Add Accents to Your Melody With Percussion Sounds

While making a track, you'll likely come to the point where it's time to write a melody. Whether it's a lead or an arpeggiated melody sequence, it should sound like it belongs there with the other elements of the mix. This process can take a lot of time and trial and error while you search for the correct rhythmic pattern of the melody sequence. There are a few tricks you can use to make your melody more interesting. We will present to you one such trick in the following tutorial. In the picture below, you will see a previously made pattern in SoundBridge: DAW, which contains all the main elements of a full mix. We're just missing a melody. Let's hear how it sounds without it.

~Full Mix - Without the Melody

Now, let's add a melody. In this case, it will be an arpeggiated sequence.

~Arp. Melody 

Layering the Accents

The idea of this technique is to add accents to your melody. This will be done by emphasizing critical notes and layering them with percussive sounds. This way, the melody will sound more dynamic and contribute to the overall drum groove. To do that, let's select a few short percussive sounds and place them right below the melody channel in SoundBridge: DAW. This will help us better look at where the MIDI notes of the melody are. As you can notice in the picture below, some percussion hits are longer than others. This is to make the groove more interesting. Let's hear how it sounds.

~Arp. Melody + Percussion 1

We could contribute to the groove even more by adding another percussion sound, which we will place on different melody notes. The first percussion hit we used was a tom sound, occupying the lower part of the frequency spectrum. For the next, we will choose a high pitch sound. Take a look at that in the picture below.

~Arp. Melody + Percussion 1 & 2

Finally, we will adjust the volume and eq the newly added percussion elements to fit them in the mix. Let's hear it.

~Full Mix - With Melody and Percussion Sounds