Mixing melodies

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What happens if you take the melodies and tunes from a song and mix them around?

Most music makes a point, some how or other, of taking contrasting sounds and playing with them. Melodies are no exception – pieces of music often have more than one characteristic melody, theme, pattern, or riff and some of the interest in the music comes from how these melodies interact with each other.

Taking this interaction between melodies and changing it, gives endless possibilities for creating new, interesting sounds.

Voice and bass

Take this example from Jason Yarde's song, Where will it take you?, where two important melodies – the vocal tune and the bass riff – come at the same time.

In the Explorer below, of Jason Yarde's song Where will it take you?, the green links go to different melodies and themes. Click on the ‘find’ buttons to go to each one.

Use the 'focus on' buttons on the track that each link points to, to hear it on its own.

Try clicking on the bars on each link to select them, then ‘copy to clipboard’, to put them in the clipboard. Hold down shift to select more than one bar at a time, to make a group selection.

If you go to the Composer, you can paste the copied bars from the clipboard into a new piece. Try different combinations and orders of melodies.

And you can move bars around by first selecting them, and then using the Hand tool. Also, if you turn on the Snap button, bars will align to each other when you move them.

Here are a couple of examples of what you could end up with...

Adding some rhythm

Mixing melodies

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