Tip of the Day: Add Melody notes to your Chords Sometimes melody notes do not completely fit their underlying chords - which can sound very interesting or just amateur and bad. A perfect example for that can be, that you are in A minor (natural) and your melody plays a G. If your bass note is A and your chords play the standard A minor chord triad A-C-E, this G can feel out of place (poor thing). You can easily make that G more welcome, by adding it to the chord already. So instead of playing A-C-E over your bass...

Tip of the Day: Do not start on the Downbeat! You know the scenario: cool beat is at 80%, the first pads or even the bassline is in and you feel, that it is time for the melody to enter your listeners ears. With or without a MIDI keyboard at hand, you might tend to start on an even beat or most of the time “even” on the first. True, many great melodies of our or former times are or were written that way, but it is very easy to spice things up a little and add a boatload of...

Tip of the Day: How to envision your Sound - 3 quick Tips Yes, sometime you just start clicking some notes together with no real intentions and create a cool song. But if we are honest, that does not happen too often and is mostly up to fate - and music follows rules. In most cases though, you have an idea that you have been whistling on your way home or a song that inspires you, to come up with a similar sound. In rare occasions you even have your song already laid out in front of your eyes and...

Tip of the Day: 5 Finger Melodies - 3 helpful Tricks! You think that really good melodies need to be extra fancy and spread across the keyboard or spanned over your whole vocal range? Maybe time to think again, because most of the catchiest melodies we know, were written within notes you can play at the same time with only 5 fingers. That does not mean, you should play them altogether though. Let´s even leave out black keys and let us imagine, we are in C Major, which gives us a tonal material of 5 notes - C D E...

Tip of the Day: Focus on Note Length - 2 easy Tips While every DAW´s editor has a default note length (mostly a 4th), it does not mean, that it has to stay that way! When you are a producer, that does a lot in the editor, this tip can lead you to more organic sounding melodies and leads, because it is more rhythmical and less predictable. Imagine Ed Sheeran mumbling some sounds over a chord progression - he introduces all kinds of note lengths, while he improvises. Tip 1: improvise Try to sing, whistle, clap or dance a rhythm,...

Tip of the Day: Use Reference Tracks This is a snippet from our Start to Finish Mixing Course. You find the official trailer below and can sign in anytime and learn at your own speed - as often as you want! Referencing is important and can´t be highlighted enough, because you can only sound as good as you want, when you know why other tracks sound the way they do. Tip 1: be picky Do not choose the first song that pops in your head though. Give it some thought, because you want that track to be very close to...

Tip of the Day: Focus on the Arrangement - 4 Tips Writing the perfect melody on the most sophisticated chords ever does not make a hit single. You need to arrange your ideas, to make it work over that period of time, we call a song. To achieve a sonic composition, we need to explore and master the vertical and the horizontal. You want to create energy with contrast - tension and release, loud and quiet. Only by introducing dynamic, you can keep the listener interested and absorbed by your sounds. There are some essential tricks you can use, to...

#PMLsundayspecial: Can you guess this melody? Can you guess, which simplified melody we show here? Sunday is funday - at least here at PML! No break up or theme park fire can bring us down. That is why we are celebrating 10k followers on Instagram and give away a very special promo code for every right answer! Please comment on our Insta post within 24h and we will send you the code, if you answer correctly. Share with your producer friends! What about the melody? We all know that repetition is a major tool to make melodies of any kind...

6 Arrangement Tips: How to make Tracks not Loops Some inspiration to get started Unfortunately we have to bypass the assumption, this might be something that can be learned over night - because honestly there is no right or wrong. As the concept of sidechaining is rather easy to understand, arranging music has at least two different dimensions - horizontal and vertical. You need to span your ideas, loops and sketches over a certain period of time (horizontal) and stack the right instruments and sounds on top of each other (vertical) to achieve the concept of a song. But these...

Tip of the day: Why your song needs a BREAK - 5 Tips Did you find a way out of the infinite 8 bar loop? Good and congrats! Did you highspeed in the other direction and your track seems like an endless collection of clips and samples, that get muted and unmuted in differing patterns? Maybe it´s time for a break. See it both ways if you want. Go to a club and listen to new sounds. Or actually introduce a break in your song, by shutting down almost completely and leave the listener in a new situation. This can...