Korg Forums

[michi_mak]

i'm not talking about different genres but more of a general kind of music - is your music more rhythm or more melodic driven?

i'm asking because i can't imagine to do melodic work without a piano roll type ui which of course is the opposite from an Electribe.

[Sulfur]

Mine is more melodic. I usually start with a riff (tipically the bass) and a simple drum. Then I build up the melody lines playing them and elaborate all of these. During the process I start taking a raw decision on the mute/unmute and pattern sequences that will help me to refine the lines and the drum through the step edit menu.
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[michi_mak]

thanx for answering! so do you "try" what fits your first melody or do you "compose" ( let's say you got an a in your first melody therefor you need a c or e because you want to be i a-minor ). i can't see how to go for a second melody or chords if i don't have some sort of piano roll or staff paper except for trial and error (hearing what fits well)...

[Sulfur]

[michi_mak]

[InTheAM]

I do a bit of both. For music that is more melodic than your typical dance track I think there is a distinct advantage to using something more complex to arrange in MIDI.

Electribes are best for electronic music that prefers quantized sequencing and simpler, repeated phrases (loops ;p).

At least for myself, if we are talking a sampling Electribe I think there a lot of cool possibilities with chopping and rearranging complex melodic material. But like the EMX or E2 are going to be great for house and techno et al. and probably not so great for complex song writing.

[King Duppy]

I work mostly on the ESX, which has two chromatic keyboard parts, so I’d say I do a fair amount of both melodic music and more rhythmic music (which I usually record electric bass and/or guitar parts over).

It’s been years since I could properly read written music, so I tend to compose either on the bass, or right on the ESX itself. Usually that means coming up with a basic drum part on the ESX, improvising on the electric bass over it (or very rarely writing a chord progression on the guitar), and then using that as the core of my song.

From there, I’ll either record the electric bass as a scratch track to follow (and ideally replace later with something more polished) or play that melody or bassline into the ESX using its chromatic keys.

If I’m basing the song around a sample, I usually set that sample on repeat so I can tease out what key it’s in, find a bass or harmony line works with it, etc. Then I'll usually mute that core sample and add more parts using the chromatic keys or tuned one-shot samples— harmonies, countermelodies, etc. Each time I add something, I'll play it along with the original sample to make sure I didn't add anything that clashes with it.

Sometimes it all works out, and it’s just that easy. Other times I drift too far from the original sample. In that case, I'll usually just remove it entirely and see if I the song works on its own without that loop in it.

I’d also suggest, in the words of Luke Vibert (AKA Plug), to “work in loop mode for as long as you can take it” to get all the EQ and levels feeling right and give yourself a good starting point. That way you don’t have to go back and fix all those little things later in every pattern you’ve built out of the original.

I also have an old ES-1 that I use mostly as a drum machine for when I’m playing bass, or for creating loops that I then resample on the ESX to use as stretch or slice parts. I’ve written some songs on the ES-1—given enough creativity, you can write a song on anything—but not being able to play it chromatically means it’s a lot more work to write a melody line or bass line.

That said—the electribes give you a ton of different parts (even the humble ES-1 has 9 drum parts and a Slice part), and I've found that as often as not, that's actually way more parts than are useful. In other words, it lets you make music that's much more busy than it probably should be.

A way around this, I've found, is to load the same one-hit sample (say a bass tone or other melodic instrument) to some of those drum parts, and tune each to a different pitch. This does two things:

1) It gives you a kind of "keyboard" to play a melody with a limited number of notes.

2) It reduces the total number of samples available to you in a pattern, which forces you to make decisions and helps you avoid a cluttered song with too much stuff going on.

Sorry this is so long. Hope it helps!

[InTheAM]

[King Duppy]

[InTheAM]

[King Duppy]

Props for mentioning King Tubby!