I’m in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.
Whether I’m sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I’m generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I’ve created.
The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it’s just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that’s been slowly tacked on over time.
Alternately, I’ll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars… these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don’t tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I’m working on.
Interested in hearing your tips and tricks for switching up melodies.
Try improvising before you write new parts of the melodies. There are a lot of cool ways to improvise. You can set up a backing track for yourself by muting all the stuff that limits your melody and playing along to the rest or do what traditional composers do and come up with the whole thing on the piano. Which instruments play in your backing track will affect the way you play the melody too, though I would recommend you don’t do it without either drums or bass in there (edit: because they provide the rhythmic backbone for the rest of the music, whatever is muted you’re not syncing to rhythmically).
I have my own method of improvising: I usually play along to other people’s tracks - the ones I reference, look up to and listen to. Just hook up a synth that sits well in the mix of the song that plays and jam away! You’ll get a lot of fresh ideas and will be able to explore different chord progressions and motions without the hassle of writing them yourself!
That’s actually a pretty novel way of approaching the problem. I’ll keep that in mind!
I already kind of do that to an extent - usually with the original iteration of the loop (which is almost always the simplest version of it), but I should consider playing around with later iterations and knocking out some - but not all - of the other stuff I’ve added to it.