Rhythmic Displacement! Unlock your boring melody

Use Rhythmic Displacement For Not Getting Stuck

How to write a melody or rather: how to not get stuck writing a melody! Writing melodies is probably one of the more abstract things about writing music. Some people have a natural sense for writing melodies, but even they need to know how to develop and expand them. So what can you do when you feel that your melody is boring rhythmically and maybe melodically? What if the rhythm just never feels right.

In this very short tutorial I show a very easy but powerful technique that you can use for when you are stuck on a melody and want to spice things up rhythmically. Or just if you want to learn how to create more music out of that one single melodic fragment. The topic of this short video is Rhythmic Displacement.
This technique is a very rational technique. What you do is simply move the whole melody forward or backward. You do this, while retaining all the note values.
This creates a different balance between melody and harmony, as well as the other rhythmic elements.

Displacing your melody rhythmically is one of the most easy, but powerfull techniques to create subtle variations in your melodic phrases. And as mentioned above, you can apply this melodic technique to any style. And once you’ve mastered it, you might even try it on your chord progressions.

Having dificulty applying this technique? It is normal that when you try to apply a rational technique like Rhythmic Displacement to a live and breathing melody, you will find it dificult to find a use for it. But don’t give up, because to write music means to experiment and practice. Maybe the melody does not sound and fall naturally straight away, but once you practice the new rhythm, you might be surprised how good it will sound!

This video is part of a melody writing series that I made. All of these videos are aimed at giving you techniques to change and adjust your melodies. This way you will never get stuck.

Here are some other episodes:

Change your melody by removing and extending notes

Transpose a melody for easy melodic variation

Connecting melodic phrases, a forgotten technique

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