It’s time to get crackin’, since my latest challenge is to make three new tracks by the end of the year. I wanted to start a new track by trying a certain very simple technique for melodic arrangement.

Once again I was facing an endless collection of different options from where to choose your instruments and sounds when composing electronic music.

The solution

As I was planning my strategy for tackling this issue, I was reminded by a tip in Making Music’s certain chapter, which Ableton has actually put online as a teaser here. The basic idea is to use only one sample to create all the sounds for your track.

I found this tip quite helpful for a couple of reasons:

I’ve always found specified limits and boundaries to actually boost my creativitity. It’s why I like to use a smaller number of drums in my drum kit setup for instance.

This technique forces me to really spend time in learning different functions of my music making software, Ableton Live 9 in my case.

Puzzle it up

I took the same approach to writing as I did with the first track, which turned out to be surprisingly fun and effective in the end.

Write a short sample of melody or chord progression Cut the sample into pieces Rearrange the pieces by finger drumming to make a new melodies

The difference this time is that now I’m going to make all the melodies out of this sample only as opposed to adding new instruments to the mix.

Tweak it!

Obviously this technique calls for some hardcore sound editing and manipulating. I tried everything from transposing the pitch of sample up and down to stretching the sample.

After some days of work, I managed to make three new elements out of the same sample using only the stock effects and tools provided in my software! Have a listen here if the player below doesn’t work.

I started by playing a few chords and harmonies with piano and guitar samples [Original Melody]. Then I turned it into three new distinctively different, yet somehow similar sounding elements [#New String Instument, #New Robotic Pad Noise & #New Piano & Guitar].

When played separately the clips sound pretty strange, but together the result is actually really fascinating. But I’ll leave that for you to find out later!

A great thing in this technique in my opinion is that the initial melody doesn’t have to pure gold to start with, as the rearrangement of the pieces turns the original sample into something unexpected.

Next: bring in the drums!

Things should get REALLY interesting as next up it’s time to add drums and start turning these sounds into a whole arrangement.