Hi guys,
Recently, I have been messing around with music composition concepts. I find good chord progressions but when it comes to harmonic rhythm and melodic rhythm it seems I cannot go further. I know I have to find a rhythm or play chords according to what I have in mind and express my own feelings as a composer which is purely a personal thing. My problem is I am looking for some ways to find more catchy rhythms which DON't COME TO MY MIND or I cannot play. It seems the Midi Editor in the DAW is killing my inspiration since for testing different rhythms I spend lots of time to change that time signature thingy and ... when all is done and I have tested a rhythm it might not be so good so I have to do it again for another rhythm I guess might be good and inspiration is GONE since I have listened to same chords for like an hour or a little more or less.
I see these producers find a catchy rhythm for vocal or their melodies in a blink of an eye!
This problem is killing my ideas badly that I have gotten bogged down so many times in front of computer screen.
Since I compose stuff behind computer, I am looking for ways to tackle this problem.
I know lots of you guys have been there or might be in such situation from time to time. What do you do to tackle it?

 

In ableton live there are some scale tools to help you change your melody and chords in other scales and even play scales using only white keys.I use this a lot its a very helpful tool.Sometimes i find a chord progression but the vocals i am singing are in other key so i use this tool to change scales and find the right one or even when my vocals and chords are correct going to another scale sometimes feels better with what i had in my mind.

 

Steal!

But what sort of stuff are you trying to do?

You could add a delay - always helps stir things up. Use some arps. Use some samples. Use a slicer type affair on samples. Use someone else's midi files? Go mental?

You could just keep going with sub-optimal stuff, and keep adding parts. Once you add a few things you can change the early parts to suit where the tune is going. Always easier when you have a framework already done imo. Then I can start hearing things that could/should be in the track. Very difficult to go from scratch and get something good quickly imo.

 

i forgot earlier to say you should find midi files of songs you like and see how the songs where made.Get the chords and rhythm from them and build your own song.Use a midi controller 49 keys or 61 this is a must for me if you want to make music,also go to youtube and find tutorials for piano there are millions of them.I am not kidding here i was lost like you are and the very first day i watched a youtube tutorial for a song that day i made my first song.

 

Thank you guys for the reply.
Do you have any fast workflow for mining more rhythms? Like you've got a bar and you want to generate some rhythms fast? How do you play around with time signatures?

 

hmm, i think most of us get the issue in general terms, as you explain it. at the same times these rhythms you talk about are often very subtle in most genres, even in very jumpy genres if you make it to rhythmic in just one area it will sound amateurish, its the sum of all the parts that makes rhythm. in your case im going take a chance and dear to say that maybe your "problem" could be other stuff than exactly "rhythm"?

if you would like to post at least a snippet of what you see as "monotonous" in your music and then a reference/example on what you mean is a successful rhythmic melody it would be much easier to pinpoint what we are supposed to comment really.

cheers

 

definitely would be helpful to hear what you are doing..and an idea of where you would like to go with it..

but you perhaps gave the solution yourself.. that sitting at the task over and over takes the freshness and vibe out
if it... when it starts becoming a slogging chore.. it's not going to sound right..

have you tried taking a night off then coming back to the project to see if something new has percolated
up from your musical subconscious ?

inspiration can come at strange times, but usually not when you have tapped out your brain's natural
positive responses to novelty with multiple repetition

 

i'm a bit puzzled about something...

isnt that a bit fast to get tired of what you're writing? i mean when i'm working on a track i can listen to it for days without getting bored of the sound, if not then it's just not good enough (for me that is)

i take you saw this on youtube or something? chances are it took them some time to find a nice beat/groove but they dont include that in the vid, and with all their experience they tend to know what works and what not.

 

You have to get used to slices of time divided

here is some interesting poly-meters in this music, ignore the "way things sound"
and focus on the timing of the sounds and movement of the sounds.

 

If you cannot play it and have no ideas, you can always hire a ghost writer and a band to play it for you. But unless you are a vampire and can compel folks to do all the work but you yourself taking all the credit (I have by osmosis watched many episodes of The Vampire Diaries, my teenage daughter is totally into it) it will cost you good money. There is no way to be creative without being creative unless you maybe hit some button that says "Randomize" on some software program after loading it with some sample, but then you would still only be creative in the way that you went about not actually creating the new rhythm.

If you need to step back to get a new perspective on what you're working on, for sure do it. There are no shortcuts that I know of to take you from A to B without at least a little brow work, anything else would be majikal thinking.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 19, 2018

Rythm, it's simple. You tap it with your hands or feet.