How to Make Chords for Your Vocal Melody | Music Production for Beginners

in this video I'm going to show you how to overcome one of the toughest challenges when it comes to writing music and that is how to put chords and a chord structure behind a melody that you have in your head the most awesome thing about this technique is you don't need to play an instrument or have any knowledge whatsoever of chords or music theory I'm using Cubase Pro because it's got the best compositional tools for people writing music or writing songs from a blank project the first thing I'm doing is adding an audio track and this is going to be mono because it's for my vocal next up is adding the vital ingredient and that's the core track the core track is where we're going to start building chords to support our melody we need a sound for the core track to drive though so I'm just selecting a very simple piano sound from Halion sonic se 3 we can add other color later now it's a matter of checking your levels and hitting record and singing or playing your melody into Cubase if at any point in this video you feel like there's something you don't know how to do like set up a microphone or an audio interface or record a track then go to the Cubase YouTube channel and there's plenty of videos there to get you on your way I've set up a couple of effects channels here a reverb and a stereo delay just to warm this vocal up a little bit there's lots of videos online about this but another way to get a really nice melody is to record different versions of it and then chop or comp these versions up into small snippets another thing that I always do is chop my vocals up into phrases so these are small sentences if you like and this is really important for the process that we're about to undertake when you record a vocal usually you just see the waveform but in Cubase Pro you can go to very audio and use very audio to analyze the audio and put it into notes on a piano score down in the low zone now we can see a clear visual representation of the notes that we've just sung you can use the cursor keys on you computer keypad to scroll through them you can use these really simple pitch correction tools to make sure that your melody is in tune you can even change things like the amount of vibrato one of the magic things about vary audio is you can extract the MIDI from the audio information so what I've just done is turned my vocal intern notes so you can see it's si si de so we know that it starts roundabout C now it's time to go to the chord track so I'm going to grab my pencil and just draw in a chord now you can see that these first two musical sentences go over four bars so I'm just putting a chord at the start of each bar make sure helene sonic SC is set as a monitoring source now we click on the first X and you can see we've got all these different chord suggestions I'm choosing C it's not a bad start so it's all about just trial and error here I think if you get the wrong chord you'll know about it let's go across to the next X and this time I'm going to go across to chord assistant and there's a number of different menus in court assistant this first one gives us a whole four bar or four chord suggestion so it's saying F would work well there [Music] but there's other things we can do we can use proximity so you can see we've got see down the bottom and this shows us some chords that might work around the actual chord we've got highlighted my favorite is the circle of fifths a this is a genius but simple music compositional tool all of these chords around the C Accords that are going to work and their chords that you'll hear in a lot of pop music so I can try all of these different chords that really very close in relation to the first chord so maybe I want to use a different color so a minor which is the relative minor of C so they go very well together you can use the cursor keys on your keyboard to go backwards and forwards in between chords waiting for the day to pass can't get it out of my that's not bad at all it's a good start but maybe you want to start with the minor chord waiting for the day to pass can't get it out of my that's not bad either but it's quite repetitive because I'm just repeating the same chords so I'm going to go back to the circle of fists and change this second baby for the day to pass that works look that's really cool that's one of the most awesome things about the core trackers we've just come up with so many different solutions in a couple of minutes now I've got the backbone of these first two musical sentences covered I can look at adding other chords in between this backbone to try and link it together look that's not bad but it's a matter of trial and error so if you like the chord try it somewhere else there's no rules but this is really easy but one of the biggest problems you have when you're coming up with chords is you're really hard on yourself it's as though we set ourselves these ridiculous standards that we've got to achieve and when you're doing that just stop and realize pop music in terms of chord structure it's really quite simple it's so simple that basically what i'm doing here is copying exactly the same as what i had in the first two sentences so i'm using exactly the same chords I'm just it's so the timing doesn't quite work because the melody is pushed here so I'm just moving this forwards damn just fine [Music] I'm just it's a great thing about working like this is I can actually see a visual representation with the wave file so I can match chords to the actual vocal dam just it's awesome now this next section the vocals come ahead of where I feel the chords should be so I'm just going to grab a pencil and put a chord in here at the start of the bar keep it simple never see and space is always your best friend when it comes to chords you don't need to have a load of changes in there keep it simple keep it spacious and let that melody take the lead role whether I go with them minor or a major here it doesn't matter it's up to you actually it's up to me but I'm gonna stick with that major now I want to show you another way of using chords inside of Cubase and this involves chord pads the chord pads live in the lower zone and basically their pads that contain chords we can use the circle fist to choose different chords or the neat thing is we can copy these chords that we've just built up in chord track directly down to the chord pads there they are there's only five chords but that's already one more than most pop songs you can trigger a whole chord using an external MIDI device use these trigger notes to play along with your track and try and find chords that work for you it's a very different way of using chords than say the core track this is more of a feel your way around kind of vibe both chord track and chord pads work perfectly together when you think you've got an idea hit record and put it down and don't worry about perfection it's about capturing musical ideas so using just one finger I've recorded all of these chords onto the Hellion Sonic track and now I can go into the lower zone and start tiding it up for instance at the moment I'm editing the velocity so that every chord is played evenly the other thing we can do is make sure the timing is perfect so I'm selecting a quantize setting and just hitting Q on my people and the idea is played perfectly in time in terms of production now you can take it in any direction I've added more instrument tracks and they're all linked up to the chord track so these tracks are all going to follow the chords that are created once again there's plenty of videos online to show you how to do this I'm gonna show you one final awesome trick in Cubase and this is to generate harmonies select apart generate harmony voices select how many voices you want and hit OK you can even control whether you want the harmony voices to follow the vibrato of the original singer for different vocal harmony parts have now been generated I'm just dropping the level so they don't sit over the top of the lead vocal there's a few other things I do to treat them like paying them and probably add effects to them now this is giving us this really current poppy sort of generated vocal sound if you struggle to create your own harmonies and you want to sing them yourself you can just highlight them and you can see the parts that Cubase is created thanks for taking the time to stop by as I said there's plenty more videos on the Cubase YouTube channel please jump over and subscribe so you know when videos like this are being released and get involved with the comments so that you're part of a wider creative community of people who are all trying to do the same thing make music I'll catch you in another video [Music] Oh [Music] you

Channel: Cubase

Views: 148,689

Keywords: how to make chords for your vocal melody, music production for beginners, chord structure, harmony, creating a chord progression, harmony of a song, vocal melody, Cubase chord track, chord track, DAW with a chord track, Piano, recording a melody, FX channels, recording different phrases, recording a vocal, VariAudio in Cubase, using VariAudio, VariAudio, convert audio into MIDI, Best music software, best daw software, best daw software for mac, best daw software for windows

Id: YHRa63l6luE

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2018