composing/writing music

[Guest iep]

how do i compose a song

 

to be honest.. if you have to ask that on a messageboard, i don't think you should be making music...

[Guest DrHat]

in soviet russia, song composes you

[Guest LJG]

in soviet russia, song composes you

 

LOLOLOLOL :teeth:

[Guest Death and Taxes]

how do i compose a song

 

to be honest.. if you have to ask that on a messageboard, i don't think you should be making music...

 

that's a lazy perspective to take. if someone wants to compose a song with no skill or even natural musical ability, you have to start somewhere as long as the desire is there. even if he does end up making what you and everyone else might perceive as total crap, if he likes doing it, then well, he should be doing it. can't fault someone for wanting to learn and try. it's quite a recurring theme on WATMM, people refusing to accept that other people use a messageboard as a tool for gaining information from experienced peers. don't poo poo another man's genuine interest in what you do for a hobby, that's my opinion. no one should be excluded from making music.

 

i'm pretty set in my musicmaking ways, methods i've developed and adhered to for almost a decade now. reading through other people's ideas in this thread has made it one of the better threads i've read in a while. so. good question magoo!

 

here's how i compose. i write a song by sitting down with a guitar and playing around until i find something that sounds "cool." my ultimate goal is to make things that sound cool, no more, no less. then i record a few takes until i have a good basic loop. then i put some effects on, if needed . . . delay, reverb, filtering, distortion, whatever. usually the polished loop has a few layers, the original loop and then maybe a distorted filter or something quietly mixed in. i loop this about four times or so and then think of a baseline. i dont know music or music theory or notes or chords or anything like that, it's basically if it sounds cool or not, trial and error. i have a decent ear for when things sound shit together. then the bassline kicks in. i want to build up the theme of the loop, adding bass and percussion with each pass, or every two passes of the loop. when i feel like it's sufficiently built up, i strip it down. i like to hear just the bass and percussion. or maybe just the loop and some new percussion, no bass. then i kick it back in again, hard, with a few more layers, and this time a main melody that doesnt really loop, sort of drives over top of the loop. i like a lot of variation to give it an organic, live feel. so my percussion loop is going to change everytime, varying slight positions, adding random noises in overtop of other hits, or cutting the length of the hit in half or something to make it sound more staccato. i'm always looking for new ways to change up the beats. from there i'll try to changeup the entire theme for an interlude sort of thing, or use heavily processed versions of the loops i've already made by this point, just to change things up a bit, and then build on that and end it. so my songs tend to have a dichotomy to them, heavily dictated by my interest level in the song. typically as i've heard the thing hundreds and hundreds of times, i'm anxious to hear something fresh, so you can almost always split my songs up into a part A and part B. but definitely agree with what DrHat was saying about smoothness. i spend a lot of time and toying around with making a big transition from part A to part B smoth. sometimes i'll have developed something in part B that i might need to go back and paste in somewhere to foreshadow it. and then the fun part is finishing the song, when you have everything down, you can do whatever you want for the last two loops or so, just fuck around, it can sound silly or campy or anything, i always seem to have a sort of tongue-in-cheek ending as if i'm so fucking tired of hearing my song i'm now going to mock it and kiss it goodbye.

 

 

here are some tips and tricks that i've sort of figured out on my own:

 

percussion: vary the volume on your hits. you can compose something with a fantastic pattern, but if you dont have the right accents and volumes on the hits then it can be the difference between total shite and the fucking business.

 

layer plenty of percussion sounds together to give them extra punch. aleksi perala swears by it, and so should you. you'll cover more frequencies, etc.

 

when i record acoustic guitar, i get rid of the sub-200 mHz frequencies on the high notes. this clears up the bass for the things that are intended to be bass. depending on your mic set up, unless it's professional, you're going to have to learn which frequencies are fucking things up in your recordings and consistently get rid of them. with any sort of open air sampling you do, i think. over time i figured this out and you're going to get less clipping, more punch, fuller sound, and altogether more professional sounding stuff.

 

you can milk a solid loop a long way and no one but you will know. process it and use it again and again. layer it over previous versions of itself. it'll be like a box of chocolates the more you start processing and layering things over themselves.

 

use field recordings and stuff. mix them in quietly, subtley. do what you gotta do to get that generic Techno sound out of your track.

[Celatid]

death and taxes = tom jenkinson

[Guest Death and Taxes]

i believe tom jenkinson is quite schooled in music and chords and notes and all that "jazz"

 

:grin:

 

but close. i'm the hardly normal daddy.