# Music Theory For Producers (This Is All You Need)

**Channel:** Akayo
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOlqJ8qoDYQ
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/KOlqJ8qoDYQ

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Why Music Theory Matters
- 5:27 — Understanding Scales in FL Studio
- 9:19 — Building Basic Chords and Progressions
- 17:33 — Advanced Chords and Emotional Voicings
- 29:33 — Capturing Melodies and Final Tips

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** Have you ever wondered how to write beautiful chords and melodies that actually make you listener feel something? Or maybe you've been producing for a while and you just can't seem to get that melody from your head out into the DAW. I used to struggle with the same thing. I can remember many times I had a melody idea stuck in my head, sounded amazing, and I'd hold on to it for about 10 minutes, run upstairs, open FL Studio, and just couldn't figure it out. I kept clicking random notes, trying different keys, but nothing sounded right. You know what I'm talking about. It's that weird feeling where the melody in your head feels almost impossible to recreate. Like the notes don't even exist. So today we're going to fix that. I'm going to show you everything you need to know about music theory as a producer, how to write emotional chords, catchy melodies, and I'll even share a few secret tips that I learned from other producers at the top

**[0:43] Speaker A:** level. So let's get into it. All right, so now we're in FL Studio and before we jump into anything else, we need to understand the fundamentals. So first, let's go ahead and open a piano roll. I have Keys on Classic, this is what we'll be using. Let's open the piano roll. And of course, if you look to the left, you'll see this vertical piano with black and white keys. And then by default all of these C notes are highlighted. So C5, C6, etc. So first of all, let's focus on the white keys. Let's start in the middle on C5. Let's place this. And we can begin going through all the white keys. So we have C, then we have D, E, F, G, A, B, and then we go back to C, right? And then we have these black notes in between the white ones.

**[1:23] Speaker A:** So what are these? Let's go ahead and place them. We have C sharp. That little hashtag symbol means sharp. We have D sharp, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, and then it continues. So it goes back to C sharp. So these right here, the white keys, are considered natural notes. And then of course, these are sharp notes. Now, why is it called sharp? Well, the thing is, a sharp note means you go one key up from the original note. So for example, C right here, if you go one note up, this is C sharp. If you go one note up from D, this is D sharp, right? And what about A right here? If we go one note up, this is A-sharp. Now, notice that not every note has a sharp note, right? So, for example, B, if we go up one note, it's C.

**[2:08] Speaker A:** And for E as well, if we go up one, it's F. So, not every note has a sharp. Now, there's also such thing as flats, which is just one note below the original note. So, for example, if we went one note below E, this would be considered D-flat. Don't overthink this right now. Basically, flats and sharps are the same thing, but it just depends on the context. Typically, in softwares like FL Studio, we use sharps, right? And so, if I move these over, this right here is 12 notes, and it's the notes that you'll be using for all of your chord progressions, all of your melodies. This is basically your entire musical alphabet, right? And so, now that we know all the notes and their names, we can cover whole steps and half steps. And stay with me. I know this seems a little boring, but it's going to build up to making chords and melodies, right?

**[2:49] Speaker A:** I promise. So, let me remove all of this here, and it's very simple. A half step is just one note above or below the original note. For example, if we place an E right here, a half step would be going up one note to F. If we place this G, it would be a half step if we go down to F-sharp. We can also go from A-sharp to B as a half step. And then we can go to A-sharp to A, for example. So, what about a whole step? Well, that's very simple as well. Instead of going up or down one note, it's actually two notes. So, for example, if I place the C, we can skip this note and then place D. This right here is a whole step. This is also a whole step, so going from E to F-sharp, going from A-sharp to G-sharp.

**[3:31] Speaker A:** So, that's a whole step. And so, as a summary, a whole step is skipping up or down by two notes, and then a half step is going up or down by one note. Now, the reason this matters is because whenever we start to build scales, those scales are going to be built from a formula that follows these two movements. You'll see what I'm talking about in a little bit. But now, let's quickly move on to intervals. Intervals are just the distance between two notes, right? So, for example, we have C. Let's start here. If we place a C sharp above it, this is a half step, right? It's also considered a minor second. Sounds very dissonant, right? If we place this up a whole step, this is called a major second.

**[4:11] Speaker B:** Sounds a little less dissonant now. If we put it up another note, this is a minor third. And actually here, let me go ahead and lay this out for you, so it's a little bit easier to see.

**[4:23] Speaker A:** So, we got minor second, major second, and then minor third. And then if we go up another note, this is a major third. Then the next one, this is called a fourth or a perfect fourth. Then we have a tritone. If you played this in medieval times, it would get you killed. And then above that, we have the perfect fifth. Then this is a minor sixth. Then we have the major sixth. Then minor seventh. Major seventh. And then finally, we're at an octave. So, just the same note, but up an octave or 12 notes.

**[5:12] Speaker B:** So, there we go. And by the way, don't focus on just memorizing the names of all this stuff. You don't really need to at the moment. The most important are the minor and major thirds, also the perfect fifth. But don't overthink it right now. You'll see why this is important in just a little bit.

**[5:27] Speaker B:** But now, let's move on to scales. This is where it kind of gets interesting. So, once again, let's start on C5. This is like the most basic note, pretty much. Now, what is a scale? To put it simply, a scale is a set of notes, usually seven notes, that sound good together. Think about it like the color palette for your track. And so, the two main scales that you need to know about right now is the major scale and the minor scale. So, to start with major scales, for example, the C major scale is actually just all the white notes. So, we start on C and then we begin placing all the white notes.

**[6:01] Speaker B:** So, that's the C major scale right there. And the name of it depends on the root note. So, for example, if I were to take this whole thing and then move this bottom note or this root note down to, for example, A. Now we're in the A major scale. If I move this down to F sharp, now we're in the F sharp major scale. Does that make sense? And then another thing, this follows a very specific formula. So, if we look here, this is actually just a combination of different whole steps and half steps. So, for example, this right here is a whole step, another whole step, a half step, another whole step, whole step, whole step, and then half step. And it's a great way to memorize how to make major scales. So, just be whole whole half, whole whole half. So, for example, now I can pick any note I want and then make a major scale from there.

**[6:43] Speaker B:** So, I could do G, for example. Start on G and then follow the formula. So, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, and then half step. Does that make sense? So, this is the G major scale right here. But, what about minor scales? They're a little bit different. Let me go ahead and delete this. If I just build the C minor scale real quick, it looks like this. So, we have C, D, D sharp, F, G, G sharp, A sharp, and then C. So, this is the C minor scale and it looks a little bit different and also sounds a little bit different. And we can look at the formula once again to memorize how to build the scale. So, for example, this is whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. It's different.

**[7:37] Speaker B:** And once I memorize this, I can build any minor scale I want. So, for example, if I wanted to build G sharp minor, we'll start on G sharp and then follow the same structure. Whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, and then whole step. So, there we go. And real quickly, if I put these next to each other, you can see the difference in structure between the C major scale and the C minor scale. Major scales are typically more happy and then minor scales are typically sad. And most EDM nowadays uses a minor scale. But, this also completely depends on the context. So, for example, a song can be in a major scale, but it can also still sound sad and vice versa. So, it totally depends on the context of the song. Now, a quick pro tip for the FL Studio users, if you go to the music note icon in the top left right here, you're actually able to right click this.

**[8:28] Speaker B:** And And the major and minor that we're talking about is actually major Ionian and minor natural Aeolian. These are the two that you want to focus on. So, for example, if I wanted my piano roll to be highlighted in F sharp minor, I can right click on F sharp right here in the root note section, and then I can click on minor natural, and now as you can see the piano roll is highlighted in only the F sharp minor natural notes. And now, if I left click this,

**[8:56] Speaker A:** as you can see, it's actually snapping the note to that scale. So, this is very useful if you're a beginner and you're just starting out. And by the way, I go super in-depth on all of this stuff with my students. So, please check the first link in the description, and then if you're interested, you can book a call with me. We can speak one-on-one together, and if I think I can help you reach your goals faster, then we can work one-on-one together. All right, so now you know the notes, whole steps, and half steps, intervals, and even scales.

**[9:19] Speaker A:** But, how do you write chords? We haven't even done that yet. So, let me right click this music note again. Let me go back to C major, just the default here. And now, the C major scale is highlighted on the piano. I'll also write it in once again, just in case.

**[9:35] Speaker B:** So, let's finally get into making chords. What is a chord? A chord is a stack of three or more notes, but how do we build them? It's very simple. If we look at our scale here, remember this is the set of notes that sound good together, let's start on C once again, just to make it simple. What we want to do is look at our scale and skip every other note. So, for example, we start on C. I'm going to skip D and then place E, skip F and then place G. And this right here is a C major chord. And we can do this for any note in the scale. So, for example, if we wanted to start on E, we could do that. Let's start on E, I'm going to skip F, then we can place G. Then the next note from here, we can skip A and then place B.

**[10:20] Speaker B:** Does that make sense? It's very simple once you get the hang of it. Let's do one more. Maybe we can start on D. We can skip E, place F, skip G, place A. So, there we go. Once again, this is the C major chord and it's also called the C major triad. A triad is just a chord with three notes, but usually we don't call it a triad. Just throwing that out there. Now, what about this one? This is actually an E minor chord as well as this one right here. This is a D minor chord. Notice how it's not major. Now, how do we know the difference between a major chord and a minor chord? Well, real quickly, let me just delete this for less confusion. I'm also going to mute these notes real quick. Let me drag this chord down to the root note of this one.

**[11:03] Speaker A:** We can tell the difference between a major and a minor chord by looking at the intervals, and that's where the intervals come in, right? So, for example, right here on the bottom, this is a major third, you remember? And then on this one this is a minor third. And you can also see by the difference in spacing between the notes.

**[11:21] Speaker B:** So, this is a C major chord and this is a C minor chord. And the name also comes from the root note down here. So, for example, this is C major. If I move this up to here, this is D sharp major. If I move it down here, this is A major. Same with the minor. If I take this minor chord, this is C minor right now. If I move this up, now this is D minor. I can move this down, this is G minor and so on. You get the point. Anyway, major chords are typically happy and then minor chords are sad. Now once again, this totally depends on the context of the song, the chords that come before it and also after it. It just depends. But generally speaking, that's what they sound like. And so now I'll go ahead and remove this.

**[12:01] Speaker B:** And now that we've built the first chord, we can continue building the rest of the chords in the scale. So, once again, we can start on D, skip every other note, so E and then F, skip G, place A, and we can do this for each of the notes in the scale. So, E, G, B. This is F major.

**[12:24] Speaker A:** This is G major. And by the way, if you like using this as a guideline, the actual notes, you can just copy this, paste it, and then bring it up an octave. So, this is on C5, we'll bring it up to C6, and then just put it here. Then we have A, A is next. Then B, and then back to C. So, C major. Now you might notice this chord at the top here. This is actually a B diminished chord. It's a little bit different. So, as you can see here, it actually has two minor thirds. If I just bring up this A minor chord, we can compare the structure. The A minor chord has a minor third at the bottom, but a major third on top. The B diminished chord has two minor thirds. Does that make sense? And diminished chords usually sound a lot more dark and tense.

**[13:14] Speaker A:** I could also make another diminished chord by placing this A and then going up by three notes and then doing that again. So, this is an A diminished chord. You You don't hear a lot of diminished chords in modern music, but it's just something to be aware of. And now that we've made all the chords in the scale, we can rearrange it to build a chord progression. So, if we wanted to, we could really just select the chords from here and then start arranging it through a piano roll. So, I could select this G major chord. I could select this one right here and move it over and so on.

**[13:48] Speaker B:** I don't really like the sound of this diminished one, so I'll remove it. Maybe we could try this one.

**[13:54] Speaker A:** So, we could do that by just selecting the chords that we built or we could start completely from scratch, which is usually how we do it. So, now I'm going to remove the scale guideline right here because we do already have it highlighted in FL. And by the way, you can also do this in Ableton. But, let's build a super basic chord progression real quick. So, maybe we can start on E. Let's skip every other note. So, we have the E minor chord. Then maybe we can go down to C. Let's start on C and then build a chord, build the triad.

**[14:24] Speaker B:** Let's go down to A. And then maybe back up to Let's go up to F.

**[14:36] Speaker A:** I actually feel like this could be spread out a bit more, so I'll stretch it.

**[14:43] Speaker A:** And now we have a very basic chord progression. One thing I quickly want to mention is inversions. So, you can see how all of these chords kind of jump very big or have very big gaps in between these notes. So, for example, B to G, also E all the way up to C. This huge jump can sound a little bit weird and then we can smooth that out with inversions. So, how do we do that? We can, for example, take this and this note and put it up an octave. So, I'll press control up arrow. In Ableton, this is shift up arrow.

**[15:15] Speaker B:** And we can do this as many times as we want. So, for example, I can take this one, move that up an octave.

**[15:23] Speaker B:** And now smoothed out those gaps. Real quick, if I undo all of this, it actually helps if we copy the root notes or the bass notes down by an octave. So, I'll copy that, paste it, and we can control down arrow put this down an octave.

**[15:40] Speaker B:** And then we do the inversions from there. So, let me do that one more time. The reason we do this is because the bass notes give it more of a foundation, especially if we invert the bass notes up an octave for example, it can feel like it lost some foundation. So,

**[15:56] Speaker A:** Here we go. There's your first basic chord progression. Now, I'm going to make a new pattern. Let's try a different scale this time. Maybe I'll right click on the music note and let's try something interesting. Maybe like F sharp, right click on F sharp, and then minor natural or just minor. And we can try and create a chord progression in this scale. So, maybe let's start on start on A this time. Skip every other note.

**[16:18] Speaker B:** That's A major cuz it has the major third on the bottom. Maybe we can go to F sharp.

**[16:26] Speaker A:** Then let's jump down to C sharp. And then let's jump up to D. And by the way, if you're wondering how I know which notes to place first, honestly, I'm just experimenting around here. So, there's no right or wrong. Just experiment and find what sounds best.

**[16:47] Speaker B:** I might actually stretch this out a bit more again.

**[16:56] Speaker A:** All right, and there's another basic chord progression. And once again, we can do some inversions to this. So, for example, we can take the F sharp, put this up an octave. We could take these, put these up an octave.

**[17:12] Speaker B:** We could also undo that and try putting some of these down an octave. So, maybe this one And just kind of mix and match it.

**[17:22] Speaker B:** So, lots of stuff to play around with here. Let me make a new pattern and let me reset this back to C major. So, now you know how to make very basic chord progressions using triads or chords with three notes.

**[17:33] Speaker B:** Now, let's move on to a little bit more advanced chords. Let's go ahead and make a basic C major chord.

**[17:41] Speaker A:** And we built this by skipping every other note, right? But, what if we continue going up the scale? So, we have G right here. What if we skip A and then place B?

**[17:52] Speaker B:** Now, we have a completely new type of chord. This is a C major 7 chord. And as a general label, you can just call it a 7th chord. Once again, same rules apply. So, if I select this and move the root note down to A, this is a A major 7 chord. If I move it up to B, this is a B major 7 chord.

**[18:13] Speaker A:** You get the point. So, now why is it called a 7th chord? Well, let me recreate the C major scale just so it's easier.

**[18:22] Speaker B:** Once again, we build basic chords by skipping every other note in the scale. And each note in the scale kind of has its own number. So, for example, the root note is one. Then, we have two, three, four, five, six, and then seven, right? So, we can kind of look at this structure as 1 3 5 and 7, which is where it gets the seven from. What about a minor 7 chord? Well, let's maybe start on D this time. We can make a basic D minor chord from this. And then once again, we can skip the next note and place C.

**[18:55] Speaker A:** And now this is a D minor 7 chord. And once again, it follows the same structure. So, on the root note, this is one, then we have three, then five, and then seven, right? D minor 7. I'll create the C major 7 again.

**[19:11] Speaker B:** And what if we continue going up the scale even more? So, for example, if I copy this and then paste it up an octave, so back up to C, just so we have more guidelines. What if we skip C and then place D?

**[19:29] Speaker B:** This is a new type of chord. This is a C major nine chord. So, once again, we have the typical C major seven chord. We can add the nine. C major nine. What about the rest of these notes here? So, for example, D, uh maybe F. Well, here's the thing. Let me go ahead and remove these extra notes so we just have the C major chord. Just so it's more simple. If we add D here, this is a C major add two chord. Now, why is that? Once again, if we look at the structure, like the numbers, we have one, we're adding two, three, and then five, right? We can also do a C major add four chords. So, we're adding the fourth note right here. If we start on F,

**[20:19] Speaker A:** this is F major add two. So, you get the point. We can also do C major

**[20:28] Speaker B:** add six. So, this is C major add six cuz we're doing one, skipping two, three, five, and then six. Does that make sense? Now, don't focus too much on memorizing all the names of these chords. Really, the main thing you want to focus on is the feeling of your chord progressions that you built. You don't have to focus on, oh, I'm going to place a C major chord here and then maybe an E minor seven here. That doesn't matter. Just focus on the feeling of your chords. I'm just explaining this stuff to you so you at least have the fundamental knowledge to go off of. And then real quick, we finally have sus chords or suspended chords. So, for example, if I make C, make the typical C major, in In suspended chord, you're using the third, the three of the chord, remember? And you're replacing it with either the four or the two.

**[21:13] Speaker B:** So, this is a C suspended two chord. This is a C suspended four chord. And you usually use this to hold tension in your chord progression before it resolves. So, for example,

**[21:27] Speaker A:** in this chord progression here, we have the suspended four chord that resolves into this one.

**[21:38] Speaker A:** This can make it sound a lot more like royal, and you can hear how it holds the tension here for a little bit longer until it resolves into this one. So, suspended chords are usually temporary, but once again, it depends on the song. All right, and from here, if you need to rewatch parts of the video to really get a grasp on it, then I definitely recommend you do that. But by now, you should have pretty good understanding of how to build basic chord progressions. So, now let me show you my favorite bulletproof method for making beautiful chords. Step one is we're going to pick a scale. As you begin to produce more and make chords more, you won't have to just pick a scale, you'll be able to go off of the feeling of it. But we'll keep it simple, we'll pick F minor.

**[22:15] Speaker A:** Once again, I always recommend working in minor. And now we want to write our bass notes first. So, for example, um let's do D sharp and maybe F. We can go up to A sharp and then G sharp.

**[22:35] Speaker B:** And if you like that, then you can go ahead and build the chords from each of these notes. So, once again, skip every other note.

**[22:52] Speaker A:** And then from here, you can decide like, okay, I don't really like this chord, for example. But I do like the first two chords. So maybe we change this one out.

**[23:09] Speaker B:** Okay, that's a diminished. Not too big of a fan of that. Maybe we try this one, just move it here.

**[23:17] Speaker B:** And if you continue trying and trying and you just can't find something that works, then I would recommend just restarting. So maybe this time we can start on F, go down to D sharp, and then go down to C sharp. Once again, I'm just experimenting around. Maybe go down to A. And then I'll build the basic triads.

**[23:46] Speaker A:** Okay, so I like that a lot better already. It's usually always safe whenever you start on the root note or the tonic of the scale. Once you have a basic chord progression that you like, then you can take the thirds of the chords and you're going to move these up an octave. So just the middle notes.

**[24:07] Speaker A:** And the reason we do this is because it sounds so much more emotional whenever the thirds or the middle notes of the chords are accentuated or put up an octave. Cuz for example, this sounds way more dull and basic than this.

**[24:27] Speaker B:** And once we've done that, now we can take our bass notes and put these down an octave. And the reason we do this is for extra reinforcement on the bass notes.

**[24:38] Speaker A:** And I would even put this maybe two octaves down.

**[24:47] Speaker A:** Just to make it sound super powerful. Sometimes the notes get a little bit too low. So I think these ones get a bit too low. Let me go ahead and raise those up an octave.

**[25:02] Speaker B:** Maybe even this one.

**[25:09] Speaker A:** So, you can kind of mix and match what bass notes you want on what octave. So, from here, raising these thirds up an octave also helped make more space for adding extra notes. So, now we can look at our scale and see what other extra notes that we want to add. So, for example, I see this one's highlighted right here. What if we place this?

**[25:32] Speaker B:** So, this right here. This is a pretty dissonant chord because we have these clashing notes. But, sometimes this can sound pretty cool. So, I think I'll keep it. Another thing, sometimes I'll take the very highest note of the chord progression and then just drone this through the whole thing. This is actually called a pedal note. So, something like this.

**[25:57] Speaker A:** And then from here, we can start adding extra notes. So, maybe this one right here. This one's in our scale. Sounds pretty good.

**[26:08] Speaker B:** And but we can place this D sharp through the whole chord progression.

**[26:19] Speaker A:** We can also try adding an F here. Now, the thing is, we already have an F down here as the bass note in this chord specifically. And you want to be careful with adding octaves like this. Sometimes this can make the chord sound a little bit more thin rather than adding a note that hasn't been used yet. So, just be careful with that. I think in this case, it sounds good. We can try adding this F to different chords.

**[26:41] Speaker B:** Not a fan of the F in this one. I think it sounds a little bit too cluttered now, so I'll remove it.

**[26:53] Speaker A:** And then generally speaking, you want the same amount of notes in each chord. So, for example, if I removed these extra notes from this one now,

**[27:05] Speaker B:** it sounds pretty basic and contrasts with the rest of the chords a bit too much. These ones sound a lot more rich, while this one sounds pretty thin. They don't all have to have the exact same amount, but you want to keep it roughly within the same amount.

**[27:21] Speaker A:** And now we have a pretty good chord progression. It's those extra notes that give it that richness. So, from here, what I would do is actually shift around the rhythm of each chord. So, I'll select this one here, and maybe we can shrink this by a little bit, and then place this one slightly earlier. And I'll enable the metronome just so you can hear it.

**[27:43] Speaker B:** Maybe we can do the same with this one. Shrink it and then put this next one a bit earlier.

**[27:54] Speaker A:** So, when making chord progressions, also think about how you can mix up the rhythm to make it more interesting.

**[28:05] Speaker B:** And then you can even add little accent chords. So, for example, on this last chord right here, I think it would be cool to add an extra chord that leads back into the first one right here. So, for example, I'll take the whole thing and make some space for the next chord. And so, the first chord right here is the root note of our scale. It's F, right?

**[28:25] Speaker A:** Usually below the root note in a minor scale, so this note right here, D sharp,

**[28:32] Speaker B:** usually this note wants to resolve into the tonic or the root note. So, D sharp. We can take this

**[28:41] Speaker A:** and I think we already have a D sharp chord in our chord progression, but that's okay. Let me put this up an octave cuz it's pretty low. In fact, we could probably just copy the same D sharp chord over here cuz it's the same thing. Copy that over and let's see how that sounds.

**[29:03] Speaker B:** I think that sounds pretty good. And we could even remove certain notes. So, for example, I'm not too much of a fan of the dissonance on the last chord. Maybe we remove this G sharp right here. And that'll give it a little bit of variation because once again, this is the same chord as this one. So, it will differentiate it a bit. So, once again, this right here is my favorite chord building formula. I definitely recommend you try it out. And this is the exact chord building technique that I teach all of my students. So, once again, if you're interested, check the link in the description.

**[29:33] Speaker B:** And so, now you know all of the fundamentals, how to name the notes, intervals, scales, and even how to build emotional chords now. But, you might be like, "What about melodies? How do I take melodies from my head and then build that out into my DAW?" Well, let's get into that. So, the thing is, most producers don't have the skill yet to literally take the melody that they hear from their head and then instantly build it out into the DAW. That usually takes at least a few years of experience. So, what tends to happen is you try your best to recreate the melody from your head into the DAW and you're kind of just playing around with notes trying to find the right one. You're trying over and over to find the right notes and maybe you get some of them right, but it still doesn't sound exactly how it does in your head.

**[30:12] Speaker B:** Like, it doesn't hit right. And then for some reason, the idea starts to like warp into different variations of the idea and it starts to sound weird. And then you end up completely forgetting what the original sounds like. And then from there, you can't recreate the melody cuz you can't remember what it sounds like, right? At least that's what happens to me. So, what you need is some sort of bridge to keep that idea stagnant so that it doesn't warp around in your head and so that you don't forget it. And so, what is that bridge? Well, it's voice notes. This is like one of the best tricks I've ever been taught. It's best to immediately record the melody ideas that you hear into your head into your voice notes app just by like humming it into your phone because then it gets out of your head and it isn't abstract anymore.

**[30:51] Speaker B:** It gets turned from your brain into your voice into notes in real life. So most producers will try and go from their head and then just straight into the DAW. But really it should be going from your head into your voice and then into your notes app which is your bridge to help you eventually get it into the DAW because at least with that notes app now you've saved it somewhere. So for example, maybe listening to these chords I might hear a melody idea in my head. Okay, so I got an idea. Let me get my phone real quick. Give me 1 second. All right, we're back. Got my voice notes app and so I'm going to play these chords. I'm going to record myself on this app. I'll sound like an idiot because I can't sing but that's okay. Let's just do this. So recording now and let's play the chords.

**[31:37] Speaker A:** And once you've recorded the voice note you can go ahead and save it. So I'll save it as a melody idea. And now at least you have a recording of this, right? So you can look back on it instead of just keeping it in your head and then maybe forgetting it. Let me go ahead and plug my phone into my computer now. I'll grab the melody idea and then drag it onto my desktop and then I'll drag this into FL.

**[32:01] Speaker A:** And usually whenever you have a melody idea you don't have these chords playing the background but I'm just trying to give an example. Let me go ahead and actually use this plugin that I have to remove the chords from the background. It's called clear by supertone. So we can just remove the ambience and stuff. Now that we have a solid version of the melody from our head we can do our best to recreate this. I just rendered out the new file so that way there's no chords in the background. And one of the best ways to actually know what notes you're playing is to double click on this, right click, and then say edit in pitch corrector. And then as you can see here in new tone it'll show you the closest notes to your melody. And then if you're really bad at singing like me, you can turn down the variation here and then turn up center and it it'll almost act like an autotune.

**[32:47] Speaker A:** And then you can kind of correct any off-key notes. And now we can literally just copy each of these notes into our chord progression or a pattern. So for example, C then it goes down to A and then up to A sharp.

**[33:08] Speaker B:** I think I repeated this phrase here.

**[33:21] Speaker A:** And then there's the melody right there. So I know this might look a little bit easy maybe, but this does really take practice as well. It's a lot easier if you're just starting out to record a voice note and then do this method rather than building it out from your head. Unless you have maybe prior music theory experience or something like that. But this is at least what worked for me whenever I first started. I think to wrap it up, let's take this beautiful pad sound

**[33:44] Speaker B:** and let's build some sort of chord progression from it. So this time let's start on G sharp minor.

**[33:54] Speaker A:** Maybe we can start with a really long note and then a half and then a note that lasts two beats. Let's go up to G sharp and then down to F sharp. We can actually put this up seven notes and then get the fifths of the chords and then just place the thirds.

**[34:17] Speaker A:** I think this is a case where we could use the suspended chord. So I'll just put this up here.

**[34:26] Speaker A:** Copy these bass notes down.

**[34:48] Speaker B:** We can take the top note of the whole progression. Maybe try droning this through the whole thing.

**[35:01] Speaker B:** This time I actually didn't put the thirds up an octave, but we can also try that.

**[35:12] Speaker B:** Maybe just find other notes in the scale to fill this in with.

**[35:28] Speaker A:** Hopefully that cleared up some things about music theory. And by the way, if you really need to, please feel free to rewatch parts of this video if you need to get a good grasp on some of the concepts. Now, the thing is, being able to build chords and melodies is a great skill. It's great to have. But at the same time, it's very important to have other skills such as sound selection, mixing, mastering, and other stuff. Because if you don't have that, then you'll have great chord progressions and melodies, but your tracks won't sound professional. And this is all stuff that I cover with my students. So, once again, if you're interested, please feel free to check the link in the description if you're interested in working one-on-one with me to make your music more professional. I've worked with over 60 producers now. Some of them have amazing results such as playing music at festivals, getting signed to smaller independent labels, beating writer's block, finishing albums, and so much more.

**[36:16] Speaker A:** So, I hope to see you in there. Thank you so much again for watching. I really appreciate you and hope you have a good rest of your day. Peace.