Convert Your Rhythm to Melody

Nobody can deny that the audio processing of drum loops and individual drum sounds requires countless work hours. Paying attention to details, cutting, moving, and processing them in various ways is something that all producers often come across. Moreover, the same approaches and techniques in treating certain drum sounds or loops can become monotonous. With that in mind, I would like to demonstrate something more creative that could inspire you to move in a different direction and create something exciting and new. By reading this blog, you will learn how to convert Rhythm into a Melody!  

Add Melodic Character to Your Drum Loop.

One of these creative techniques would be adding melodic character to your drum loop. In this case, morphing it with the harmonizer effect would be the way to go. There are various harmonizer effect plugins on the market these days, but I find one particularly useful. The Record, which you can find within Guitar Rig 5 by Native Instruments, is a simple yet effective tool with many parameters needed for this task.

Firstly, I will choose a random drum loop from my sample library and place it on the new audio track. So, the unprocessed drum loop sounds like this:

~ Drum Loop Unprocessed

Guitar Rig 5 Resochord

Once I have the Rhythm, the next step would be to place the Guitar Rig 5 plugin on the newly created audio channel rack in SoundBridge and choose Resochord among various components. Let me briefly explain the parameters within Resochord that we will use for this tutorial: -The MIX controls the amount of the effected signal. -The MODE section has three controls and one switch. -The switch toggles between CHORD and STRING. In CHORD mode, you can use three controls: -CHORD determines the chord overlay of the processed signal. -STYLE sets the chord type from major, minor, alt, meta, and frank. -KEY allows you to transpose the Resochord in semitones. However, in STRING mode, only SPREAD   and KEY controls are used. -SPREAD sets the range of frequency affected. -The six combs are tuned according to various chords in CHORD mode. In STRING mode, the six combs are centered around one frequency and can be spread for an intense chorus-like effect. Lastly, DECAY control determines when the effect is held after the original signal.  

Moving Forward

After determining the base key (in this case, C minor) using the KEY and CHORD parameters, we can play around with other parameters, like setting the desired amount of DECAY. Furthermore, I will create a new automation lane on the drum loop track and automate just the KEY parameter to create some melody. Here are some examples of how the result sounds in STRING and CHORD mode. It's always good to get the creative juices flowing by converting your Rhythm into a Melody!

~ Drum Loop With Resochord / String Mode

~ Drum Loop With Resochord / Chord Mode