However much us Brits criticise the US for commercialising dance music in the last 3 years with the likes of Skrillex, David Guetta and Avicii capitalising on what was a very wide gap in the market, collaborating with some of the most sought after artists in the music industry. We must not forget that the US were the ones that gave birth to disco, house and techno, which all electronic artists of today have undoubtedly been influenced by. They have also produced some extremely gifted artists with the likes of Carl Craig, Danny Daze, Gaslamp Killer, Soul Clap, Pillow Talk, Flying Lotus, Jimmy Edgar, Nicholas Jaar and Seth Troxler (to name a few), showing that the US sure know a thing or two about what underground electronic music is all about.
In the US, New York to be exact, you can also find one of the most highly regarded electronic music colleges in the world, known as Dubspot. It is the U.S equivalent to Pointblank and like Pointblank it has a huge range of expert driven online tutorials that are well worth delving into, and for the purposes of this piece we have found a particuarly good introductory video on ‘Creating Melodies from Chord Progressions’.
What Matt Shadetek has done is create a melody by slicing up chords into 16ths using a pad instrument, he then mutes all of the 16th note slices and un-mutes selected 16th’s to create a riff. This is a slick technique if you’re having trouble creating a melody for your track and although the video is aimed at beginners, more advanced producers could also use this technique for inspiration by using more complex chord patterns.