If you have a chord or a chord progression it's quite easy to make a melody from that. In this article, I'll show you how to make melodies from chords.
Here's what we'll make using a simple MIDI chord.
Let's go
How To Make Melodies From Chords
First let's start with a chord. We'll take one from the Dreamy Chord Progressions MIDI pack. They come with samples and MIDI chords and we'll use both.
We'll start with the chord progression sample:
And then we'll grab the accompanying MIDI progression to kick start our melody. For this beat I wanted to add acoustic keys as the melody so I'll go with that.
Here's the chord progression:
To make the melody it requires two simple steps:
- Shorten the notes.
- Space them out across the measure.
It looks like this (In this video, I'm going to delete a few notes for simplicity, but we'll talk about adding more notes and density in a bit).
And that's really it. You want to make sure to keep the notes the same (ie don't move them up or down).
Just shorten them and move where they are placed in time, but keep the note the same.
Here's what it all sounds and looks like (also added drums).
Making Melodies Tips
Above is a base way of making melodies from chords.
A few ways you can edit the notes to make them stand out:
- Ascending - the notes constantly go up
- Descending - the notes go down
- Mixed: the notes go up and down
- Vary length - the notes have differing lengths
- Density - more or less notes within a measure
- Spacing - there's more or less space between notes
Here's a video showing these in action:
Making Melodies
As you can see it's a pretty simple process on how to make melodies. Start with a chord progression, shorten up the chord notes, and space them out.
The fun part is playing around with the order of the notes - ascending, descending, mix, density, spacing, and note length.
Play around, have fun, and find something you like.
How To Make Melodies With Dreamy Chord Progressions
For chord progression MIDI, check out the Dreamy Chord Progressions pack. It has 30 samples and 30 MIDI chord progressions. The sounds from this post came from that pack and it's perfect for getting a jump start on a beat.
Cole
