World-famous producer KSHMR has released another “Lessons of KSHMR” in partnership with Splice. This lesson focuses specifically on writing melodies for your music. Arguably one of the more difficult pieces of writing, this 12-minute session is screen-direct walkthrough of KSHMR’s process. KSHMR talks about scale selection, some basic progression patterns, and his process for ‘finding that next note’ in a song. The melody he creates throughout the video is built in Ableton Live, which is KSHMR’s DAW of choice.
One of the greatest takeaways from this video, is simply hearing him talk through his process. A lot of his methodology (and it seems like most producers follow this), is a sort of “trial by error” approach. That’s the combination of experience layered on top of a strong understanding of theory. The foundations of music production are such a solid combination of art and science. Music production can be very formulaic by nature – your ear knows what sounds good and can recognize flow, but the art comes into play with minor tweaks and direction. We aren’t downplaying the art by any means – that’s the part that makes your song unique and able to stand out from everyone else.
You should ignore this TLDR and watch the whole video, but a few notes:
- KSHMR begins this video with a bass line to set the flow
- Duplicate your bassline, stack notes into chords to build a foundation layer
- Don’t always start on the root note of your note so you have something clean to return to
- Recognize when you need to add/remove notes to keep the energy moving
- Duplicate your 8 bar with slight changes to keep things interesting, but don’t change your “home” (first few notes)
- Ending your melody on the root can be a bit dull, but not wrong.
- KSHMR definitely knows his theory — he’s not just a note guesser.
One interesting call out from this video is when KSHMR notes that a portion of the melody he builds reminded him of a Showtek melody. He states that, “it’s a habit of mine and not necessarily I don’t think a bad habit to constantly pull from great melodies…but sort of tie it together to make it your own.,” in regards to mimicing or sort of using someone elses work as a reference point. It’s funny that KSHMR calls attention to this as his hit song, “Secrets,” actually took the melody from “Heads Will Roll” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. However, he did really seem to make it his own.
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