How to improve my composition skills?

lol bra'''vo skibby.

  On 7/3/2014 at 11:53 PM, peace 7 said:

Expressing oneself musically, is to convert oneself into sound. This first requires being conscious of one's emotions; and second, requires one to have a massive library of musical themes/concepts to consciously/subconsciously choose from, to most accurately be able to depict oneself at that moment. Much like writing a novel-- if the only type of text you've ever read in your whole life is erotica, it's going to be tough for you to write an action adventure novel.

 

So basically, to express oneself most accurately with music, it's necessary to listen to and study as much music as possible (as many genres as possible). That's the only way to really figure out what appeals to you as a composer. And then of course when composing-- experiment. Listen to your own music bits and react to it. That REACTION to your own music bits is how a lot of music is made. Some people compose the whole track in 5 sec in their head, but often times it'll start with a bassline or whatever, then listening to your own bass shitz- if you open up- you'll hear the next best thing to come into play.

 

The most personal-output creating and "original" artists- in the visual arts and music- tend to have massive mental libraries due to eclectic tastes (as well as learning what does not work for them)-- and they tend to be multi-media, multi-instrument.

 

That being said, if you don't want to compose heartfelt and sincere works and just want to improve in technical composition to pretend like you're good at music to impress people who are easily impressed-- just copy formulas (track structures). "Music is so eeeeeeasy"... etc.

Alternately, take a fuckload of drugs, and compose on drugs. Psychedelics will get you far. --Perhaps so far, that you will not even want to make music anymore, but still..... Drugs are another way to "improve" composition skills greatly, because you can never compose outside of yourself when always inside yourself-- drugs help you go outside of your regular, chosen character (but actually still you when going "outside").

And as noted by others, it really helps to actually be able to play instruments. Even the difference in output between clicking on a piano roll and manually playing melodies with a MIDI keyboard is huge.

I'd say have something to say, and if you don't, borrow it from someone else. That should give you enough fuel to keep trying and learning until you get satisfactory results (me I'm still trying.)

Learning music theory and doing formal exercises does sound like good advice, but I can't recommend it myself because I know nothing about music.

FWIW, yan, I think you're already an excellent composer, generally surprising me with the way you incorporate changes in your tunes, and the rather complex emotional content you're able to create. Quite a bit of your music is both impressive from a technical standpoint and deliberately unorthodox from a composition standpoint, and it gives the impression that you know what you're doing and are thinking of composition from a variety of angles already. That said, I think this thread is full of excellent advice - hope some of it comes to help you out as you keep writing.

For me. I just make the music try to emulate what's going on in my head. There's seems to more technical limitations at the moment than anything else. An inability to translate the melodies and rhythms into my DAW. As I get better, I get better at that translation. I'm much better than I used to be, but I have a long way to go before it feels natural I think.

Oh yeah. In order to get better at composition, for now it's mainly overcoming those technical limitations. Whenever I find myself saying "This is fine because it'll take longer to do this instead even though changing it would make it sound better" that's when you know there's a technical limitation and that's what I focus on...

For now.

  On 7/6/2014 at 12:35 AM, luke viia said:

FWIW, yan, I think you're already an excellent composer, generally surprising me with the way you incorporate changes in your tunes, and the rather complex emotional content you're able to create. Quite a bit of your music is both impressive from a technical standpoint and deliberately unorthodox from a composition standpoint, and it gives the impression that you know what you're doing and are thinking of composition from a variety of angles already. That said, I think this thread is full of excellent advice - hope some of it comes to help you out as you keep writing.

Yeah I was going to say, I would be interested in reading yanG compositional advice to be honest.

  On 7/2/2014 at 9:42 PM, A/D said:

Work to really hear internally what you want to happen next. That's the only way you can satisfy yourself.

most of the time, i loop stuff until i hallucinate new parts, or i put in events that i expect. but sometimes the best things come when forcing in a random event and it creates an awkward moment that the other parts need to make some comment on. like birds chattering back and forth.

i have 15 years experiences of producing all kind of music, whatever that worth haha

but for sure i can say,

first advise is listen to load of music, any genres you can, don't get stuck in one style

if you think your music lacks of something it's because it certainly does, so compare your productions with others, even if the level is high, those things takes lot of times.

something that worked great to me :

find your three favorites tracks, and try rebuild them, exactly the same, you'll understand so easily things that you never get with basic listening

last but not the least, few knowledge of music theory wont hurt :)

One suggestion I shall add is to never have fear of the things you want to create. It has happened a lot to me, like, when I'm producing pretty experimental and cool stuff, but then I think "wait, I haven't hear this before, it most suck then" and start making something more "likeable".

my 4.98 dollars.

I think one hugely important thing to becoming better at composition is to become sensitive to all the elements of composition (e.g. phrasing, dynamics, harmony, texture, syncopation, form, etc etc).

The musicians whose compositions I aspire to--say Squarepusher or RDJ or BoC or Bartok or Eno or Milhaud or Copeland or whoever--have a mastery of these elements to one degree or another. To me, it's not a mystery why the greats are great. They are usually obsessive craftsmen (each with their own respective strengths and focus, of course).

And all of these elements can be refined just the way a craftsman refines their craft. If you want to work on melodic phrasing, you can sit down and work on a 1-minute tune where you take a melodic motif and apply it to a sequence of random chords. If you want to work on harmony, you can take one of your old tunes and reharmonize every second chord using common tones. And so on...

All this relates to the Four Stages Of Competence (unconscious incompetence>conscious incompetence>conscious competence>unconscious competence) which essential entails just being aware of details you never paid attention to before.

p.s. I think you could go about this by simply listening to music you like, paying attention to the details, and then applying this attention-to-detail to composing.

  On 7/5/2014 at 6:16 PM, peace 7 said:

 

  On 7/3/2014 at 11:53 PM, peace 7 said:

Expressing oneself musically, is to convert oneself into sound. This first requires being conscious of one's emotions; and second, requires one to have a massive library of musical themes/concepts to consciously/subconsciously choose from, to most accurately be able to depict oneself at that moment. Much like writing a novel-- if the only type of text you've ever read in your whole life is erotica, it's going to be tough for you to write an action adventure novel.

 

So basically, to express oneself most accurately with music, it's necessary to listen to and study as much music as possible (as many genres as possible). That's the only way to really figure out what appeals to you as a composer. And then of course when composing-- experiment. Listen to your own music bits and react to it. That REACTION to your own music bits is how a lot of music is made. Some people compose the whole track in 5 sec in their head, but often times it'll start with a bassline or whatever, then listening to your own bass shitz- if you open up- you'll hear the next best thing to come into play.

 

The most personal-output creating and "original" artists- in the visual arts and music- tend to have massive mental libraries due to eclectic tastes (as well as learning what does not work for them)-- and they tend to be multi-media, multi-instrument.

 

That being said, if you don't want to compose heartfelt and sincere works and just want to improve in technical composition to pretend like you're good at music to impress people who are easily impressed-- just copy formulas (track structures). "Music is so eeeeeeasy"... etc.

Alternately, take a fuckload of drugs, and compose on drugs. Psychedelics will get you far. --Perhaps so far, that you will not even want to make music anymore, but still..... Drugs are another way to "improve" composition skills greatly, because you can never compose outside of yourself when always inside yourself-- drugs help you go outside of your regular, chosen character (but actually still you when going "outside").

 

And as noted by others, it really helps to actually be able to play instruments. Even the difference in output between clicking on a piano roll and manually playing melodies with a MIDI keyboard is huge.

 

you've never lost yourself creating before? i like drugs just fine, but i've been able to do this since i was a kid. it's one of the big reason i like making music. when i listen back to stuff a lot of times the only way i can tell i did it is when i hear fuckups that sound like me.

tbh, on drugs some drones and noise are like every single feeling and thought ever. i don't find them that helpful for making stuff to listen to when i'm not on drugs or for people listening that aren't on drugs. dunno. it's the same music i make when i have migraines, but with with less distortion.

whatever works for you, but the rest of that is completely backwards to my experience.

the only thing that works for me is showing up and working and that naturally tells me what i want/need learn more about or improve from there and trusting that whatever i'm working at is the right thing for me at the time.

Kudoz Jonah! You're rocking some next-level shit. That last line is beautiful and is a solid work ethic for composing the life journey itself. ...kudoz, kudoz.

Well- if I ever recommend drugs for creating anything, part of it would be for purposes of making uncommon connections (spirit of experimentation!), other part for having fun and relieving pain of the technically mundane. I'm able to compose music on or off drugs (though I have never used psychedelics to make music, unless I did during ReBirth days and forgot). But seriously just now by thinking of my reply to you, I realized that my music creation on drugs, becomes a high-level experience in and of itself for me. So "goals" of making music for later listening do exist, but in retrospect, smoking up and composing was always some operatic experience that I enjoyed. Like I'm willing these sounds from within myself with tools, then a feedback loop is created with input/output (ears/heart), and these emotions- combined with intention, expectation, execution, and comparing- all become entities as simultaneous orchestra, conductor, playaz, audience; caught up in a real-time jam. It is somewhat similar for me "sober", but the experience is not as "hyper 3-d" as when high. Sober I go deep IN, ganj I go deep OUT.

Summation is basically that I used to love smoking up, and everything was incredible as an opera hologram hyper anime kung fu flick.

There was a really good book on the subject called Music Theory for Computer Musicians that I highly recommend. It's a very easy read and something you could go through while going to the bathroom. It was eye opening for me because by the end of the book I realized that I already understood a lot of the basic mechanics of how to compose and chord progressions through experience and trial and error, but the book shows the relationship between individual notes, melodies, chords, progressions and rhythm and how they all come together. Kind of like being lost in the woods and being able to find your way through landmarks, then suddenly having the Music Theory helicopter come and fly you up so you can see the entire forest but from a different perspective.

It didn't change my compositional skills overnight but it lead me on the right path of self-discovery and acquiring additional educational materials on the subject.

  On 1/10/2016 at 6:57 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

how do you avoid writing in 'blocks' of loops, what are some things you consider to break out of the linear nature of different layers looping together and shifting in a predictable manner?

I struggled with this a fair bit, in the end I found it helped me a lot to do more stuff live/in real time. Could be automation, muting/unmuting, synth soloing, adjusting arp parameters, anything really.

Generally I have given up talking about theory

But I will say this:

-Study Schenkerian analysis in all its recursive weirdness

-Study Bach's use of counterpoint, development and functional harmony

-Study non-diatonic functional harmony (i.e. All the 20th century weirdos) so that you can 'piggyback' on Bach-esque fundamentals, while getting as outré as you want

-Study the melodic approaches of bebop (e.g. chromatic approach tones, enclosure, sidestepping) as well as the rhythmic approaches

-Consider that (perhaps) being a good composer entails being a good musicologist, and that 99.99999% of people who make music are oblivious to the ideas and methods of the past, and what a shitty state of affairs that usually is

Currently I'm studying Indian classical music and it's really the most amazing stuff. Their use of articulation is so beautiful and counter-intuitive, and something that I hadn't even considered a possibility before.

But honestly, I try not to discuss theory anymore because musicians (unlike painters or cinematographers or writers) seem almost superstitiously averse to it.

It's mental.

I could whinge about it for hours, but there is this (false) punk ethos about the less knowledge the better, I'm gonna just follow my gut, and the whole idea of discipline and study has been tossed out with the bathwater.

"AHHHHHHH" -Marilyn Manson

Ignore Schenker, it's reductive bollocks and only works on a tiny amount of music.

Start with Palestrina, not Bach. That's if you want to start at the "beginning" of harmony and counterpoint, which you may not. I didn't.

The 20th Century weirdos are so totally diverse that to study ALL of them in any detail is the work of several lifetimes. If you like the sound of something, you'll probably have at least some curiosity about how it's made.

Holy shit lol

Schenker is not reductionistic (prescriptively, recursion can be unlimited; descriptively, it is equipped do deal with all 12tet music) it's like saying grammar or syntax is reductionistic

(P.S. If you wanna subvert grammar, it certainly helps to understand grammar)

Dude seriously gtfo with that shit

"AHHHHHHH" -Marilyn Manson

Also, Even if it was reductionistic, it's still worth studying

"AHHHHHHH" -Marilyn Manson

(Alright, my tapatalk sig is outty like a bellybutton)

So anyway, some more approaches

There are also a bunch of really esoteric approaches to composition

(Akin perhaps to something like 'animal study' in acting)

Miles Okazaki uses the Golden Mean to generate rhythmic ideas

(Essentially, having a beat-cycle of one Fibonacci number divided equally by a neighboring Fibonacci number)

Check YouTube for his 'polypulse' video

He also has a video on 'rhythmic tiling' which is essentially two or more identical melodies interwoven with no empty space leftover

he has an amazing guitar piece where he has a long melody set in three different octaves, and displaced like a typical canon, but the result is this bizarre labyrinthine thing with dense harmony and you can't even tell that all three lines are identical

He will also compose a handful of 'cells' (a bar or two of melody and harmony) and then order them in various ways using his obsession with geometry

Then there's all the dudes who study bird songs (e.g. Eric Dolphy, Messiaen, etc)

There's my homie Messiaen, who had a preoccupation with symmetrical ('of limited transposition') scales, like the 'whole-half' or 'half-whole' scales, or the augmented scale or the whole-tone scale

Then there's the world of polytonality

I think Milhaud's "Suadades de Brazil" and "Billy's Capture" from Copland's Billy the Kid are my favorite polytonal pieces

But truly, no matter who says something is too basic (e.g. "Bach is so 101 lol")

The fact remains that having strong fundamentals will put you light years ahead of both yourself now and everyone else

I promise this is a lesson you will learn over and over

You are utterly clueless. Don't give advice.

  On 1/10/2016 at 6:57 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

what do you keep in mind when composing, do you have any guidelines for structure? when do you know to move on?

 

and also

 

how do you avoid writing in 'blocks' of loops, what are some things you consider to break out of the linear nature of different layers looping together and shifting in a predictable manner?

I don't generally have any composition guidelines, I mostly just try to wing it. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a certain passage and then just go stream-of-consciousness with regard to progressions and ideas for how to connect it to another section. It's easier in a tracker where everything is systematically laid out, even more so than a piano roll or even traditional score (which, since I can't read music, may be why I find writing in a tracker easier).

Similarly for your second question, for some of my more ridiculous prog compositions (e.g. this track) I had a bunch of short loops/sections that I'd compiled from various improvisations/demos and spent a few days working on the transitions. I find it helps to have a rather 'flat' sound palette when working on stuff like that, since it pushes you to make the track more interesting from a composition point of view, rather than relying on 'techno' variations in sound to push the track forward.

Sometimes it also helps to have each section in a different key/tempo/time signature; part of the fun of composition—at least in my experience—is figuring out how to creatively transition between sections (another example, sorry; this track goes through a series of upward keychanges in order to change key to one semitone below the original key, and then back again; probably one of the weirdest modulations I've written, but it's interesting!).

  On 1/10/2016 at 7:24 PM, LimpyLoo said:

But honestly, I try not to discuss theory anymore because musicians (unlike painters or cinematographers or writers) seem almost superstitiously averse to it.

It's mental.

I could whinge about it for hours, but there is this (false) punk ethos about the less knowledge the better, I'm gonna just follow my gut, and the whole idea of discipline and study has been tossed out with the bathwater.

haha, shit, I totally agree. I have friends who think that studying music/sound design will make them unable to appreciate punk music or other deliberately shitty forms of music.

maybe I already said this itt but in electronic composing, don't drag it out. 16 bars of every variation you proudly work into a song just gets people skipping entire sections. Say it and move.

To improve your composition skills, do something practical. Write some music. Often. If need be, read up on some theory, but then make some music with that theory.

  On 1/11/2016 at 8:49 AM, psn said:

To improve your composition skills, do something practical. Write some music. Often. If need be, read up on some theory, but then make some music with that theory.

Actually yes, that's the best advice: write something every day.

How to compose improved skills? Improve!