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FamiTracker
This is something I started this morning. I wanted to experiment with combining the double harmonic scale (I bII III IV V bVI VII) with the Hungarian gypsy scale (I II bIII #IV V bVI VII) since I couldn't decide which one to use initially. I think the results are pretty neat.
This is far from complete but I think there's enough there to start getting some feedback.
Also, there's a lot of power in the bass so I hope you've got some good speakers or headphones.
Be careful with how much theory you rely on when composing stuff, robro. Scales and chords and different theories out there are really neat to explore and play around with but ultimately, the theories aren't what made the music they were formed from.
Theories were always formed after the music was made, not the other way around. Your musical ideas should ultimately come from your own head without excessive feedback from scales, chords, theory or an instrument.
In my experience, the best middle ground is making yourself very familiar with a scale or concept. Like try singing these scales out loud and see how well you actually know them. Once you've got a good hold on that, you'll become less distracted from the theoretical concept and can focus on making logical melodies that are formed by your very own unique, subconscious musical personality(as opposed to making decisions based on theory knowledge and sound feedback).
The WIP, so far, starts feeling a bit repetitive. I think that's cos you're harmonic rhythm here, the chords, just keep repeating over and over. There's also not much rhythmical variety in the melodies. The best way to demonstrate what I mean by this is, take the rhythm of any of your melodies and imagine it being played on a snare drum. How interesting would it sound?
These are the kind of issues that theory can't solve. Theories can't produce melodic or rhythmical themes and motifs for you, they can't make the decisions on which chord voicing fit best with a given melody, they really only provide a ground for analyzing harmony and form. There's no instructions out there on how to internalize theory to be used in a practical way. It's an issue I've been hacking away at for years.
Hope any of that's helpful. Your posts remind me a lot of stuff I posted up here a year or two ago. All the neat scales and theories seemed like some awesome key that could unlock the door to making really cool and interesting music. But the poopy truth is that it really isn't. I've met scores of people who make incredibly colorful and harmonically complex music with tons of personality, who don't even know what a 9 chord is. It's been a frustrating path to walk, a lot of musical friends of mine shun the idea of taking any theory too seriously and say I overthink things and denounce my own musical revelations as being silly or not being true to myself or not being a real artist. But I'm still convinced there is a personal process to internalize the information in such a way that you can make music naturally with it. Still searching tho : P
Thanks for taking the time to write that incredibly detailed response gyms. You've definitely hit the nail on the head with your advice, as I haven't yet internalized the concepts I'm trying to build my music from. I guess it's just when I want to sit down and make something but don't have any specific ideas, it helps to have some constraints to narrow my focus and picking a scale (or scales) to work within seems to be a useful constraint.
First of all, yes, the track is definitely too repetitive right now, which is something I've noticed about a lot of the stuff I've tried making into more complete songs. I'll often make a short progression that sounds good to me but I won't really know where to go from there so I just loop it over and over.
Also, the more I listen to that loop the more "right" it sounds and the more locked into it I become. When I came back to this track after a long break today, it sounded really weird the first time through. It didn't really make sense. I guess that means my melodies aren't "logical". Very few things I've written actually sound good to me if I haven't heard them in a while. I guess they aren't predicable enough, but at the same time a lot of my favorite musical artists are very idiosyncratic and unpredictable at times, yet when they do something surprising, it sounds good. That's the greatest mystery to me.
[quote=robro]Also, the more I listen to that loop the more "right" it sounds and the more locked into it I become. When I came back to this track after a long break today, it sounded really weird the first time through. It didn't really make sense. I guess that means my melodies aren't "logical". Very few things I've written actually sound good to me if I haven't heard them in a while. I guess they aren't predicable enough, but at the same time a lot of my favorite musical artists are very idiosyncratic and unpredictable at times, yet when they do something surprising, it sounds good. That's the greatest mystery to me[/quote]
Yea, that happens to me all the time when listening to computer feedback of my music for too long, the perfect example of what relying on to much feedback does to you ears over time. It's a bit foreign if you're used to using computers for writing music, but you should try recording yourself singing out ideas and then transfer them to the tracker. Your voice is the most direct path to the brain, there's almost no mental buffer or distraction from interfaces or instrument keys, you can just sing what you feel, what you think. It's direct and reliable. Over time, musicians can develop this ability with their instruments. People like ZZZV seem to have done it with famitracker even!
As far as getting stuck or not knowing what to do, I've found one thing that I tend to do when describing things with rhythm or melody is move my body around and make motions with my hands or arms or something while I'm forming something and the ideas just kind of flow. There's a strong tie between music and physiology.
Actually, I recently found out that this is how public schools in Hungary [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_Method]teach kids music, they acknowledge that there's a connection with music, the body and movement.
Also, listening to more music with longer and more complex forms help with escaping repetition and getting stuck. And not just listening, but fully internalizing the pieces as well. This is an easier thing for pianists to do because the piano allows to you see, play, hear and feel multiple parts.
[quote=Gamma]those were pretty informative posts, gyms
thanks for dispensing knowledge[/quote]
My pleasure. Hopefully I'm not getting too purple-prosey with my walls of text here; hope this makes sense and some of it helps. It all pretty much sums up my musical progress these past two years. Haha, it all seems to be coming full circle too, back to a place where I don't exactly know what I'm doing, just using my own developing senses.
also,
[quote=gyms]Your posts remind me a lot of stuff I posted up here a year or two ago[/quote]
to show you what I mean, [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=1639&highlight=gyms]ha [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?page=2&id=2152&sort=&highlight=gyms]ha [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=2379&highlight=gyms]ha [url=http://famitracker.com/forum/posts.php?id=2433&highlight=gyms]ha
If you read through any of those, you'll notice how all the theory talk never really leads to anything. And I can honestly say, in retrospect, that none of it made me a better composer. I really started to improve a lot more when I finally accepted and realized that theory knowledge isn't what makes good/fresh/original/whatever music, it's my own personality, tastes, and simply knowing how to interact with it all.
fluidvolt summed it up best in one of those:
[quote=fluidvolt]I had a pretty good grounding in theory from when I first started years ago, yet my tunes still sucked. I think theory or not, the key to writing good compositions is to write many (initially bad) compositions.
This is in no way an attack on music theory though; I think it's great and I encourage people to learn it in order to further their understanding of music, it's just not some magical guide to instantly writing great music (not that anyone specifically insinuated it was).
That said, don't be a slave to theory. The best composers have bent the rules in order to express what they wanted to(i.e. Beethoven, Debussy, too many to name), regardless of what the theory said. It's more of a reverse-engineering of techniques from successful compositions than rules handed on from on high. Incredibly useful, but in no way law.[/quote]
fluidvolt and myself have had quite a few lengthy email discussions about this stuff. He seems to have broken away from using an instrument or program to compose with, he's trained himself to write his ideas directly to staff. And it shows! If you guys haven't heard his [url=http://ubiktune.org/releases/ubi048-fluidvolt-reflections-of-a-dancing-leaf]debut release on Ubiktune, you should go check it out. It's some beautiful work and demonstrates the benefits of what we're talking about here. His ideas are so fully formed and natural sounding becuase he's not distracted from theory and computer or instrument feedback when he composes.
And I've had similar discussions with blitzlunar, zanzan, kulor, tonythai, rushjet, jrlepage, kfaraday, fearofdark, heos, moot...it goes on and on really. They all operate along similar lines, they've developed their own methods of reliably extracting the ideas they hear in their head and feel throughout their body. It's something I've been focusing on for a while now too and it's boosted not only my confidence as a composer, but the overall quality, cohesiveness and flow of my music. It's getting easier and more comfortable the more I focus on trying to extract what's inside...it's liberating, compared to where I came from with so much theory reliance in the past.
But again, I'm still not convinced that theory should be shunned or looked down upon as dry, calculating analysis and being completely useless to pure composition. I truly believe that you can absorb the more complex concepts out there in a way in which it becomes subconscious decision making.
All the people that tell me they don't know anything about theory, yet make melodies and harmony that conform to major and minor scales, are pieces of evidence that theoretical concepts are essential to artists and can be used naturally. The trick is knowing how to absorb and internalize it all to the point where it's no longer 'theory', but sounds you hear without thinking about it..but I don't think you can break into internalizing the more complicated stuff without acknowledging this first.
edit: to elaborate on what the 'more complicated stuff' i'm referring to actually is,
Erno Lendvai's [url=http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/vismath/lends/]"Symmetries of Music"
Olivier Messiaen's "The Technique of My Musical Language"
George Russell's "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization"
You can find pdf copies of the other two if you're crafty with google and torrenting.
"Symmetries of Music" touches on a lot of concepts surrounding Bela Bartok's music.
"The Technique of My Musical Language" is a book from the composer himself on his own methods.
"The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" is an amazing pattern discovered by Russell. If you can grasp what it has to say, it breaks down a lot of jazz concepts down to the core.
I have always kind of wondered what resources people used to learn more about music theory. The internet is loaded with information, but you've really got no way to tell if the person who's teaching you is at all qualified to be teaching you to begin with, or can do so in a manner that makes sense for your skill level.
I will be saving that list of books and will read them later. I've heard what you can make, and if you recommend those books as valuable resources, there's got to be some value there. Thanks again, gyms.
[quote=Gamma]I have always kind of wondered what resources people used to learn more about music theory. The internet is loaded with information, but you've really got no way to tell if the person who's teaching you is at all qualified to be teaching you to begin with, or can do so in a manner that makes sense for your skill level.[/quote]
Yea, it's tough to know what to do or where to turn for that stuff, there's just so much out there. This is where having private lessons or going to school helps a bit.
But ultimately, I think someone from a jazz forum I frequent summed it up best:
[quote=]"i do get the impression that there are viewers on the forum who may be seeking but a single book which would give them the insight and solutions to all of their immediate and long term goals and as a music instructor well into my third decade of teaching, i assure you that this cannot be so. your abilities will arise from the sum total of your life experience, musical and otherwise, and to say that how you approach the theory of music is an integral part of this process is undeniable. you must study many different approaches in order to synthesize what for you will become your very own personal muse."[/quote]
