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To Capture a Melody
Hi, friends! I am wondering what you all use to capture ideas when you're just playing around on a keyboard. I often like to sit down at my beloved M3 and just start playing whatever comes into my mind, and sometimes it is brilliant (if I do say so myself), yet unless I break out of the moment with the express intent of programming the idea into something, everything is lost in an instant. Sometimes I'll start an audio recorder to capture the idea, but reverse engineering it later is too difficult. MIDI is probably a better option, but to be honest I'd like to hear it, as well, and matching tempo from what I'm playing to what is recording isn't always an easy task. I don't want to be a slave to a metronome and the ideas often change mid-stream. This really might be a matter of self-discipline more than finding the right combination of tools to help, but it's worth searching. So, how do you (or would you) ideally pin down those elusive melodies that deserve to be heard again for "easy" future transformation into a song? Thoughts?
Comments
You could try recording the MIDI data without using any quantizing or metronome. It would be similar to recording the Audio, but you have the pitch and relative timing of the notes to go back and look at. It won't have any relation to the MIDI timeline, but you also won't be slaved to a preset tempo.
I'm a big believer in stickiness. If a melody is really that good, I'll remember it the next time. And if it's not, then I'll likely find a variation on the melody later that does stick. But, everyone is different. I do use an audio recorder to work on harmonies and accompaniment ideas.
Repetition. Just pick any random combinations of notes that go together harmonically using the 8 bar standard and just work with it. Eventually your brain will find a way to make a meaningful song out of it.
Don't believe me?
Watch this:
There was a thread on this recently that featured some workarounds to achieve something close on iOS...The newest Ableton is the only solution that will do exactly what you need. I have been using this "capture" feature quite a lot.
I find that if I noodle around on push for a few minutes playing around similar notes, that it's very easy to pick out a few loops that I am happy with and duplicate some of these midi clips to play other instruments. Adding arpeggiators and transposing some tracks really speeds up the process of getting a full arrangement going quickly.
Play it into Notion. Then just copy and paste the section you like.
If it is something I started humming to myself or doo-be-doo-be-doo-ing and I happen to be home where the iPad Pro is, I’ll use Apple’s Music Memos. If I’m out, I’ll try and remember it but forget it, no matter how good or memorable or hooky it is. If I don’t externalise it on a substrate with persistence, it’ll just go - I’ve lost countless ideas that way. All the ones that would have made me very rich indeed - all those got forgotten.
I’ve tried writing down melodies in the past, using unwieldy arrangements of dots and arrows, to indicate earlier than / later than, and higher frequency / lower frequency, but there doesn’t seem to be any workable arrangement of mapping a tune out on two-dimensional paper. At least, not that I’m aware of.
The new Ableton 10 "Capture" feature seems brilliant for this. I hope we see other DAWs copy the feature soon. Doesn't seem like it would require any fancy programming.
In terms of iOS, Apple's Music Memos is one of the best things I've seen. And it's FREE. It's completely FREE. Go check it out.
My phone's voice recorder is full of short recordings of ideas. Some have parts sang by voice: verse, chorus, bass line, drum beat etc. I have virtually thousands of them. The idea is to listen to them during a creative low to get ideas.
As opposed to @lukesleepwalker's idea of stickiness, I listen to them from the perspective of time which gives me a more objectivity. Some of it is just average but some are real rough diamonds.
Accidentally this captures some of my 'then' life in the background: kids screaming, coffee perculating, wind in my bike's bell....
Odessi on MacOS has had a capture feature for a while now...
Random samples. Much of the time the result is nothing. But every so often, the basis of something begins to reveal itself. Then the starting gun has been fired.
If only we had such a technology we could do away with midi altogether.