Chop and rock your music!
Finding a basic melody is one of the first steps in producing a new song. It can be a catchy guitar riff, chords or other sounds that inspire the producer. I want to present a technique that gets the first idea to the next step. This approach is commonly used in the Electro House subgenre Complextro. It brings excitement and variety to a melody as well as more possibilities to build up the track.
1. Record a catchy melody and chop it
It does not matter if you have a guitar riff or piano chords. In this example I used a electro piano melody, which I midi-recorded in Logic. Chop the chords and tones of the melody and try to find the baseline in it.
2. Load a bunch of samples and tune them
You will need a bunch of samples. I went to YouTube to get entire albums, which I loaded into my sampler. When you have your samples ready, chop them as well and layer the peaces under your already chopped melody. Tune the sample pieces till they are playing in the same tone as your melody does.
3. Arrange it
Use bass sounding samples as your bassline and high, edged sounding samples for the upper melody parts. To avoid a muddy and unprecise sounding track, use delays and reverbs with short delay times. Keep the release and the attack tight. Your DAW looks like this:
Listen to the final mix. Use a kick and sidechain to gain more bounce:
DAW: Logic Pro | VSTs: Kontakt5, Sylenth, Nexus