composing/writing music

[Guest Mr. Magoo]

ok so i want to create music, i've got a copy of ableton(fuck off too that cunt), and for a while now i just sit at the screen not knowing what to do, this happens when i've created a good bassline, beat, and then i start to fuck around with synthy/string stuff that i think i'll use later, as well as other sort of lead melody, other melodys.

 

the real point of this thread is to ask help from anyone who is experiened in music making note: not experimental/glitch/electronic music/or any other non-pop format music, how do i compose a song; as in what comes next?...what else have i missed?...do i need such elements?....

 

i'am really frustrated here cause i've got good ideas, and have no idea what else i need, for instance with the lead melody, do i need several other melodies for it?, or when the best time to play it?

 

if you are going to respond to my needs then please do not respond to the example questions i have written, since they are probaly useless, or i just don't know, just respond clearly and help me out.

 

thank-you kindly

 

 

btw, dont bother posting sarcastic comments, its weak, and Italian.

[Guest Mr. Magoo]

in other words, how do i structure a song?

[Guest Captain Cooper]

No one can tell you how to write music... study the tracks you like, work out what it is you like about them, and apply it to your own stuff (without ripping it off)

[Guest 1KB]

read up on some music theory

 

when you think you know enough, keep reading

 

it may not help but it'll certainly give you some ideas

 

wait in that case it will help

[Guest Mr. Magoo]

yeah i check google/wiki and stuff, and i feel as though i might have a better understanding, its just this song i'm working on now in ableton, its killing me, tell me if you will let me send you the set!

[kcinsu]

I was just about to write a long post with some advice, but then I read that last line about Italians, so now all I have to say is fuck you.

[pcock]

i suggest beggining with something simple like rondo form, ie intro theme/chorus , verse/episode, theme, episode, transitional variation passage theme.

 

this is the easiest to work around, and you will need to bear in mind harmonies quite strongly depending on wether its for the verse or the chorus

 

in the verse i would suggest much plainer and less satisfying harmonic passages such as chords constructed merely of fifths, or major and minor triads, simply because this will make a much nicer contrast when you go into the chorus. also make sure your melodies are indistinct in this section, maybe even your melody from the chorus fragmented/unfinished?

 

go onto a music site, check up major 7ths, diminished 5ths, general complex compound and dissonant chords for the chorus, as this will give it a much richer and more satisfying texture, turn up the volume on the melody line, and start off writing conjunt(no big leaps from note to note) strong, highly tonal melodies in the chorus

 

some tricks of varying the music

 

augmentation is taking your melody and extending every note by double, often while leaving other aspects of the music the same in order to kind of emphasize the diminuted melody

 

diminution is the oppostie of this, shortening them

 

writing your melody in inversion is simply taking all the notes and reversing them in terms of pitch, this can be done chromatically, which will often leave the melody dissonant and unrecognizble, or it can be done tonally (this can be done for you in cakewalk, cant vouch for other software)

 

using the melody in retrograde is rewriting the melody from back to front, combing this with augmentation can produce some well interesting effects, ive noticed venetian snares does this a hell of a lot.

 

note that ive said melody in all of this, but as you increase in skill this can also be used for harmonies and your rythms aswell, and in terms of electrnoic music is especially useful for your baselines.

 

im sure kiani can add stuff and correct stuff if he gets over the italian dig lol.

 

whack some of the technical terms in wikipedia for a much moire indepth explanation and examples, also study scores of classical music such as beethoven and mozart and bach to get started.

[Paulie Walnuts]

Most music's built around some kind of chord progression - it might be a I-IV-V-I... In techno it might just be a I...

 

How you move between and within the chords is the tune.

 

You can imply chords from the notes you're using... Analogue Bubblebath would be a V-VII(B)-IV-I progression...

 

There's psychology behind every chord you use. Analogue Bubblebath ends on a Plagal cadence - IV chord to a I chord - this gives it its warmth...

 

In standard Blues, every tune uses much the same chord progression and rhythmic structure - what separates one tune from another is often quite subtle - maybe just a bit of phrasing in the bass line, and the choice of notes to highlight in the guitar part.

[pcock]

2 phrases with the first ending on an interrupted cadence and the second ending on a plagal cadence can be immense if done right

 

magoo ive got no idea how much you know,but now that the moon has brought it up, if you take the first note of the key that you are writing for, ie, c major, then the numerals refer to the chords from the tonic c to the octave c in this manner

 

I c major triad

II d major

III eminor

IV f major

V g major

VI a minor

the 7th chord is a dissonant chord, consisting of B, D, and F in the key of C major, but the f is often raised to an F sharp in order to create the consonant chord of b minor

 

if you right a peice consisiting entirely of these notes , it will quite frankly be tedious harmonically, similar to hymn

 

the essential problem with alot of modern music is that they do just stick to this tonal idiom, and use the texture and timbre and instrumentation to create interest, which in my opinion is a very backwards step for music.

 

cadences are a small sequence of chords at the end of a melodic phrase, phrasing is very easy to pick out in simple and modern music, but this can getmuch more tricky when studying 20th century classical

 

perfect chord V to chord I

imperfect pretty much any chord to V

plagal (as moon said) V to I

Interrupted chord V to any chord but I or V.

 

you have a midi controller cos id have thought this well hard to understand without a keyboard of some kind in front of you.

[Braintree]

Smells a lot like sperm in here.

 

Mr. Magoo, listen to some jazz standards or old rock/blues. In fact, listen to James Brown if you want to know a lot about song form. The form they use is extremely clear. Try and listen to how it will be related to your sequencer [measures, etc].

[acid1]

Sometimes doing things differently helps a lot, I mean thats the whole experimentation process.

 

If you use ableton, try to download some other demo or random product, make sounds sounds in that, import into ableton afterwards. If you make a sound first then a melodyfor it afterwards... do it in reverse, make the melody first with a lame generic synth then spice up the sound afterwards. If you synthesize all your sounds, try to record some. If you write music at night, try to write it in the morning. If you write your songs in order from beginning to end, try to write some sections of the songs out of order... etc etc etc

[Paulie Walnuts]

What you notice with a lot of producers is they'll start off doing fairly standard musical stuff, with chord progressions and sometimes verse, chorus structure - which often sounds quite colourful and easily recognisable... But then there's always this tendancy to focus more on more intricate musical elements and see where you can take them...

 

I rarely think in terms of chord progressions and melodies now - I find myself doing beats for a while, then I'll experiment with maybe a single chord, and some kind of unusual harmony - and a tune kind of evolves from that... More like painting with watercolours - you colour the sound with fragments of ideas and suggestions...

 

It definetly helps to have a good understanding of music before you do this. Not necessarily an academic understanding, but at least an ability to conceptualise solid musical ideas.

[Guest man with no name]

work on a track until it feels right... If you feel it's missing something then continue working on it.

[YEK]

write like 3-7 loops that sound good together in ableton. record and play them in and out... go back and listen to it and cut copy paste. then layer a new sound on top

it's all about jamming with ableton but i find i'm more inpsired when i have loops already constructed that sound good together

loops equals drums and melodies... bass line probably later on

[Guest Mr. Magoo]

I was just about to write a long post with some advice, but then I read that last line about Italians, so now all I have to say is fuck you.

 

well you could of proved me wrong.

[Paulie Walnuts]

But you know what - I think the reason music was generally much more interesting, and certainly musicians were more able to forge their own way, in the early days, was because they'd all come from backgrounds other than the one they ended up producing in.

 

Most producers from back then had bought samplers, keyboards, etc. to play in bands or make hiphop or electro or whatever. So a lot of those early records were made by keyboardists and people who'd spent time behind the desk with bands, and they tended to have a fairly solid grounding in production, composition, keyboard playing etc.

 

There's always this risk now that all you're learning is how to reproduce other people's ideas... You don't learn about music or engineering in general, so you never become a flexible or even 'enabled' musician or producer, you just forge on until you can recreate a certain something - then you recreate it over and over and hopefully add your own 'edge' to it...

 

I think the best thing you can do is deliberately not go down that road... Learn all the basics, get your grounding, in neutral territory... Whether that's taking piano lessons, studying the work of videogame composers, playing keyboard in an industrial band, etc. otherwise there's 150,000 kids out there doing the same thing with the same software at the moment.

[kcinsu]

I was just about to write a long post with some advice, but then I read that last line about Italians, so now all I have to say is fuck you.

 

well you could of proved me wrong.

 

I'm not Italian, I just think what you said is a bit shit

[kcinsu]

and actually, my comment wasn't sarcastic at all. I honestly was going to write stuff, but that last bit pissed me off, so unsarcastically, I told you to fuck off.

[Guest Mr. Magoo]

anyway sorry for that i just dissaprove the method of play of the italians, and i was being no better as sterotyping them.

but if you feel like it, then fuck me.

 

 

cheers everyone i have a better understanding, although its still hard to get a fucking FUNKY GUITAR RIFF, you know those ones where its a very simple hook!, well i've created some and they sort of throw off my track, but i'm trying too make it funky!

 

sample clip

here

[Guest version2006]

http://www.musictheory.net/

[Guest DrHat]

Here are some things I wish someone would have told me when I was just getting involved in this stuff:

 

1) smoothness is very important. you have to sit down, listen passively, and see if anything feels "sudden" or "unexpected." if anything does, chances are there's something off, somewhere. unless, of course, it's like a venetian snares song where the bass suddenly goes buuUURRRWANANA and scares my dog

 

2) re smoothness, if you make a big jump in a melodic line (more than two or three half steps) try to either leave on a note very close (in terms of scale) to the one you're coming from, or have a note very close on the note after the one you land on. basicly, you don't want to have a huge gap without having it do some small movements, leading in or out of it, i guess. important to creating smoothness.

 

3) don't be afraid to throw a whole chunk out, if it doesn't work with the song. even if it's totally awesome. mute it, start another midi track, etc. if you're lucky, it'll be used in a b section or something

 

4) music theory is really helpful for questions like "i have this mass of notes here, what the hell should i do for the bassline?" or "what note would sound least off with these current notes?"

 

5) coherency - find your favorite bits of what you're currently working on, and focus on them. try to make other parts of the song reference or reflect them - via techniques others described above, such as inversion, augmentation, etc. this is a very subtle, yet very important point.

 

6) keep it simple, stupid. no one ever won prizes for maxing out polyphony

 

7) keep it even simpler until it's mostly there - until you have the core of the song down, don't load it up with harmonies/duplicate synth patches for sonic reasons.

 

8) play with it, it's a game. if you tell yourself you _have_ to have a song started in five hours, well, that's when it goes to shit. don't worry about finishing the day with jack squat, except a little more wisdom and experience.

 

enjoy

[plastic]

6) keep it simple, stupid. no one ever won prizes for maxing out polyphony

sure is fun though! Sometimes I make it a game to overload the midi buffer on my synths. great fun! :grin:

[Celatid]

6) keep it simple, stupid. no one ever won prizes for maxing out polyphony

[Guest DrHat]

wat

[Celatid]

take a look at the words in the top right corner of the image