vibe or a different feel out of it so i'm gonna do that with this one too let's do let's pitch it up four times one two three four and the way you do that is you hold down shift and then you just click up on your directional thingy and now this is gonna have a whole different vibe so yeah honestly now it sounds like a whole different melody and we basically just made this whole thing from a four bar four chord melody and now it sounds like something super professional and super nice and super good so yeah but yeah honestly that's pretty much gonna do it for me in this video i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you're able to learn a couple things in this video and you know maybe get inspired to go make some fire samples or melodies or beats or something now who knows so yeah anyways i hope you guys enjoyed this video make sure you follow my instagram and my soundcloud those will both be down in the description below along with the place of songs i produce blah blah all that other stuff you guys already know and yeah i will see you guys next time god i'm looking at it

Channel: feezo

Views: 60,448

Rating: 4.940392 out of 5

Keywords: lmms, lmms trap beat, melodies, how to make good melodies, nick mira, feezo, internet money

Id: 0sRvkaxh8EU

Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020