Creating original melodies for your EDM track can be hard. These tips will help you to get more inspiration for the next melody in your productions.
Tip #1 – Listen & whistle
Just listening to a chord progression for 5 minutes can help you imagine new melodies. After 5 minutes, start by whistling notes, and most importantly: record yourself! If you’ve whistled a great melody, convert the audio to your DAW and you’re done!
Tip #2 – Recreate other melodies
If you still haven’t found a good way to create new sweet-sounding melodies, try recreating existing melodies first. This can be a great way to get to know music theory but also to give you more inspiration. Bonus tip: Try recreating the sound design around the existing melody as well. This can also lead to an inspirational boost. Maybe check out our hardstyle serum presets for industry standard sounds.
Tip #3 – Ghost notes
Perhaps you’ve heard of this one already, but it’s very useful: Use ghost notes. If you’re working in Fruity Loops and when you’ve inserted one of the MIDIs in the piano roll, go to the piano roll of your leads and press Alt + V. Now you can easily see the chord notes. Most of the melody notes should be aligned with the chords in order for the melody to be on key.
Tip #4 – (MIDI) keyboard
Simply let the chord progression play for a while and ram some keys on your (MIDI) keyboard. Once you’ve hit a good-sounding section of notes, place them into the piano roll and finish the melody. Even though this sounds very stupid, I’ve come up with some great melodies using this strategy.
Tip #5 – Reverse melodies
Pretty unusual, but reversing existing melodies can give a song a whole other vibe. Of course, you shouldn’t copy the reversed melody, but it can help you to get creative.
