Melody Techniques Every Melodic Techno Producer Should KNOW! – Transcript

00:00beep beep so I've currently been working on an afterlife inspired Soundset for you guys and as I've been doing this I've had to learn how to create Melodies like anima kasan butchering names here in order to create sounds that will work in your music today's video I want to show you guys some of my findings and what I've learned from making Melodies like the afterlife guys the first one that I see a lot in this genre but also all over the dance music world is ratcheting not to be confused with getting down and dirty and twerking but

00:28what you want to do is you want to set up a Melody a rhythm we're going to go into a 116 format and we're going to set up a rhythm and you're going to hear this a lot at the beginning of a drop in techno a lot of artists are using it as a pre-drop as well now from here what you want to do is you want to ratchet now and the way you ratchet is you're going to go right click and hit 132 and from there you're going to find

00:54spots that you feel the ratchet will benefit but the effect this creates is there add a Melody to it a lot of the times you don't want to move around too much use the freaking scale so here we are in minor we can go into Fring scale which sounds rather weird but all I know is I call it the badass scale because you're allowed to play this one semi tone up from your Ruth note which creates a badass Vibe for instance

01:28here hey suspended quarts are dope and as melodic techno starts to look at trans and start to utilize a lot of these transy techniques suspended quarts will become your best friend so for this one I'm going to use the save me quartz patch we have quarts ranging from 1 through six or 1 through seven one being your root note the name of the scale but from there Watch What Happens so here I have a D sharp and I'm going to do the

01:51bluey scale the bluey cord but if I get rid of this and I start to move move this guy in the middle up or down then I'm creating a suspended chord which has a lot more tension it sounds a lot more dark so what I can start to do is let's just for the sake of the tutorial just do this Rhythm I could do something

02:24like hey creates a lot of tension it makes it feel like we're about to take over the world and and you know just go ham so now I could do something like and now we can Implement some ratcheting as we know before have fun with this music production should be fun guys don't take it

02:56serious we have the ratcheting at the end so nice I don't want to get cop copyrighted though pitch b is another technique that the afterlife guys melodic techno guys that are really doing great utilize really well but for this one you need a sound designer like me or you need to learn how to make the sounds yourself so and we have a patch that by itself me sounds cool but it sounds kind of lame until we add the pitch BS now

03:21you could do this inside of midi but what I prefer to do is use again the synth to program it in now at the bottom left of serum or any synth you're going to find a Bend range and and the location of this will differ depending on the synth you use but the bend range allows you to control what this knob is going to so if you wanted to go to the perfect fifth you could do that plus

03:49seven U okay but for this one I want to put the top highest at one and then I'm going to put the bend range going down at minus three and the the way that you program that is the powerful in combination with the sound design of a sound pitch BS work really well and it's something that I've been hearing uh in a lot of the tracks a great way to program pitch BS is inside of the Matrix utilizing an LFO for

04:18example this one here we utilize the technique of routing our LFO to the fine of our oscillators which is going to be a very weird section of pitch for example if you have a g and a g sharp in between that there's what we would call the out of key um range and that is where we want to be at with example this sound

04:44okay because as you can hear we're not really bending past the note but we're getting this to sound out of key on purpose to create tension to create darkness and that's what anima does really well with this siren sound B another technique that I see a lot and this is something that anybody can use is knowing the scale knowing what part of the scale creates the mode the feel of the scale and abusing it okay um now in a minor scale this is

05:11usually going to be in the two and the six and the reason for that is if we look at the dsh scale we're going to have our D sharp then we're going to have our e notice how we're going one two steps now from here there's going to be a section where we go what we would call a half step up and then we're going to do a whole step that's two a whole step that's two and then again a half step so these sections are the only places where you're going to see the change between a black to a white note

05:37or and that is what creates tension and that that's what creates that Eerie Vibe so when creating Melodies a lot of the times and from there I like to assign notes now if I'm trying to go for something darker then obviously I'm going to want to abuse that section here or abuse this here for

05:58example and now let's put this now I can move with some of the notes at the end to create a bit of variation and from here I can use the sounds good sounds and evolve them and that's what makes these tracks work

06:25really well because you'll get something like from here I can also abuse that second one here see how I revolve around a lot that now these are theories again these are

06:52like things to help you make Melodies From there there's always exceptions you can break the rule you can do certain things and that's what leads to it but whenever I'm freestyling people ask well how can you come up with Melody so fast that's because I understand these little theories that I learned from again my sound design career from trying to find out how these guys make their Melody so I can make sounds that work really well for you guys octave jumps are another really good technique that's being used and I call them trans gallops but they

07:18work so well so well because check it out if I'm playing a D sharp with a really good sound and I jump I mean that's proper programming so usually in a s you're going to have your mono Legato here if I turn this off I am going to lose a bit of that so if I turn the mono Legato on which is going to make and the always which is going to make the notes Collide that just means they're going to be

07:46lazier it's going to take longer to get to that pitch I get that to it from here we can utilize an R to do an a technique that's actually done by Hardwell in one of his new tracks but what we do is we set up an arpeggio that's going up and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a

08:11chord feature from Ableton and utilize this chord so that we can play up one octave from the note we are on and this is going to create a trans Gallop but the here you become more of an ARB

08:39my goal with this video was to give you guys some dope techniques to hopefully spark that creativity so that you can start making music again and hopefully some of these inspire you to make a track I mean they're all sick the most important thing with these techniques is to have the right sounds sounds that sound good if you guys enjoyed any of the Sounds in this video you can check out my sound design work over at evil sounds.com the sound Bank I'm using is not out yet it's going to be out next week so be on the lookout for it if you guys want to continue your knowledge forward consider watching this video on

09:04how Medusa processes their leads I think it's very similar to how the afterlife melodic techno guys do it I mean it's the same ballpark and it's very interesting to see how much postprocessing they do but I learned a lot from the video and I hope that you guys do as well