We are back with another week of Point Blank Online. We are now three weeks into the electronic music composition course, and we’re finally delving into the meat of what the course really has to offer. If you missed weeks one or two, no worries, just click the links and you can catch up on some of the useful tricks and techniques we are finally getting the chance to put into action.
In the third week, we covered approaches to writing melodic rifts and the different approaches a producer can take to getting some ideas down into your own Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). In the previous lessons, we covered ideas such as chord chord progressions or bass lines which provide you with a couple musical boundaries in which the rest of the creative aspects of the song can live. Elements such as melodies or harmonies lie within (or tastefully outside of) these simple confines. So expanding on the theory we covered in some previous weeks, we learned all about how to start crafting your main ideas within themselves.
These ideas include things like making a melodic idea out of a pitched percussion sound like a tom drum or synth percussion. Making little melodic ideas that are short and easily loop-able can lead to more complex melodic ideas as you continue to build around a simple foundation. Other tips that can get you off the ground when starting to craft new songs is building ideas off of other people’s music. This isn’t to say steal a synth line and drop it into your track or anything like that. But instead try looping an 8 bar phrase in one of your favorite tunes, and building off of that simple idea. What you have an idea you’re proud of, delete the original sampled idea and you are left with a great platform to build the rest of your song.
After the conclusion of week three, I am more excited than ever to continue with the course. Finally getting into the knotty gritty of writing electronic songs and fleshing them out into full arraignments is what got me pumped about this course in the first place, so I, along with the rest of my class mates, are pumped to get the ball rolling. This week also saw the submission of our first batch of assignments. This required us to submit a handful of rough sketch ideas that will grow into at least one full tune by the end of the lesson. As we speak my submission is getting reviewed by one of the professors, but next week I will be able to tell you just how all that is going!
Happy Producing everyone, until next week! For further information on all that Point Blank has to offer, head over to their website for full courses and more information on earn gin your degree through one of the best electronic music schools there is.