Commodore Remix

Hi !

Since i am "famous" for wrong notes (or false notes), i hope to find some help here...

First of all: normally there are no such thing as false notes! Because music is still art - and you as the artist create the sounds ! Look at some of the "neoklassizistische" (<this is german, because i don´t know the english word for it) music...sometimes this kind of music sounds terrible, but it´s exactly the way it supposed to sound. If a painter wants to paint a green sky with yellow clouds, no one would say: such clouds don´t exist Anyway, thats not what i want to discuss. I want to do music that sounds harmonic and that feels "right".

When creating a ReMix i start with putting the original lead notes (the melody) in the piano roll. after also adding the original baseline notes, i want to give some more sounds to it...like a pad (or strings) that play the matching chords. And there is the (my) problem...i never went to a musician school or have some sort of musical education. I always made music just by ear. And that leads me to the following questions:

1) How can you tell, that the basic-tone of a song is (for example) Major C (C-Dur) ?
Is it the first note of the baseline? Or some kind of summary from the most played notes?

2) Can this change during the song ? (e.g. song starts with C-Maj but chorus plays in F-m)


I have searched the web for tutorials of this matter and found some, but they can´t answer these questions to my satisfaction.

Me neither have musical education, by I can tell you it is based on the scale you're playing in. All chords are based on scales, so if your melody fits perfectly into a scale, you'll easily see which chord is the base chord for that melody.
You can usually form chords with notes from the melody, and that might help you out

Anyway, wikipedia is always your friend

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28music%29

Thank you very much !
I think this will help me out...and to build chords with notes from the melody is also a great suggestion - will try that.

How could i forget wiki ?! i often look for answers there, but didn´t think about it...silly me

My system is: "trial and error"...


But kjetiln is right. You can find out at least two notes of the chord by the melody and bassline.

Amok wrote:My system is: "trial and error"...


But kjetiln is right. You can find out at least two notes of the chord by the melody and bassline.

That can be right in most cases but won't be in some cases. The main melody of Warhawk for example starts
with a note which does not appear in the root chord and so do a lot of basslines.
It's only a matter of the scale, therefore it's necessary to check at least the first few bars of the main melody.

@Iceman: There's still something like false notes: If you're doing a remix recreating an existing melody and change several notes unintentionally I'll still call them plain wrong. IMO it shows that the artist did not pay enough attention to the original he wants to contribute to. Still for me it's a different aspect when note changes are done on purpose but in almost all cases there's no "improvement" made.
Interestingly in most cases it's quite easy to distinct intentional from unintentional changes.

Romeo Knight wrote:

Amok wrote:My system is: "trial and error"...


But kjetiln is right. You can find out at least two notes of the chord by the melody and bassline.

That can be right in most cases but won't be in some cases. The main melody of Warhawk for example starts
with a note which does not appear in the root chord and so do a lot of basslines.
It's only a matter of the scale, therefore it's necessary to check at least the first few bars of the main melody.

Yes, i know that it isnt that simple sometimes. But then i use the "trial and error" thingy...

Anyways, i still have wrong notes and chords in my remixes, too...

Ofcourse you can talk about false notes by doing a remix otherwise you would call it a total conversion...

Nice to hear that you guys also "fiddle" around with the notes i think i should just spent much more time on this...but it´s so damn frustrating to just try notes: you have to hear the same sequence over and over...and at one point you cannot tell what right or wrong...normally i put that track aside and get back to it some days later. But that will not always work :/

Anyway thanx for the comments

If u arent sure if your notes and chords are right, you should hear the original tune several times again to get the feeling for the right notes back. For me it works in most cases...

This won't help much, but while I know some basic music theory I never "think" in those terms (ie. I don't think: "okay, now I'll play within a modal D# scale, or perhaps play some Locrian runs!"), I just "feel" when a note is false/wrong. When I want to learn a song on the guitar I may use tabulature to help me find out how a certain passage is played, but that's just when I can't figure out how to play it. To me the only tool I use to detect false/wrong notes are my ears, nothing else. It's an "instinct" I've had as far as I can remember. If it sounds good it's right, if something sounds "off", there's a mistake somewhere.

Oh, btw., I think the more experience you get, the better you will become at learning a song/melody with your ears. It will get easier to detect the notes and rhythms. Just keep working and experimenting and you'll get the hang of it. Rome wasn't built in a day.

i would be more than happy to have this ability. as i said: i hear that there is some wrong (or out of harmony), but i can´t put my finger on -.- and thats the point where knowledge or maybe lots of experience count. someone said: music is just like mathematics so i was hoping that there is some kind of super-uber-mega-trick to "calculate" the a chord-progression

right now i am working on a SID-remix where the bassline goes up´n´down very unregulary...with lots of pitches...it´s hard to tell what notes are the basic ones. i nailed the baseline down on all patterns and wanted to start giving some depth to the song by adding strings (or pads). but to play the same notes like the bassline or the melody sounds...ähm...stupid

but i think (hope) to get it right...sometimes


Edit: made a screenshot of that funky baseline:

That's right, music theory is basically mathematics, but musically speaking often 1+1=3 seems to be more right than 1+1=2.

Don't you just love 4-Mat's funky bass lines

The one nice thing about SID tunes is that you can sometimes use the original Arpeggios to figure out what chord progression the original composer had in mind.

Romeo: I'd say music is like a formula x+y=1, for single value there is infinite number of solutions, but also not every solution fulfils that formula

Gaaahhh!

Emancipate yourself from the chains of music theory!

Transcend the cruel limitations of conventional chord progression!

Make music that sounds good to YOU, and most importantly - BE CREATIVE!

[Takes off bra and runs naked throught the woods]

i.e. Become a Jazz musician!