A ton of you (especially those from the UK) will know that chord planing is essentially *the* sound of early 90s rave. Load a complete chord into your sampler, then play it like a standard melodic line. How do we go about building interesting melodies and/or bass lines on top of this?
I'm currently working on this track. I've let you hear 8 bars of just the bassline, then 8 bars of the bass + the major chord stab. https://soundcloud.com/chqtestsubjects/raveloopcut
It uses the famous Brazil stab, which is itself a complete (?) major chord. As such, my chord progression is F major, B major, C major, and it sounds great. Building a complete track around it is proving rather taxing. Treating each chord as a key change is one avenue I've looked at - there's only one note's difference between the tones of F major and C major, and even a hack like me can deal with that. But that B major is gnarly as hell and shares barely anything with the two keys either side of it.
I've gone back to some of the tracks of my youth to see how the old guys dealt with it, and the answer is largely that they didn't. The chord planing itself is busier and works as the only 'melody' heard, while bass tends to be the root of whatever triad is happening at the time with the sampled stab. Often the bass is sub rattlingly low and allowed to be simply out-of-tune sounding, the 'hear/feel' threshold of these ultra-low lines largely absorbing any dissonance. While it's an improvement on what I've got in the sound example (where I just octave jump the root notes), I'm not really sure how to develop the track beyond this. Sure, I could do what all the old rave guys did (arpeggiate the bassline/melody as per the chord sounding at the time, have a break down consisting of one bass note with a spooky fifth a few octaves above on a string synth, etc), but then I don't really want to fall into pastiche with it and I'd rather the Brazil stab remained the sole single call back element. Attempting to make something that calls back to rave but sounds thoroughly modern necessitates avoiding those 'proven' rave cliches, and limits what I can do in terms of arrangement. I'm quite keen to having that lovely bass sound play more of a melodic role and focus on this melodic rather than purely sonic development. Something like the role the bass plays in this track, perhaps:
Any thoughts?
Working with melody when chord planing
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- KVRAF
- 3506 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
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- KVRer
- 3 posts since 31 Jan, 2017
Hi. It's actually used a lot in Deep House & some Drum & Bass as well and it's the former where I became familiar with it using chord memory on certain synths.
Yes it can be tricky trying to come up with melodic parts because as you've realised, you could technically be going in and out of different keys and if you did that with your melodic parts, it's gonna sound pretty weird and you'd be wandering around with all sorts of notes with no sense of cohesion. But you're playing that riff pretty fast, so really one could argue that this IS your melody. It's not serving as a set of chords in a traditional sense so any further melodic parts might confuse things and make it sound too busy.
That said, is that stab a major 7th or just a triad? It's difficult for me to pick up on whether it has a major 7th or not so I am going to assume it has and is. Anyway, there's 2 notes different between an FMaj and a CMaj chord not one, the 'F' & the 'A'.....FMaj=F/A/C and CMaj=C/E/G the B Maj B/D#/F# shares the 'B' from the scale.
If we assume the stab is a Major 7th. Then you have these notes: F/A/C/E, B/D#/F#/A# and C/E/G/B, so really, the only out of key chord is the BMaj7 but it's root note is common to the scale so you could play a 'B' over that particular chord. If you think further than just the chord you can find more notes than just the chord notes and that will give you more options.
For instance, an 'A' under the CMaj7 makes it Amin9 a 'D' on the top makes it CMaj9, and 'A' under & a 'D' on top makes it Amin11.
With the FMaj7, a 'D' under it makes it Dmin9, a 'G' on the top makes it FMaj9, a 'D' under it and a 'G' on top makes it Dmin11. So there's some non chord tones that will sound ok sustained through at least the CMaj & FMaj chords. You'd probably want to avoid an F note over the CMaj chord and you'd probably want to avoid a B note over the FMaj chord, Notes that will sound ok over both of these chords would be A, C, D, E & G ( A minor pentatonic )
As far as the B chord goes, you'd probably be better off just using a 'B' note through this chord and it will be fine over the C chord as well.
Yes it can be tricky trying to come up with melodic parts because as you've realised, you could technically be going in and out of different keys and if you did that with your melodic parts, it's gonna sound pretty weird and you'd be wandering around with all sorts of notes with no sense of cohesion. But you're playing that riff pretty fast, so really one could argue that this IS your melody. It's not serving as a set of chords in a traditional sense so any further melodic parts might confuse things and make it sound too busy.
That said, is that stab a major 7th or just a triad? It's difficult for me to pick up on whether it has a major 7th or not so I am going to assume it has and is. Anyway, there's 2 notes different between an FMaj and a CMaj chord not one, the 'F' & the 'A'.....FMaj=F/A/C and CMaj=C/E/G the B Maj B/D#/F# shares the 'B' from the scale.
If we assume the stab is a Major 7th. Then you have these notes: F/A/C/E, B/D#/F#/A# and C/E/G/B, so really, the only out of key chord is the BMaj7 but it's root note is common to the scale so you could play a 'B' over that particular chord. If you think further than just the chord you can find more notes than just the chord notes and that will give you more options.
For instance, an 'A' under the CMaj7 makes it Amin9 a 'D' on the top makes it CMaj9, and 'A' under & a 'D' on top makes it Amin11.
With the FMaj7, a 'D' under it makes it Dmin9, a 'G' on the top makes it FMaj9, a 'D' under it and a 'G' on top makes it Dmin11. So there's some non chord tones that will sound ok sustained through at least the CMaj & FMaj chords. You'd probably want to avoid an F note over the CMaj chord and you'd probably want to avoid a B note over the FMaj chord, Notes that will sound ok over both of these chords would be A, C, D, E & G ( A minor pentatonic )
As far as the B chord goes, you'd probably be better off just using a 'B' note through this chord and it will be fine over the C chord as well.
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- KVRian
- 524 posts since 26 Nov, 2009
With such progressions you are modulating through different tonalities or you are borrowing chords from parallel tonalities.
This is used all the time in film music...
Identify your master scales that fit into your chord progressions and just play some melodies.
This is used all the time in film music...
Identify your master scales that fit into your chord progressions and just play some melodies.
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- KVRist
- 129 posts since 2 Sep, 2016
It is not so complicated, tho maybe requires learning to understand reasons for it.
OK, so not knowing these things, we think hacky. So you move only from F to C like I to V? The B maybe is behaving like IV. Tho it is a sharp IV, so find the mode having a sharp IV. Substitute like this. Who knows? It maybe becomes normal for the ear.
OK, so not knowing these things, we think hacky. So you move only from F to C like I to V? The B maybe is behaving like IV. Tho it is a sharp IV, so find the mode having a sharp IV. Substitute like this. Who knows? It maybe becomes normal for the ear.
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
As said or implied above, planing will tend to take you places that diatonic triads won't explain. Conventional terms kind of not the point there.