I'm picking a style from the Stylepicker, and then creating a Melody with the Melodist, and finally, I'm adding a real track soloist to the mixer, but I find that I am having a few issues.

The first is that the generated melodies don't sound all that different.

The second is that even though the soloist is a recommended real track, it doesn't work well with the generated melody.

I just want to quickly make an album that follows a similar style, but doesn't sound like 10 samey tracks.

Here are my Melodist settings.

Just wanted to say Welcome. I don't use the Melodist, but I'm sure someone who does will be along to help.

Thank you, Matt, good to be here!

Trying to make an album without much effort....... Seriously? I thought it was the effort going into it that made it good and unique. If it didn't take much effort, anyone could do it. No... you need to put some effort into this even with BIAB. The more effort you put in, the better it (hopefully) will be.


My advice: Don't use the melodist and then try to have it do several songs in the same style. To get a somewhat different result, you need to use a totally different style.

I used to use the melodist a lot when I was first getting started and noticed that there was a certain similarity in much of what I was doing. I started hearing the same licks and patterns in the "new stuff" that was in my older tunes.


The best way to work is to create your own stuff and not let the melodist do it for you.

My big nit with the melodist, aside from the somewhat apparently limited creativity it has, is that many times, the chords it was picking were just plain weird. I was having to go in and do massive editing anyway so why not just create something new from scratch? I don't think I ever had a single song that the melodist created go from start to finished unedited.

These are a few of the songs I "wrote" using the melodist, albeit with heavy heavy editing.

Walking in Springtime

A Memory of You

Sao Paulo Night

It is possible to get some totally different sounding stuff but you have to edit and add some live parts. Each of those songs above, and several more on my music page, started as ideas created by the melodist. I picked them from dozens of melodist attempts. Then I sat down, and edited the results to become a unique song. Each one has a different style as it's basis.

A note of interest and observation. I heard someone else post a song in the showcase a few years back that had the EXACT same melody line that I remember from one of my early melodist experiments. I mean exactly the same melody.

Melodist should really be more for inspiration than the final product; however, my suggestion is to go through the various melodists and generate a song that has a chord progression you like. Make sure the "allow style change" checkbox is checked, but the "generate chord" checkbox is checked. Forget about the melody for now (especially since you're having the computer generate the melody anyway).

Then once you have a chord progression you like (and you can definitely tweak it after it has been created), then go back to the melodist and uncheck the "allow style change" checkbox, because you now have your backing progression.

Uncheck the "generate chords" checkbox, and now, with the "Generate Melody" checkbox checked, go through the various soloists until you find one you like. It will generate the melody over your underlying chord progression. Don't worry about the instrument used for the melody, because you can change that later.

I think that would give you more flexibility and satisfying results. You'll have to generate chords a bunch of times, as well as later generating the melody a bunch of times.

Obviously, you can skip the first half of the process by just entering your own chord progression, and then allow BIAB to generate a melody over that.

Once you have the melody, you are still probably going to find some notes you don't want. You can edit/delete/move/etc those notes in the piano roll editor.

Don't know if it helped, but as RHarv said, it's still some work. Yes, you can just push a button and get a melody over a chord progression, but it probably won't be what you really want.

That's how I use it...get my chord progression first, then do my melody, then do my soloist (if desired). Actually, oftentimes I'll also use the melodist for my soloist (at least when working with MIDI), as the melodies tend to be less busy than the solos. I just swap the melody with the soloist track, generate a new "solo" melody, and then swap the tracks back and make sure the instrument assignment are correct. If I'm using RealTracks for my soloist, it works the same regardless of which track I'm using.