Instead of spending years learning the intricacies of music theory before having melodies and chords that match,
you can literally just have notes that sound well together highlighted.
Obviously this will not replace theory, but it is a fast lane to your music not sounding really bad, and I wish I knew this much sooner when I first started.
FLStudio 21:
1. In your Channel rack, right click any sample and go to the "Piano Roll"
2. On the top left of the piano role there is a right arrow you will click on
3. Select "view" and then choose "scale Highlighting"
4. Now you are presented with a list of scales that you can choose, which will be highlighted in the background of the piano role
5. Now for your whole track, if you only use notes that are highlighted in the piano role, you will never be out of key again, and your music will sound much better.
[Note: this is also possible in older versions of FLStudio such as 11, and likely most DAWS however the settings are located in a different location, you will need to research and dig.]
This will help:
-Making Melodies
-Chords
-Staying in key
-Knowing which notes will clash and resolve terribly
(Important: write down which scales you use for each song, and when you change the scale in the next song, it will apply to every song until it is changed again, meaning if you work on 2 different songs at once in different scales, you will have to keep swapping the scale)
Start experimenting with melodies and chords in each scale, to really improve your emotion sound design rapidly.
When I hear a track where random notes are selected, and are in a completely different key, and sounds terrible, I immediately cant continue listening. Of course their are niche cases where producers go out of key to add a unique approach tastefully. But most of the time it is somebody who doesn't know much about Theory, and selects random notes that they like, and nobody has the heart to tell them it is terrible.
Please start using Ghost note scale highlighting
