Breaking Writer’s Block: Creative Ways To Start New Tracks

Most producers know the frustration of a creative dry spell. Jonny Strinati walks through ten techniques to help break the writer’s block and generate new track ideas.

UsE Audio-To-Score To CREATE Chords

Extracting the melody from a percussion loop can be a great way to kickstart a new idea. Furthermore, playing back the hook you’ve created alongside your original percussion loop usually creates a strong framework to build on.

Step 1

Begin by loading a percussion loop into your DAW. We’re using Logic Pro X here, but Ableton and Cubase both feature the ability to extract MIDI data from audio files. There are even plugins dedicated to this task such as Melodyne.

We’ve loaded a two-bar percussion loop onto an audio track. We’ve made sure there is some variation between the different percussion hits contained in the loop, so the MIDI we extract from this loop will contain notes of different pitch. If your first choice of loop doesn’t create good results, it’s quick and easy to try another one until you find something that works.

Step 2

Now press cmd-F on your keyboard to show Flex Pitch/Time. You will now see a Flex icon appear on the audio track; click this so it turns purple and activates Flex editing for this audio region.

Underneath the Flex icon there is a drop-down menu containing the different types of Flex editing we can apply. Select Flex Pitch. You will now see MIDI notes appear on the audio region, reflecting the pitches of each percussion hit.

Step 3

We now need to transfer the MIDI notes we’ve generated to a new instrument. Double-click on the audio region to bring up Flex Pitch editing. In the top left of the pane there is an Edit drop-down menu. Towards the bottom of this menu you will see ‘Create MIDI Track from Flex Pitch Data’. Select this option. Logic will extract the MIDI data and create an Electric Piano track with the pattern.

Step 4

Now we can transfer this MIDI region to another synth and search for a more interesting sound. We’ll load an instance of U-he’s excellent Diva synth and recall the ‘HS Fatima poly’ patch found in the POLY SYNTH category.

Step 5

Now we can take things one step further by using Logic’s Chord Trigger MIDI effect to generate chords from the MIDI notes we’ve created. On the Diva channel strip, underneath the EQ box there is a MIDI FX slot. Select Chord Trigger from the list.

We’ve chosen to load the Minor preset from the Single>Triads category. This creates extra notes three semitones and seven semitones above the root, giving us a nice warm minor triad.

Dropping the notes down by one octave for a deeper sound, here’s our quick and easy chord pattern playing back alongside the original percussion loop and a simple kick pattern: