I’m having trouble writing melodies. I’ve watched a lot of tutorials, know music theory, and know keys and scales so don’t tell me to do that. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
There’s no systematic approach to melody writing. You just have to keep trying.
It’s just practise. After a while you will get good at making what you have in your head. In the end you will just know what key comes next before playing it. If you are still not getting the feel you want it might be because you are in the wrong scale. So remeber there are many more than just major and minor.
If I don’t make exactly what I want in the first try. I will move the MIDI clip to the side and try again. Then after a while I will have a few to chose from or even merge parts from a some together.
I normally hit keys til something comes together. Another thing you can do is take a clear melody from something else cut it up reverse it and such until its something new.
all these user names with ‘official’ on the end, is it because you’re so popular you actually have people copying your names and you need to put the ‘official’ bit in there so we know it’s really you?
…anyway regarding the melody, if you know music theory, know how to play, etc, etc, and you still can’t come up with a melody, then my advice would be to choose a different path in life.
1 BigUp
Yeah the official one is Kronos, father of the Olympians, the great castrator.
That or the beast of time.
I found that Maschine can help coming up with melodic variation etc… but in the end
it has to come from your mind.
what usually helps me is fucking around with the synth untill I find an inspiring sound, then usually i can roll out some decent shit in 2 minutes
Like when you hear 2 notes of a certain synth your brain fills in what the notes need to be quickly.
With melodies it’s really like that, if it doesn’t come to you quickly it’s not coming at all. I keep switching the sound until it’s obvious what needs to be done. Sitting around tryna conjure up good melody without that spark of inspiration doesn’t work for me.
Another fun thing is to make a melody that’s meh and then bounce it and mess with it going forward and back and stretching and cutting it up and moving it until it sounds really cool
Start tunes drums first when you have no ideas and then start adding sounds on top.
1 BigUp
I used to dissect MIDI files to learn about melody and structure. Might be worth a go.
I made this tune 8 years ago, dissecting the Real Rock riddim from midi files. The bassline notes and background keyboard came from the midi files. It was a fascinating experiment.
Now thats where being a musician really kicks in. Its all on you buddy, theres no tutorial and no one to help you on youtube to do that.
Only advice would be - play a drum loop, and just start playing on your midi over it - untill something hits that sweet spot in your soul. Goodluck!
This is good advice. I know it’ll not be the advice that people struggling want to hear but it’s the truth!
I have issues with melodies because they don’t sound amazing straight away, or they don’t sound like artist X so I get put off.
Persevere and believe in yourself! 
Theres loads of tricks
but the main one is to make it percussive. Make a rythm out of the melody. Create the melody on top of drums so the melody underlines the swing or plays against it.
Then when you’ve done that, just come up with some simple variations and then loop those.
Then write some similiar rythmic variations in double tempo on top with a high lighter sound like an arp or some piano.
You will qucikly get an affinity for this and then you can begin to create a rythmic melody without drums where it just hangs on it self. Thats really the key imo. That it can stand on its own.
But trust me a lot of amazing songs are totally fucked in this aspect and we actually help them out with the way our mind cling on to the bit that we like or is good.
A lot of time a song where we think the melody is amazing, is often just the good part of the song and the rest of the song (without us realizing it) is actually quite bad. The only way i can say this, is that when you sample the good part and loop that - you might suddenly realize it needs the bad bit - to sort of present the good bit in another light. Context is everything blablabla but yeah.
tip : keep the bass that goes with the melody simple to begin with (not like in the beginning of the song but in the beginning of creating them) - this way you can use the bass as the rythm part you can lay the melody on top of.
Or steal entire melodic bits from films - put them in melodyne and then just make another scale out of the info but keep the rythmic relation between the notes intact or at least similar.
Melody is all about the way the sequence that it consists of by itself creates something we can loop up in our mind and make a rythm out of. And much more so than which notes gets used. They basicly just have to have some form of relation - the scale could be totally fucked and still work TBH.
Next bit is not meant to sound totally smug but…
There is actually one note melodies which either undermines it all a bit or just proves my way of thinking. 
