Beats or Melody: What comes first?

[KingTrollestia]

As someone who is just starting out making music, I was curious to know which usually comes first in your music production experience. I'm mostly interested in working with Dubstep, Techno, and House.

[Paianni]

Neither. It tends to be the chords that come first for me, followed by a beat, then a melody if needed.

[Nine Volt]

It's all personal preference, but I start with the beat.

[the4thImpulse]

There's no real best place to start that works for every person and every song. It will all come down to a personal preference that you will grow over time.

Now what I do when first starting a track is to use a drum kit from a previous track (I typically make the house/electro genres), I always save the kits from previous tracks to use this way in the future. I create a quick and simple drum loop and then load in a synth and start creating a chord progression. After I get a synth riff I like I then go back to the drums and build a new kit replacing the samples and re-eqing and mixing them in to better suit the riff.

If you really don't know where to start then I would suggest messing around with synth for a bit and maybe you will find a nice riff to work with.

[KingTrollestia]

There's no real best place to start that works for every person and every song. It will all come down to a personal preference that you will grow over time.

Now what I do when first starting a track is to use a drum kit from a previous track (I typically make the house/electro genres), I always save the kits from previous tracks to use this way in the future. I create a quick and simple drum loop and then load in a synth and start creating a chord progression. After I get a synth riff I like I then go back to the drums and build a new kit replacing the samples and re-eqing and mixing them in to better suit the riff.

If you really don't know where to start then I would suggest messing around with synth for a bit and maybe you will find a nice riff to work with.

Yeah I was thinking about just playing around with some synths, trying to find something that sounds good, then try and build a beat around that. Though i'm not sure if that's the best course of action.

Also if anyone knows how to create some basic techno/House/Dubstep beats to work with i'd really appreciate it a lot

[Nine Volt]

House would be 4 on the floor at 128 BPM (by that I mean a kick on every beat). Typically there is a snare or clap on every other beat, and hats are used to fill the spaces.

Dubstep is usually halftime at 140 BPM (the rest of the song is 140, while the drums are effectively at 70). A kick-snare-kick-snare pattern is typical, but, perhaps even more so than with most genres, dubstep drums have a huge amount of variation.

[itroitnyah]

I've found that starting with chords can help to set the mood of the song, and then building up from there will almost always ensure that the mood of the song stays the same. Drums are sorta something that doesn't really matter when exactly you make the drum pattern in the song, imo, since the mood of the drums aren't affected by the mood of the chords. But the drums ARE incredibly important for keeping the mood of the song. A quick bouncing beat with many kicks and snares in a row and fast hats won't keep the mood of a sad, dreary song. You get the idea.

[the4thImpulse]

Yeah I was thinking about just playing around with some synths, trying to find something that sounds good, then try and build a beat around that. Though i'm not sure if that's the best course of action.
Also if anyone knows how to create some basic techno/House/Dubstep beats to work with i'd really appreciate it a lot

As previously said, there is no 'best' course of action. Only the one that works (and really any course can work). Since you are new and have nothing to go by you need to take whatever direction you think of to gain the experience. Your suggestion is as good as any, take it, if it doesn't work out so well for you try another route and consider thinking about why that may be.

FOr how to make beats just search on youtube "How to make (genre here) beats". House is almost always kick on every quarter note and snare on the 2nd and 4th with some hi hats playing 8th notes. Dubstep can be vastly diffrent with all the sub genres so try listening to the song and copying the kick and snare sequence.

[cloudshovit]

dubstep is 140. 99% of dubstep is at 140 half time.

[Navron]

Neither for me. I often switch what kind of element I start with, because most of the time I already know what kind of song I'm going for.

If I'm doing an atmospheric, eerie kind of song, I'll usually start off with a pad, then figure out when the drums are going to fade in and establish a groove. Once the intro and groove are set, then I'll work on the melody and chords.

If I'm doing a club stye song, I'll usually figure out the main hook before deciding what kind of drum beat goes best with it.

If I'm doing a big epic piece, I'll usually work on the motif and the melody first, then work on synth arrangement, and lastly drums.

Overall, it varies as much as my genres do.

[LFP]

Usually melody/chords first for me, after I have figured that our I design some synths and then decide on a bpm style or w/e and apply a best accordingly :3

[Raddons]

I just cycled through like 3 basslines and 4 leads for something I'm working on. I did the beat first, but I changed that. I'm probably gonna change it again later on.

[FLAOFEI]

Depends on the genre for me. Though I usually start with a bassline a few notes aranged as a melody, then a drumbeat. Then improviseing from that.
Its easier for me to do the drumms after I have a few notes down since Im a drummer. I have alot of experience coming up with drumbeats on the spot to fit the tune, so I can just make up a good beat fast.
If you have any experience with improvising on any instrument you should do that one second. Its tempting to do it first, but its easier in the long run.

[Lavender_Harmony]

There is no correct answer to this and there never will be. It depends on what's in your head.

[ph00tbag]

It really depends. Sometimes I start with a melody and the percussion flows out of that. Other times, I start with a really catchy percussion riff, then I build a track around that. In other cases, I just have a patch or effect that sounds really cool and I riff off of that.

Whatever comes first, I can say that the writing doesn't start in earnest until I've made the beat. So I suppose you could say the beat is really where the track starts.

I will say that, particularly for house and techno, you'll want to spend a lot of time on the beat, because that will be the most prominent aspect of the track, and if it doesn't have an infectious groove, the whole track will suffer.

[Nine Volt]

There is no correct answer to this and there never will be. It depends on what's in your head.

^^^This^^^

Music is all about personal preference (except mastering and maybe mixing). Nobody can tell you how to do it, you should just go with what you think sounds good.

[Seven]

Oh, but OP's not asking what's correct. It's asking what we do.

I begin with whatever element my song revolves around. That's often chords, synth design or a baseline. (Rare cases, the actual melody. I have started off with drums as the centerpiece of some songs, but they turned out rather ambitient.) If, for say, I come up with the baseline first, the next step is usually the chords. Then the tempo, depending on the apperance of what I've got so far, and adjusting the drums to that.

Then the brickwall compression on everything. And all the soundgoodizers.

[Dabrenn]

Neither. It tends to be the chords that come first for me, followed by a beat, then a melody if needed.

This is what I do as well.

If its House, the beat is always first technically, since it's pretty basic. But I wont do percussion fills until much later.

However, for breakbeat, I usually start with a basic loop (think Kick hat snare hat), build my main hook on top of that (Including melody), then go back and add in drum fills.

[Ed Viper]

I typically set up my bass tracks first and build everything else off of those low-tones, actually.

I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be done, but it makes it easy for me to make sure the melody(ies) harmonize with all the background sounds.

[Borsko]

I tried starting a song out with just vocals, but I found it hard to make a melody with it and even harder to make a beat. I don't suggest doing that, but it may work.

For Drum and Bass I typically start out with a beat, but for just about everything else I just stumble across a melody I like and go from there.

[itroitnyah]

I tried starting a song out with just vocals, but I found it hard to make a melody with it and even harder to make a beat. I don't suggest doing that, but it may work.

Well if you're going to be making a melody for vocals where you record the vocals first, or remixing a song where you the have the vocal track file before you can start making the beat/melody, then you need to record in the bpm your song is in, or change the bpm of the vocal file for the remix to match. I know there's a thread on how to do this somewhere below here.

[BlackElectric]

I do my drums and rhythm guitar chords first. Then after that I go on to lead guitar melodies.

[Nine Volt]

Melobeats. Melody created with the beat.