Thought I would continue here in this forum more for the songwriting aspect.
I'm a very analytical, black/white, 1s and 0s kind of thinker. I've been this way all my life and I do not have a creative bone in my body. But I'm a good IT geek. I've yet to submit my own song to the User Showcase (Hoping to change that in 2018). I've been in bands in the past and spent a lot of time recording them as well. I just haven't really written ANYTHING of my own material. I've been a forum member and BIAB/RB owner for 4 years this week and I've finally now learned the Melodist.
So what I've found with the Melodist is that it can generate chords, melody, or both. In my case, I just need to create a melody as I write my own chords with the Chord Map (see attached at the bottom of post). Those creative, talented folks that hang around here simply step up to a piano or whip out the guitar and run some scales up and down a few times and have a melody riff. I can't do that!
So once I have a BIAB song setup with my style and all the verses & choruses bars set up with chords, I'll highlight 4 or 8 bars of the verse and open the melodist. I leave pretty much all the settings stock and make sure that the box is set to keep the melody in the current style. Once I click OK on the box, I go to the melody in the Piano Roll view and then I can drag notes around in pitch and time until I'm happy with the result. If the melody is too blah to edit, I'll just wipe it and melodist again. Once I have it finalized, I'll copy that verse melody to the rest of the verse parts of the song then I highlight 4 or 8 bars of the chorus and rinse and repeat the melodist.
Would love to hear anyone else's experiences in this situation.
Now on to lyrics..... argggghh. Hey, wait! I can use the post above to write a song about not being able to write songs! Eureka! Maybe kind of like this:
I've got the cure for that one - 1) only WRITE instrumentals, and 2)when playing, ONLY PLAY MELODY (chordal, jazzed up, straight..) - NEVER SING (can't sing and have a voice for deep space)
Larry
Win10Pro,i9,64GB,2TBSSD+20TBHDDs,1080TI,BIAB'24,Scarlett18i8,Montage7,Fusion 8HD,QS8,Integra7,XV5080,QSR,SC-8850,SPLAT,FL21&others,Komp.14,IK suite&others, just a guitar player-AXE FX III &FM9T, FishmanTP, MIDIGuitar2, GK2/3'sw/GI20
Great post and I agree. The Melodist is an amazing tool.
I usually use my own melodies but when I find myself getting stuck in a rut, and the song I'm working on sounds like something else I've heard or written, I open the Melodist and always manage to find melodic inspiration. Like so many things in BIAB, it is such a great song-creating tool.
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