Knowing how to write melodies quickly and effectively is really important – no doubt.
In this article and video, I’ll show you a great little hack for writing (or playing) melodies in ANY key with MINIMAL musical knowledge required.
Watch the video tutorial below, or scroll down further if you prefer reading:
Example: Say your song (i.e. chord progressions, bass line, vocals, etc.) are written in a key with lots of black notes in it (e.g. E flat minor).
That can make playing a melody quite tough as unless you’re a skilled musician with a good knowledge of scales, you’ll probably keep playing wrong notes, and it will sound horrible!
To get around that, try playing your melody using only the white notes.
How? Like this…
Writing Melodies in Any Key
Load a MIDI pitch transpose plugin in front of your melody instrument.
Using the MIDI pitch transpose plugin, transpose your melody instrument by the amount of semitones it is between the root note of your song’s key (in our example, it would be E flat) and either “A”, for a minor song or “C”, for a major song.
Why?
Because both A minor and C Major only have white notes in them, so after you use the MIDI pitch transpose plugin, you’ll be able to play your melody only using the white notes but it will sound like it is in the same key as the rest of your song.
Easy peasy!
In our example, the song is in Eb minor. The notes of Eb is 6 semitones below the A on the keyboard, so we transpose our instrument by -6 semitones, so that when we hit “A” on our keyboard, the instrument actually plays an Eb.
And there you have it! Easy melody playing in any key. For another great little hack, try my humming technique (click here) 😊
Let me know if you have any more melody-writing tips & hacks in the comments below!
Cheers, and happy producing,
Will
