Dear friend, please meet our new teachers; on the right are several Expert System software programmers and on the left are their computer programs running on their computers. Shake hands and say hello. Is it possible to do the same thing with actual humans? Make the process more effective, faster and cheaper? Of course, the answer is definitely yes or I wouldn’t have created this course. I’ll admit it’s a bit strange having a computer study from an expert and then having the computer’s programmer be our teacher but, hey, if it works why not?
I’d like to answer the most important questions; what problems do you commonly face as a songwriter/composer and what are the key characteristics of effective solutions. One of the most important if not THE most important question that needs to be answered is how to come up with melodic material.
The qualities that the most effective solutions have to the problems you face as a composer are the same qualities that effective solutions have to any problem you might encounter. The solutions need to have a balance between being effective, abundant, fast, easy and cheap.
I've experimented with a lot of different things and had success coming up with melodies using different approaches such as; turning phone numbers, street addresses and names into melodies and rhythms, as well as rolling dice for one or both aspects, narrowing down the kinds of things the dice can choose such as rhythms, melodic sequences or interval motion thought to be probable, building motifs from auto-morphs or digital patterns such as 1234, 2345, 3456 or basing them on complex mathematical patterns and fractals etc...
Some of these solutions are fast and easy but not effective. Others are somewhat effective but not fast or easy. As you may have guessed by now, my favorite all time “technique” for coming up with new material is through the transformation of existing music which fulfills all of the criteria. It’s effective, abundant, fast, easy and cheap.
It's obvious to me that we can't be spending an inordinate amount of time agonizing over how to turn one melodic cell we've created into a phrase and then have no idea how we're going to create the following phrase. Then there is the question of where is the melodic material for the next section coming from?
Either we have to be able to come up with the answers to those questions fast or we have to stop thinking note to note and start thinking in broad strokes; at least as broad as a whole phrase and maybe even as broad as the entire album.
A master animator just puts in the important scenes and lets the grunts paint in all the rest. If you’re not already a professional composer then without the right teacher plus the time and money to invest, the conscious transformation of existing music is truly the next best thing. We have to be more like the master animator. We must have the big picture and be able to work from the top down. If you can't do this, yes, you can still write songs but its slow going and often doesn’t sound as good.
Luckily there is a huge pool of songs you already like which you can use as source material that you can transform into new music. And you can do it in big chunks such as entire phrases, sections and even whole songs.
It’s not possible for them to be boring. You already like them. And the level of ease with which transforming a melody can be done is the same level of ease you have drawing the silhouette of a carrot (>) backwards (<) or of drawing the silhouette of a mountain (^) upside-down (v).
If you can’t read or write music, it’s O.K. You’re covered. First, there are a lot of midi songs available on the internet. Find ones that you like and click on the guitar solo or the vocal part to see what it looks like on a grid. The ability to read traditional music notation is not required. There is no need to learn guitar tablature either, although if you already know how to read that, then you can use your favorite songs presented that way as the pool of music you’re going to morph into your next album. Second, you can just notate a song you already know onto paper with lines for a graph. And if you have sound editing software such as Wavelab, you can record your favorite music and play it back slower so you can transcribe it onto the graph paper. Wavelab can even play the music backwards for you and can start the music on any note you want.
One pro said to me that what I‘m recommending is not what professional composers do. There are no professional composers of popular styles of music that he knows who are using the backwards and upside-down version of phrases as new phrases. Well, to start, lots of classical composers are using these techniques and not just in twelve-tone or serialist music. In standard practice these transformations are applied all the time but at the smaller level of the motif. The serialists and the twelve-tonalists are applying it at the level of entire compositions. Jazz improvisation instruction books often tell you to practice all of the ideas both upside-down, backwards, and rhythmically displaced. For melodic material, rhythmic displacement in particular is a common stylistic element of jazz. And even the pros creating popular music are occasionally applying these transformations unconsciously. The professional who said no one is using these techniques has in fact used these techniques himself more than just a few times, albeit on a smaller scale than what I’m recommending here. He just didn’t know CONSCIOUSLY that his subconscious had already been using them. These are tried and true methods known to serious composers and we’ve ALL heard them before. If you don’t tell the people who listen to your music that you made it using these methods, they’ll never know the difference. Your music will cause their jaws to drop regardless. They’ll want to know how you got so good so fast and that’s all that matters. Then, your only problem will be how to record thousands of ideas fast enough. The fact of the matter is that there are many paths that all lead to the same location. My composition professor at Keimyung university in South Korea told me of a student who entered a music writing competition with a piece of music he created by taking one of Beethoven’s works, writing the whole thing backwards, and then performing it with an orchestra. He took second place. This stuff works. Period. I already did it, classical musicians did it, bebop musicians did it and pop musicians are doing it. If we can do it, you can do it too. Before you can start applying the transformations, you need to be able to either get your hands on a song book, midi versions of your favorite songs, or be able to transcribe.
Individually, each transformation is simplistic and I had originally rejected them for popular music, thinking they only had value to classical dodecaphonist and serial composers etc... I had tried them and wasn’t impressed. But then I discovered that simultaneously applying the backwards version of the melody (which is known as the retrograde) with moving all the notes of this new backwards version up or down by a certain interval (which is known as transposition) and moving all the notes backwards or forwards a certain number of beats (which is called rhythmic displacement) solves a lot of problems at once. It solves the problems of
1) creating variety in a subsequent section by changing the rhythmic location of the first rhythmic event,
2) varying the starting pitch,
3) creating the benefit of having a different melodic contour,
4) creating a different melodic rhythm,
5) making one section reach a higher note than the other,
6) having a different ending note, and
7) having a different rhythmic ending position.
That’s powerful. Talk about economy of means. Just this grouping of only three transformations (backwards, transposed and displaced), consistently works. They’re what allowed me to take a short melody and extend it into a complete composition. Even if you don't like my CD's chords or lack thereof, or my instrumentation or my textures, MELODICALLY, this method is quite a success.
You do need to sing or play through the melodies you arrive at to make sure they are what you want to hear. Sometimes it happens that they’re not. But frequently all they need is a single note tweaked or to be transposed or displaced to a different position. Very occasionally it happens that you just can’t find what you’re looking for. There are still other transformations you can try.
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