Come up with melody

>come up with melody
>no clue how to slap the right chords onto it

how

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vocaroo.com/i/s0c8jkeAaO0D
vocaroo.com/i/s0bTxy4UzHmf
vocaroo.com/i/s0dIZKjedD1n
vocaroo.com/i/s0XV9PjTq0DU
vocaroo.com/i/s1vF7QnzSpJ7
vocaroo.com/i/s02ms1Z10iXk
soundcloud.com/foamroller
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Have talent

Pretty sure there's some music theory involved.

The talent lies in coming up with the melody, not the arrangement.
Which is why melody writers are the ones making copyright money.

Post the melody

either practice ear recognition or play in different keys until it fits

easy with basic chords and a capo

Tonal harmony is literally all about this process.

If you want to stumble your way through it by feel, I would say pick the most "important" notes of your melody.

Say it's the note A, think about all the chords you could fit A into that might work, like F major (F, A, C) etc. and try them out.

the other way, is to think of a bassline to go along with your melody, hum it and it might come naturally, that'll be the bass voice then it's just a matter of figuring out what notes will go on top of that bass note. (they might be inversions).

>Music theory

jej

Almost all pop artists play by the same rules, but most of them don't know what the rules are and fumble around desperately till something sounds okay. Music theory is a hugely convenient shortcut.

>play in different keys until it fits
>easy with basic chords and a capo

I think I got the first four basic chords using standard tuning without capo.

AND HAVE YOU STEAL IT?????????????

Thanks.
I have the first four down, but then it goes into a strange new area.
Is it possible that I might need a capo mid-melody?

Trial and error

Or: come up with the chords first

>buy electric guitar
>train finger speed
>play shit that sounds good
>??=??=?!!=!?11=??
>profit

>Is it possible that I might need a capo mid-melody?

nope.

You just need to think of new ways to phrase the chords, (barre chords, perhaps simply playing the chord as a triad or finding a different inversion etc.) there's more than one way to skin a cat and there's more than one way to play the "same" chord on a guitar.

think with your noodle not with your doodle.

It's a shortcut if you don't have talent, which you obviously don't have because you're here asking tips on how to write a song. It takes way fucking longer to learn music theory than it does having music naturally flow from you.

This, nearly all songs are written over chord progressions

Though nothing wrong with a melody striking you on the spot

OP here. That post wasn't mine, stop being so confrontational.

Also, you're wrong.

And yet almost every great classical composer and jazz musician had an extensive knowledge of theory... Hmmm, no, I guess it just "naturally flowed", which for some reason is incompatible with knowing what the fuck you're doing

post melody, we harmonize it for fun

Yeah OP, I've got Ableton open ready to do some dumb harmony shit with it

ALRIGHT hold on.

Keep in mind I came up with this melody and the lyrics (in my native language) back in school a long time ago (oldfag here, 35 y o), and I sang it to a lot of people I know because the lyrics were supposed to be funny.

It's ok, OP, if you want to only post the melody without lyrics I don't mind.

Same here

The lyrics are my watermark against copyright infringement.

make up any old lyrics then

Do you know the notes of the melody? If so then you have a ballpark idea of where you probably want to end up.

Start by using basic triads that include some of those notes but preferably not as the root unless you're aiming for a very simplistic sound. So if one bar has A, E and G the natural choices to look at first would be A, Am, Em and C, meaning I'd want to see how C major sounds first since you're avoiding the root to hit the 3rd, 5th and 6th, it probably has the nicest color of those basic chords. Then just repeat this process whenever you get to the next chord change (which there's no right answer to, deciding your harmonic rhythm is about as important as writing the melody in the first place), with the added consideration that you need to worry about how it sounds to move from the first chord to the second. Don't worry about finding chords that necessarily represent every note in the melody. Singing outside the lines is very common even in pop music to give the music more depth and excitement, you just have to use your ear to figure out what works best for you.

An alternative approach is to just figure out roughly what the first and fifth notes of your probable key are, write a chord progression that sounds good independently and features those notes, and then just slap that under the melody to see how it sounds while making minor tweaks to make it fit better. This is much less work but usually leads to the melody having more "disconnected" notes, which may or may not be desirable.

Or you can just write down random unrelated chords on bits of paper, draw from a hat and use that as a starting place. There's literally no correct or incorrect way to write music and knowing what outcome you're shooting for is very important as a guide. Are you trying to write a poppy country rock jam? Progressive metalcore? Dark folk? Something that sounds like someone transposed different instruments in a synth pop song to the wrong keys? That's all up to you.

This DESU.

If you can't pull ideas from other music you will be poking around in the desert looking for something that works for fucking ever. And when you do find it, it's just going to be your brain's messy recollection of music you've heard before anyways.

Alright, here's just the melody:
vocaroo.com/i/s0c8jkeAaO0D

Here's the melody with the chords I found just now:
vocaroo.com/i/s0bTxy4UzHmf

G - Am - C - G - Am - Em - Am - D

Not sure how "correct" this sounds.

And just for giggles, here's the melody with chords and the original """humorous""" lyrics in my native language, that delighted my classmates so:
vocaroo.com/i/s0dIZKjedD1n

That seemed to work well to me. Kinda want to hear the rest of it with the chords, the end of the melody was the best part.

This is what I have for the second part so far:
vocaroo.com/i/s0XV9PjTq0DU

That B7 works very well.

The next part is tricky though.
This part: vocaroo.com/i/s1vF7QnzSpJ7

The notes where the chords should be in this section are C - B - A - Fsharp/Gflat
But none of the B - A - Fshapr/Gflat chords seem to work.

Your version is good

Here's a rough draft of mine vocaroo.com/i/s02ms1Z10iXk

G D Cmaj7 Cmaj7
C D Em Em
C D G Em
C D Em7 Em
G D Cmaj7 Cmaj7
C D Em Em
Am7+9 D G Em
Am7+9 D G E

You don't need theory if you have talent. Learn to harmonize. Study the Beatles. Listen for hours until their use of harmoies Sheeps onto your subconscious.

If you can master harmonies you can be a great songwriter.

Very different, there are a bunch of parts that I really liked.

Overall I think that sound really works with the cheesiness of the song, what keyboard are you using?

I'm just using the default Accordion and Bass Guitar settings on Ableton and playing it on my computer keyboard lol, it does sound like an old Casio though

I have these things.
Maybe I should just knuckle down and record this thing right.

But then I remember audacity being a piece of shit where you have to manually synch every track.

Made Noel Gallagher a multi-millionaire.

Can't write lyrics for shit but writing literally thousands of simple chord progressions and melodies until something sticks works.

Meant to quote

Nah this is bullshit, I could make up "correct" melodies on the spot over chords, as well as apply "correct" chords to a melody well before I learned theory. As long as you're smart enough to recognize patterns, then as you learn, sing and play songs you will learn the language of music even if you don't know how to write down the grammatical rules.

The language comparison is a good one, you don't consciously think about sentence structure when you speak, and you maybe don't even know how to explain the rules, and yet you know it anyway.

soundcloud.com/foamroller

now that we're at it, pls someone rate my melodies for this simple song, my first try at simple acoustic song.

guitar all over the place, repetitive and clunky
decent voice though, work on it
and have you ever heard of a chorus?

well it kinda has a chorus, maybe its not obvious, but chorus is meant to be part when key changes from Am to A and it goes into well known progression I V vi IV

mic is laptop built in so thats why everything sounds shit.
what do you mean by guitar being all over the place?

But taking English at school is still good for improving your vocabulary and understanding why things work like they do
Same applies with music

>what do you mean by guitar being all over the place?

I mean you need to work on your rhythm, bit forceful and jarring

not shitting on you btw, props to anyone out there writing and being creative

Yes of course, but those who never took an English class don't "fumble around desperately" until a coherent sentence comes out

thanks, any feedback is appreciated
i thought the melody is nice so i made a song quickly

That's just because they've been generating language every day for most of their lives.

People getting into music haven't been generating music all their lives, just listening to it.

Children getting into speaking haven't been generating speech all their lives, just listening to it.

Right, and they sure struggle don't they?

Not really, after a year or two. Who knows, maybe I'm some sort of exception, but it was only after about a year of guitar playing that every melody I came up with was in key and I could tell right away if a note was not in key, and I didn't even know what a key was yet. It's much more important and useful to be able to hear that intuitively than to understand why it theoretically does or doesn't work.

You could read and learn that on day one, and then all your writing is just going consist of checking what you've done against the "rules" rather than be a natural process.

>you don't consciously think about sentence structure when you speak, and you maybe don't even know how to explain the rules, and yet you know it anyway.

Because speech is engrained into your mind from a very young age, you hear it absolutely everywhere. Parents, in public, pre-school and further education. You aren't exposed to music to anywhere near the same degree.

I think music would come a close second in that regard though. Besides, I wasn't saying EVERYONE already knows these rules intuitively, I'm saying musicians who have learned a reasonable amount of songs. You learn what works through the process of speaking and listening, theory just tells you WHY it works.

Without any musical theory, you could definitely hear if a chord matched a note; but even with a tiny bit of musical theory you could already greatly narrow down the number of chords to check.
And that's just one tiny example.

But give me a melody and I'll just hear the potential implied chords in my head, I'm not going to have to go through it note by note and think "okay it starts on C, then there's a D, and ends on a G, so a C major chord will work with the D as a passing tone". Again I'm not saying that stuff is useless, just that it's more important to be able to think in music than think in written rules.

What the fuck are you talking about?, talent doesn't mean shit if you don't have practice.

Have you ever played an instrument in your life?

Use fifth chords in whatever way sounds good.
The beautiful thing about them is that you don't have to know jack about music theory because they're not even real chords.

you mean power chords? like G5 F5 E5