Stage 1: Writing Melody and Chords

First of all, the DAW (digital audio workstation) I am working on is FL Studio. There are a lot of videos and tutorials of producers of many genres who uses this, so I figured using this program would be most practical with all these resources helping me.

Before anything else, I needed to select the beats per minute value of my project. It's a bit higher than most other electronic music genres out there, but I've selected 150 bpm as it correlates with the music I normally listen to.

Changing the program's default bpm preset to 150bpm

By default, FL Studio has the Kick, Clap, Hat, and Snare channels open on the channel rack. You can play around with these channels to create patterns/sequences, but I don't need these for my project. I've closed all the default channels and opened up FL Keys, a stock piano channel.

FL Studio's default channel rack configuration

Opening up the FL Keys channel

Opening up the channel's piano roll allows me to place notes and any patterns I want. Here comes the fun and hard part. I'm not musically gifted or anything. The last time I played on an instrument was during elementary school, so transferring a melody onto the piano roll will be challenging. I spent a long time whistling and trying out notes at the same time.

The keys for the 16 bar melody

 The second verse has a slight variation at the end to give a more climactic ending

Now that I have the notes down, I will need to create the chords on another FL Keys channel. By definition, chords are a group of notes (typically three or more) sounded together, as a basis of harmony. This will add a background layer to the piano keys and act as a form of support. Kind of hard to explain, but give the finished chords a listen and you will know what I mean.

The chords for the melody

Writing the chords was very difficult. I had to figure out which notes sounded good individually to create the harmony I needed. Lots of trial and error went behind this process. If you had a background in music theory then this step would be easier, as a note's major and minor scale plays an important role in writing chords.

Here are the keys and chords playing together: