How to create music with randomly generated notes?

Ever tried random musical composition? It works! In a previous article I shed some light on how to put music over lyrics or rhythmic patterns. That time I came up with a certain melody line, I even harmonized it later on. But how did I come up with that melody line, you may ask. What to do when you don’t have the slightest idea what notes to use? Well, if it happens, all you have to do is start gambling.

Take out your dice

Yep, we will call luck to our side, to get some help. At first, let’s decide how many notes do we want, set the range we want the notes to come from, and the kind of scale we want to use, too. I think a short, 7 note phrase will be good enough for our purposes now, within an octave (with the octave note still included), over the diatonic C major scale, to keep things easy. You can find a random number generator here (you can use a 8 sided die too, if you have one). Enter the numbers 1 for min – that will be our lowest number note, the tonic of the scale, and 8 for max – that will be the octave note. My numbers are the following: 8, 3, 4, 2, 6, 3, 5

Let the numbers lead your mind

The score of it – with all quarter notes – looks like this:

Now that we have the notes, we can harmonize our musical phrase:

And if you would like to play the chords on your guitar, these are the chord shapes I used: