Doubts in creating Goa melodies

On 2013-02-15 20:35, willsanquil wrote:
you don't need a MIDI keyboard. I mistakenly thought that it was an essential element for production so I went off and grabbed one for $70 - it was my 3rd piece of gear after my monitors and my soundcard.

I never use it.

On 2013-02-15 20:35, willsanquil wrote:
you don't need a MIDI keyboard. I mistakenly thought that it was an essential element for production so I went off and grabbed one for $70 - it was my 3rd piece of gear after my monitors and my soundcard.

On 2013-02-17 06:09, goatrancejp wrote:
but psychedelic sounds does not make much sense to aply music theory....

On 2013-02-17 06:09, goatrancejp wrote:
.....they are psychedelic and psychedelicness does not make sense at all.....

On 2013-02-15 20:35, willsanquil wrote:
you don't need a MIDI keyboard. I mistakenly thought that it was an essential element for production so I went off and grabbed one for $70 - it was my 3rd piece of gear after my monitors and my soundcard.

I never use it. 95% of the MIDI notes that I enter in come from clicking in ableton, sometimes I'll use some iPad apps to generate some data but yeah unless you're actually a capable keyboard player or you dedicate a significant amount of time to learning and playing keys...I wouldn't suggest a keyboard. Not advocating AGAINST the keyboard per se, just saying that it isn't necessary for melodic creation.

For me, ableton's MIDI effects and the arpeggiator in tandem with manual editing give me all the chords and scales and shit that I could ever want.

For instance, if I want a Goa melody I create a MIDI Clip that is equal to the length of the Arp section I want to create with one long midi note at the root note that I have picked.

So my goal is to take the one long midi note and through MIDI Devices take that one note and convert it into a series of arpeggiated notes.

So the first device I use is the Chord device, which takes a MIDI note and adds in intervals for you. So I pop in a chord device, use a chord preset.

So now our single note is a bunch of notes.

Ok, so now I'll add an Arpeggiator device, set it to 1/16ths adjust the gate down to maybe 50% to start and leave the steps and whatnot alone for now.

So our one long midi note is now converted into a chord and then arpeggiated - but its not in the scale I want so I add a Scale device set to the Phrygian preset and the root note that I have chosen.

Now that we have our long MIDI note converted to a chord, arpeggiated, and being forced down into the appropriate scale we can muck around a bit. Try automating the Step/Distance. Also automating your Key Tracking in your synth can have big effects at this stage.

Once you are happy with the MIDI you are generating, create a new MIDI track and change its Input to the track that you were just working on, then arm the new MIDI track, enable record, and then hit play at the beginning of the MIDI Clip.

Now what you have is the actual MIDI data of that 'performance' - your initial one MIDI note has been converted into melodic awesomeness!

Disable all your MIDI devices and drop that newly recorded MIDI clip on top of the old 1 note MIDI clip. Now you can go nuts manually editing in little slides or riffs or what-have-you.

andddd if you don't use ableton sorry for writing a novel about something that you can't use

On 2013-02-16 22:03, willsanquil wrote:
oh, another great thing to do for Phrygian scale melody is to learn what the intervals are in that scale.

1-2-2-2-1-2-2

That's the semitone intervals - but a lot of the time step sequencers (for instance, the lovely Sylenth1 Arp in Step mode, or Zebra) will let you put in +/-24 or so semitones. So, turn those intervals into numbers you can use, and go up more than one octave

1 - 3 - 5 - 7 - 8 - 10 - 12 - 13 - 15 - 17 - 19 - 20 - 22 - 24

So if you write those numbers down somewhere or just remember them, you can somewhat randomly throw those values into a step sequencer and get going. For instance, go into sylenth, go for bandpass filter with a lot of resonance, turn the Arp on, turn it into Step mode with 8 Wrap and throw in some of those numbers randomly and add a couple of Holds to the pattern. You should get interesting results very quickly.