chord progression help

drought

New member
so when i look up videos on youtube about how to create a melody there is something that always confuses me. i understand that to make a melody that you stay in a scale and and u can use chords from the scale to create a melody. But in the videos say they pick c major as there scale for the melody they will go down an octave and put notes in like c d e c or something like that and then they will go back up to the octave they want to you and start putting in notes and chords. so what and why did they do that in the lower octave?
 
Well, I don't know if I understood you right, but I guess he was either:
1. making bassline on lower octave? (don't know how low),
2. if it's the same melody on lower and higher octave, maybe he was giving the melody some variations, so that it doesn't repeat only a melody on 1 octave.

It is not like 1 octave = 1 scale. You can place notes whereever you want in the scale (in this case scale of Cmajor) of course those notes need to be going good with the chords you are using.
 
The bass could have been on a lower octave just because it sounds better. If you use a plugin like boobass and put it in the 6th octave it won't sound "bassy" because the pitch would be to high. My bass is usually around octaves 3 or 4.
 
So here is a somewhat prosaic (almost country) example that shows four different octaves being used to create a melody and backing:

[mp3]http://www.bandcoach.org/fp/audio/melodicDesign.mp3[/mp3]

melodicDesign.png


The image shows the names of the notes and we can see that each one is in the scale of C major and has it's own place in providing the bass, the chords and the melody.

This is an extract from my larger American dance music suite (based on the ideas found in writing Cajun and Zydeco and Appalachian mountain music which goes back even further to old English folk songs).

Read the notes as you listen and understand that a scale is a source of ideas not the only idea.
 
Basically,

When you play your music on different octaves you wider the range of your song. That makes it sound more interesting.

Basically bass is played low, melody is high and chords are played in-between. Now that doesn't mean you can't do something different, but that's like the basic rule i'd say.
 
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