melody arrangement question for making house

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

melody arrangement question for making house

Hello,

I work on ableton and I have a project where the main melody is currently sitting at 5 bars. i know this is not typical from your 4 bar or 8 bar melody, but I cannot seem to translate this melody from the current 5 bar to 4 or 8 bars nicely.

My question is do any of you have experience with producing house tracks where the main melody was 5 bars, or any other non 4 or 8 bar value? Is it advised I should continue to leave it at 5 bars or work toward making it expand into 8 bars but still sound nice.

hope to hear from some of you soon cheers

2

I sample clip would help a lot, but without I’l try to give some advice.

Generally in music, you shouldn’t confine yourself to bars or measure counts but in the world of EDM it is important as it maintains the groove and pace of the track. More so, it can confuse the most important people, the dancers.

That being said, the Head-Tail approach is pretty handy. essentially what it is, is a melody/riff that has a “head” which repeats for 3,6, or seven bars. with the 4th, 7 & 8th or just the 8th bar being the variation.

Examples:

Bar: 1 - - - 2 - - - 3 - - - 4 - - -
____Head Head Head Tail

Bar: 1 - - - 2 - - - 3 - - - 4 - - - 5 - - - 6 - - - 7 - - - 8 - - -
____Head Head Head Head Head Head Head Tail

Bar: 1 - - - 2 - - - 3 - - - 4 - - - 5 - - - 6 - - - 7 - - - 8 - - -
____Head Head Head Head Head Head T - A - I - L -

I’ll just take a wild guess and assume that Bar 5 of your melody is the “Tail” so to speak. If you can re-arrange it to fit in one of the above examples, hopefully it will fit better. The key is to make it seamless and one bar should move smoothly into the other. It should also make sense. Don’t just cut up the melody and squeeze it in, otherwise you’ll have an illogical mess.

A good example of the “Head-Tail” form of arrangement is the song Enter Sandman by Metallica. Off the top of my head I think it fits the 3rd example.

Hopefully this helps, again, if you are able to load of a sample, maybe with just a 4 on the floor kick underneath so that we get some bearing as to how the phrasing should be I’m sure many others here will be glad to help.

Chev

Note: Formatting on the quick response is pure shit, the heads and tails should line up with the bar number but I give up trying to get it perfect.

3

thanks for the reply! ill put up a small clip right now. its in F#3.

https://soundcloud.com/devils-advocato/5bar-sample

like i said, i tried extending it out to 8 bars and giving the first 3 bars just little snibits but nothing sounds good.

4

haha its ok i understood what u were trying to say. also, the clip has a 4 bar loop with my percussions and the first 4 bars are repeated so when the main melody starts in the drum loop is also (re)starting

5

You’re using ableton right? Don’t forget to insert “time signature” (just under the play-stop-record buttons) at the start of the melody clip. It will make the arrangement MUCH more easier to handle (if you haven’t already!).

6

to be perfectly honest man, you don’t need the 5th bar. The 4th bar leads into the beginning of the phrase fine, where as the 5th bar doesn’t really do anything for it.

What you could do is keep the first 4 bar loop, as say Phrase 1 (where the 4th bar is your “tail”) extend or re-work that 5th bar into a variation of the original phrase
so you’d have something like:

Phrase 1
1 - - - 2 - - - 3 - - - 4 - - -

Phrase 2
5 - - - 1 - - - 2 - - - 4 - - -

Then you can arrange it however say for example:

Phrase 1 - Phrase 2 etc

Or,

Phrase 1 - Phrase 1 - Phrase 1 - Phrase 2

you get then idea.

Where the bar number is each of your 5 bars in order of appearance in the sample. Again it’s just an idea. The 5th bar, to my ear, really does not need to be part of the loop, and ultimately the loop does not have to be 5 bars long. Play around and see what you come up with.

Chev

7

leave it

Do not change your melody. If it is 5 bars, leave it 5. I many times made tracks with 5 bars , or 5 alternates with 4. Do not care aboute symmetry. There is a site that can help. www.arrangemymelody.com. Good luck