Hey you all,

for some reason I come around this issue quite often, not being able to find fitting instruments/sounds to add to the melody or harmony I am currently working on.

I am making so called "loops" for some friends who are producers mostly for modern HipHop.
They then use these loops add drums and arrange the beat for artists to record on.


Composing the melody and not coming around fitting layers kind of discourages me at times or it is the other way around and I end up spending quite an obsessive amount of time.

I started saving all the MIDIs of the projects I did not finish, reusing them later on potentially.

What are you doing with unfinished projects? Just leave them as they are?
Do you have some sort of "timer" like "If I dont find something fitting in 40 minutes I start a new project"?

Of course I have some sort of alternative processing as in, "okay I now use XYZ plugin to reshape the composition completely". But that does not really fix my problem, since the composition itself is not the issue.

Do you sometimes feel like having too much sounds to access is making things harder?


Please let me hear your thoughts on this topic!

 

It's better, of course, to play an instrument and record a melody yourself. Today's MIDI generation suffers massively from copy and paste.

Creativity is lost. I'd rather take a walk in the woods more often so they can escape the massive data overload and give their brains a break.
The art, or rather the difficulty, today is to stand out from the monotony, where everything has been planned and written.

But with an intelligent and imaginative arrangement, something new is possible. But that requires technical knowledge and also empathy for the subject matter itself.

Listening to and reading about great artists can broaden your consciousness. If you're interested, read a few interviews with Klaus Schulze at www.klaus-schulze.com/interv/welcome.htm

Take more time, and when the time comes for a piece, keep working on it. You have to make it happen, so put more thought into it.

The Yello musician from Switzerland has about 50 projects on the go, and in the end, he always manages to get a CD done. Perhaps read a few interviews with the band Yellow.

 

How are you creating your melody without a sound in mind in the first place?

I tend to use presets a lot, so maybe having a tonne of presets for the synth you like (if it is a synth you're using) can help you to find the sound that's in your head.

Otherwise if no preset exists, then you may need to create it yourself, being familiar with how to create sounds and program synths probably is the best thing any electronic music producer can do.

I am aware of how to create sounds but I think that dialling in every sound from scratch might slow down the creative process somewhat for me, so I tend to preset surf a little bit nowadays.

 

Thanks for your response.
It is really not the melody that is an issue, but to add to it with more instruments/sounds that fit.
I guess I describe it best by saying I sometimes have a hard time finding thematically/sonically fitting instruments to be used as layers I can turn on or off depending on the part of the song (hook, verse, bridge, intro, outro, pre-hook, whatever).

Of course I cycle presets too but I end up cycling presets for an hour or two or sometimes more depending on how much I like what I made so far, but as you can image that is kind of self defeating the longer you go.
So I was wanting to know how others deal with that, if they stop the project if they havent found something after say 60 minutes.

For me I am having a way easier time if I find a sound I like first and than making a melody I envision as I go.
But continuing on being it adding chords, other melodies or just notes to function as further harmony the sounds need to fit the envisioned theme and me looking for these can be exhausting at times, partly because I dont have a good coping strategy for those situations.

Hope I could make it a little more clear what I am trying to talk about.

 

I see what you're saying, maybe you're overthinking it.

I try and keep melodies at least to be quite minimal, most of my projects consist of probably a piano or rhodes, a bass, a pluck and some strings/pads melody wise, rare that I layer things too much in favour of creating the strongest sounds I can with as little as possible.

Some people would disagree and argue the strength of layering sounds but I find that can muddy up the whole mix if you're not one for over eqing like me. (For orchestral/classical or soundtrack music of course there are many layers, but I find for electronic music often less is more)

So yeah just quality of sounds over quantity I guess

 

Last edited: Apr 19, 2025

The answer really is to learn how to make your own sounds. I often waste hours going through presets too then I watch a video by somebody who knows how to make their own and it takes them a minute or two to dial something in.

 

This works sometimes when the melody/harmony/rhythm work nicely but the instrumentation and/or sounds don't: strip it to bare minimum, and I mean really bare.

Replace all instruments with sine waves, replace all percussion with short blasts of noise (filter accordingly: low noise for bassdrum etc.).

Start with the strongest instrument, possibly the melody. Start working the sounds upwards, add more things to the spectra, say, a sine wave an octave up, setting the amplitude at roughly half. Don't like it? Then pitch the second one octave and a fifth up and try that. Now play with the envelope, do you want a fast attack or a slow one for that instrument? Tweak it to your liking.

It gets way complex from here of course, but that's how the harmonic series start with oscillators. The first implies a sawtooth wave, and the second a square wave. If you're going synthesis route then pick one and start sculpting the sound from there. If you want to use real instruments (or reproductions) then the first could be a stringed instrument, the second a wind instrument. Now if you liked the fast attack, then look into plucked or struck instruments, or other things with fast attack (or at least played staccato).

At some point start replacing your percussive blips and thuds with better sounds, by now you should have an idea how the tune should proceed and choose accordingly. This is a great point at which to tune your percussion instruments, by the way.

Do this in order of importance, focus on the important bits first. When adding a new instrument (or replacement) consider the spatial and amplitude relations of whatever you have, place them in virtual space so you'll build up a soundstage at the same time. If you have a conflict, consider orchestrating bits differently, or try different chord voicings etc.

And so on, might be overkill building everything from the ground up, but it's a method among many.

 

Of course, I realized that early on, especially when you have someone over your shoulder, you just can't be sitting there browsing stuff all day. Just pick few capable instruments, learn the shit out of them over time and stop adding stuff until you can actually recall preset names and know instantly how they sound. When you get new sound bank, spend proper time with it, don't just hoard stuff for the sake of it.

I can imagine someone who got 200GB+ Nexus with 120GB+ Omnisphere with few S synths (Serum, Sylenth and etc) with 1000+ presets on day 1 is practically lost in browsing eternally.

So yeah, pick few stuff, learn what you got and over time just add stuff you can utilize properly, repeat.

 

[QUOTE="presets on day 1 is practically lost in browsing eternally..[/QUOTE]

I'm not sure if this is entirely true, I have probably close to 20,000 presets for Serum alone and I don't spend forever looking for one when I'm in a workflow The presets are all organised into genre and then those are organised into preset type of course, so really if you're intelligently preset surfing, it probably only takes the same time to select a sound you like than it would take to create the sound from scratch if you're so inclined.

The way I figure it, there are people that are a lot better at creating sounds than I am, and they've already done the hard work for me, and there are only so many sounds that I'm typically using anyway, so often it's easier to get a good sound with tweaking something that's existing. I don't look at it as cheating as such, some people might.

After all synth programming is an entirely different ball game to creating music, if you're tweaking a synth you're editing and not making music. I like to keep the creation and editing workflows as seperate as possible because I feel like too much editing gets in the way of the creative workflow sometimes. A piano player probably doesn't spend a lot of time getting the perfect piano tone, as it's already there for him, he just sits down and starts mashing the keys

 

Last edited: Apr 19, 2025

If i'm positive i'll never finish them, i scrap whatever ideas i can for other projects.

No, but i can understand why some people would take a similar route.

Yup. Of course the easiest solution is to just restrict your options (i like that option, it's a good option). But if you're a collector of sounds i think there's a couple of things that really help on making decissions rather quickly.

One is learning to describe a sound, like really put words on it (i.e. continuous, impulsive, rough, evolving, etc.). Pretty old technique, but it really helps you nail down what kind of sound you're looking for, and if you know what you're looking for, it's A LOT easier to find it.

The other one is, if you already have a composition, learn the role each instrument is playing in it. If you understand the role of an instrument in the piece and swap it for another instrument that's playing the same role, then it will probably still sound okay with minimal tweaks. Then if you have time you can search for a more fitting sound.

Either way, if you have 10k+ samples, plugins, whatever, you really need to find a way to make sense of what you want (or need) before you start searching or making from scratch, otherwise it's gonna take forever.

 

It's definitely true. But it's also hyperbole, because almost noone starts out on day 1 with hundreds of gigs worth of presets and samples. So instead of picking a sound and knowing to say it is good enough for now, they will keep digging through more sounds.

I saw a "track breakdown" video tutorial somewhat recently, where the guy was just endlessly searching for presets. I had to turn it off, and that is someone with releases on labels and track breakdown video "course". Eventually you learn to use a placeholder and just keep going. That's why some people like to do "subtractive arrangement" also.

 

Either work with more open or more closed texture concepts. Opening means forcing yourself to accept new things, combinations that don't really seem to match, and so your results could be more on the experimental side. If you choose to close, you will have more focus, your results will be more conservative and derivative ('references', 'influences'), but also more cohesive and meaningful. In both cases, you will speed up the search and the decision making.

 

There is something to be said for getting ideas down fast and making progress with a tune. There's a guy called Artifact in the DnB scene and he was talking about this very subject, making progress and acknowledging this is very much part of getting tracks finished, it seems like the more over deliberation is had does ultimately lead to unfinished projects.

I wouldn't say it's a total waste of time to have unfinished projects because you're still creating/practicing something, but the end game has to be finished tracks, especially if you're working towards a designated end goal.

 

I create sound palettes as a hobby, and I always have a few ready to go whenever I need them. It's especially important to have a cohesive sound if any tracks are related to one anther.

 

Last edited: Apr 19, 2025

One way: layer 3 different voices (VSTs) on top of your original "close enough" voice, then run through lots of presets on each one until you get something interesting, then tweak those 3 presets, mix 'em in and out a bit and add FX sends on each one.

 

That's called arranging (in pop/rock/jazz) or orchestration. The foundation of all orchestration or arrangement is counterpoint. There are excellent, and there are amazing books on counterpoint, but you could always attend a class at your local conservatory, college, or take private lessons.

If you are serious about music, and intent on becoming or remaining a professional composer of beats for a long time: study counterpoint. You can start here: Dmitri Tymoczko, or with the following three, accessible counterpoint books.

• Paul Hindemith
• Beth Denisch
• Dan Maske

Of course, if you can't read music, the books might not be of much help - but a private teacher can break it down for you, in person.

The composition is always the issue - or the composer, if you prefer. If there is no space for a counterpoint, or any arranging ideas to naturally spring up, then the composition is too busy. Let it breathe, give it space - remember the saying from Miles Davis:

• "Silence is music too."

 

Practice is fine, but it's best left for when you are not in the middle of a track. Then it is Experimenting, not practicing. Anyway, I like the placeholder option for situations like the one in the thread title. You don't know what you want, and it has you jammed up. But that part isn't just flowing out like everything else for a reason. You can shoehorn and force anything you want, but that doesn't mean it's the only option or even needs to be there. Parts like that often get completely replaced later on in the production.

 

Well, it's practicing making music even if it's not going to end up as a completed track. Hairs unsplit, I was just saying that unfinished projects are not a waste of time even if they can feel frustrating

I'm pretty good at recognising what is going to end up as a finished track and what is not nowadays, and I tend to focus on ones that I know are getting finished. I don't think it's that important to finish absolutely everything you start, some would argue it's better to do that.

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2025

I would love to hear some more opinions on if somebody should finish every project he starts!
Myself too thought about this question quite often.

 

There are plenty of short boring platitudes people like to throw around about it, to get those out of the way:

Spoiler

1. Aphorisms
A concise, memorable expression of a general truth or principle.
Example: “Done is better than perfect.”

2. Maxims
A brief statement that expresses a rule of conduct or a general truth.
Example: “Finish, then perfect.”

3. Adages
Old and well-known sayings that express a general truth.
Example: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

4. Creative mantras
Often repeated phrases artists use to guide their workflow or mindset.
Example: “Ship it.” or “Move fast, break things.”

5. Proverbs
Traditional sayings offering wisdom or advice.
Example: “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

I could write a bunch more than these, but that would just be a good example of bad time management.

The only one I think is actually important is this: If you accept someone else's project for money, it's not your music. It is work. You have to finish it, or call it done at some point. Done, or not.

A bad idea doesn't really get better the more you work on it. Doing the wrong things perfectly is a waste of time.

With all the plugins and software people have available to them, you can definitely over-work a bad or good idea until it's no longer a good piece of music to listen to.

You don't have to call something finished just because you got stuck. That's your chance to learn new stuff. Plowing forward until you are done is good practice when you are still learning. Equal parts of ingenuity and confidence-building.

You shouldn't just keep working on something just because "there is more you want to do to it."