Captain Melody

I’m slowly converting to using the Captain Plugins by Mixed In Key as my go-to Midi tools! Especially the newly released Captain Melody 3.0 is absolutely amazing for creating melody lines when I’m looking for inspiration.

A lot of Midi Tools seem gimmicky at best. It’s cool to know that David Guetta wrote the melody and chords for his “Stay (Don’t Go Away)” remix using Captain Melody 3.0! Check out the introduction video to get an idea what you can do with the plugins.

What’s new in Captain Melody

The so-called Idea Box in Captain Melody helps craft melodies appropriate for different types of instruments. While the built-in Captain Plugins instruments sound ok-ish and are alright to knock out some ideas, you want to switch to VST output quickly. This way you can route the plugin to a virtual instrument of choice, like Omnisphere, the Arturia V Collection or Kontakt for example. A list of parameters basically affect the melody’s rhythm, cadence, complexity, tonality and much more. You can create arps, change melody shapes, add randomness and experiment with variations of your melody!

Especially the new First Note and Lanes options are great to narrow in on a specific type of melody you are after. First note is obvious – it lets you select the note your melody starts on. Lanes on the other hand is a great tool to have. They change the probability that a given note occurs in the melody. You can also choose “Follow Chords” within the Lanes, so the intervals are based on the chords changes as apposed to just the parent scale.

Other new features in Captain Melody 3.0 include a pencil and paintbrush for MIDI, which lets you draw in the notes of your melody right inside Captain Melody 3.0. Paint your melodic ideas onto the MIDI editor and draw in polyphonic melodies in a breeze!

Overall the melodies instantly sound great out of the box, which is probably due to the fact, that a bunch of new presets inspired by the latest Spotify Charts were added. And finally – you have the ability to import your own custom MIDI Files!

Can’t find the right rhythm of your melody by tweaking the options? Enter Magic Record and jam out rhythms on your computer or MIDI keyboard to add even more magic to your music. So cool!