Music Composition/Songwriting How To 5

You probably want between 13 and 16 tunes on there. It's best to shoot for the higher number of songs so that if you have to throw out one or two that aren't up to snuff then you still have enough to satisfy their appetite for new and good music.

For my next album I've created a scheme with a variety of forms for the first 10. In pop music the A section is the verse the B section is the chorus the C section is the bridge. I also use T for transition and R for Rise which is also known as a prechorus.

The schemes are; ABACDCABA, ABABCAB, ABCDABCDABCD, ABCABCABC, ABTABTCAB, ABABTCAB, ABTABCAB, ARBTARBTCARB, ARBARBTCARB, ARBTARBCARB.

There's variety and it's in the complexity ball park. Also, each one of these songs should either start on a different note, be in a different key or use a different kind of scale.

For now you can just randomly assign keys either just going up the scale as in; the first tune starts on C the second tune is in D the third tune is in E etc... Or you can use dice to decide which tune starts on what note.

The only comment I can make here is not to put the climax of your album in the key of D if you're a solo guitarist unless you can play it with the E string tuned down to D or otherwise you won't have the guitar's beautiful low register to give the tune some oomph.

We're starting to close in on the details. What are you going to do with those sections of music?

Usually the chorus starts on the downbeat and on an important note of the key/scale. That's usually the 1st note/tonic but may also be the 3rd or 5th in that order.

I haven't seen any books cover this point except the Berklee book on Popular Melody Writing. Period. Finished. It's the only one and I've read A LOT.

Music Composition/Songwriting How To 4

So, what is the popular song form and why is the popular song form popular? It goes; Intro Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Chorus Out .This Doesn't tax people too much. They don't have to work too hard to "get it".

This also has to do with song length. If, as we're told most normal people have attention spans of 15 minutes then a song 15 minutes long won't bring in people with shorter attention spans. Teachers will probably scream and point "Junior High School Students".

If you want to include them then you better cut that figure in half. A tune seven minutes long can go on the album but it will never make it to radio unless you're Pink Floyd etc... Radio format is about 3.5 minutes. Not much longer or shorter.

Initially, shoot for around 100 measures of music at a moderate tempo and you'll be in the ball park for the airwaves.

I'm all for looking at the big picture so let's say you're composing music for an entire album of music and not just one tune. This is a good idea so you can plan to incorporate enough variety between pieces of music on the cd.

People want to feel like they're getting they're money's worth and so the complexity rule doesn't apply so much to the number of songs on a cd.

Music Composition/Songwriting How To 3

It's because a guitar has 6 strings of which 5 may be ringing plus the vocalist puts the number of voices near the acceptable ball park for complexity.

A vocalist with a pianist is another example for the same reason. We don't pair vocalist with only a flute player usually because then only two notes sound at the same time and fails most peoples criteria for sufficient complexity.

This also applies to song form which is where most books on music composition instruction start. A song can have one section that repeats which could be labeled AA.

Although it occurs in the classical repertoire, most modern people find it far too simplistic both as listeners and composers.

Another form is to have a first section with a contrasting section as in AB. The complexity has increased but not much and still fails the music psychology test.

After that comes ABA. This is just at the lower range of the acceptable complexity scale and you run the risk of boring more than half of your audience with something like this in my opinion.

When we come AA'BA'' we're making real progress. This is the form of a lot of jazz standards. The A's are called verses and the B is called a bridge and the whole thing is called a chorus.

This terminology is different when talking about pop music which we'll get to in a moment. The problem with jazz is that if each person takes a turn soloing over several repeats of the form then it fails the complexity test by containing too many sections of music.

AABA for the first statement of the material then AABA again for the first soloist and maybe played more than once. Then AABA again for the second soloist. and the third and the fourth.

So there's something like AABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABAAABA etc.. That's 40 sections of music which is way beyond what most people will sit through especially if there's a drum solo.

Some people will "chunk" each AABA into a single section but that leaves 10 which is still too high.

Music Composition/Songwriting How To 2

Try to come up with as many ideas as you can about how to accomplish your compositional goal. I'll help you if I can.

This brings up the point of instrumentation. What instruments will you need to use to create the mood you're shooting for. There are certain paramaters about how many parts you will need. This leads to the issue of complexity.

There's a concept in musicology about well-formedness that applies to rhythms, scales, song forms, and instrumentation. Pop music for example usually has 5 instruments at one time. The reason for this is because of music psychology.

People's brains are wired to expect a certain amount of complexity and if the music doesn't satisfy that because it doesn't have enough "voices" for just one "for instance",

then a general concencus will be arrived at by random samplings of the population that the music is too boring.

Also, if there are too many voices then a majority of normal people will be put off by the higher level of complexity. An example of why a singer and a guitarist is O.K.

How Pros Compose

I once read that Sting sometimes sets the sentences in his morning newspaper to music. This has the added benefit of suggesting possible lyrics once an adequate melody has materialized.

One article was saying that people who have composing careers tend to start with the big picture and work down toward the details. Amateurs do the opposite. Pros are able to conceive of and write several parts simultaneously taking into account how they interrelate.
Amateurs write one bar at a time.

Another point about complexity is instrumentation. Perhaps the reason pop music has only 5 or 6 parts is due to the "not enough instruments=boring, too many instruments=chaos" dichotomy. Pop music has the happy medium.

I was reading a scholarly article about complexity that basically said successfully creative people have personalities that love complexity, so they're able to crank out all this different stuff. However, complexity is not the same as popularity. The Beatles, it mentioned, got less and less popular, the more complex they're music became.

The most popular music, they said, tends to have a moderate amount of complexity, not more or less. I read a related article on music perception/psychology which mentioned that well formed rhythms (what people expect to hear) have 2-6 events per 5 seconds (that must be the parameters for a moderate amount of complexity in that musical dimension). The tempo 100 beats per minute is in the center of the perceptual field (moderate complexity?).

Musical Patterns Three

What humans seem to like is a balance between simplicity and complexity. This is similar to a fractal: it repeats but in an ever changing way. It’s probably not good if the pattern is only identifiable after looking at hundreds or thousands of members in the sequence. So, not every sequence is going to be useable for music that would be appreciable by humans.

Here is an interesting example of a pattern that repeats in an ever changing way:

10
01

10/01
01/10

10/01/01/10
01/10/10/01

If you keep repeating these patterns in this manner, ironically, you end up with a pattern that never repeats.

Also, we can take note lengths such as short and long and combine them into a structured but never repeating pattern. This is only one of several ways to do this. And both this and the above pattern have already been used by many composers without recourse to a computer. Just an interest in mathematics.

SS,L
SSS,SL,LS
SSSS,SSL,SLS,LSS,LL
SSSSS,SSSL,SSLS,SLSS,SLL,LSSS,LSL,LSS

So, in the first links in this thread there are mathematical sequences found in "nature". One group which seemed promising for a pitch sequence was the Sprague Grundy Values for Dawson’s Chess if we assign a number to mean pitches and perhaps the zeros mean rests. I thought it would be good for that because the first line of the string would primarily create a melody that keeps in the range of steps and thirds.

It’s like this;

01120311033224052233011302110 etc...

It has a cousin called the Sprague-Grundy Values for games of Kayles. I thought it would be good for creating both a pitch series and rhythms where if each rhythm from a chart is assigned a number. The most important rhythms being a 1 etc... You can click the chart to see it larger.

Sprague-Grundy for games of Kayles goes; 01231432142641271432146741265 etc...

The Class Number of Q Series would produce rhythm patterns of ever increasing complexity.

111221212424142366434422648445264423688818474etc...

The Infinite Juggling Sequence seems like it would also be good for rhythms because there would be a balance of repetition and change.

3342333342423411etc...

In "The Number of Factorizations of n into Prime Powers Greater than 1", the repetitions of 1 while the series progresses would help create a sense of unity;

1112111321121115121211321321etc...

This Infinite Fibonacci Word (there are several) would be good for alternating two pitches or two rhythms in a complex manner;

1011010110110101101011011010110110101101011011010110 etc..

For "The Number of Segments needed to represent ’n’ on a Calculator Display" could be an ever rising pitch pattern or an ever increasingly complex rhythm scheme;

6 2 5 5 4 5 6 3 7 6 8 4 7 7 6 7 8 5 9 8 11 7 10 10 9 10 11 8 etc...

As would "The Number of Letters in English names of length ’n’";

4 3 3 5 4 4 3 5 5 4 3 6 6 8 8 7 7 9 8 8 6 9 9 11 10 10 9 11

I forget the name but the code for this one in the second link is AO72203 would produce only stepwise pitch motion if each number is assigned a pitch;

1 2 1 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 4 3 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 5 4 3 4 3 4 3 2 1 etc...

as would "The Number of Runs in a Binary Expansion of n";

1 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 4 3 2 3 2 1 2 3 4 3 4 5 4 3 2 3 4 3 2 3 2 1 etc...

and "Roman Numbers for n" with occasional motion by third and even more rare by fourth;

1 2 3 2 1 2 3 4 2 1 2 3 4 3 2 3 4 5 3 2 3 4 5 4 3 4 5 6 4 3 4 5 6 7 5 2

Some Cellular automata would produce various patterns, some that involve simultanaeities where some voices would linger, some drop out, and some appear. It could be interesting for experimental voice motion/chord construction.

Musical Patterns Two

My Korean composition professor, who is a big fan of Eastern European classical music especially the Polish composer Lutoslavski, told me to write ALL of my rhythms for classical music using the golden mean/fibonacci series in a certain way. Where, for example, 3/4s of the way through there was some variety within two measures. Then again at 3/4s through 4 measures which includes the first two already discussed. And again at 3/4s through 8 measures.

Anyway, if you’re so inclined to search for meaning within mathematical "systems", I came across this page which has about 147 number sequences 1/3rd of the way down the page.

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Seis.html

Here is another one with probably thousands:

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/Sindx_Aa.html

Not all of them seem musically useful to me and I only looked at the one’s with an asterisk which are supposed to be frequently resorted to by mathematicians making them more important in the math world.

How to translate these into musically meaningful ideas will be the topic of the next posts in this thread.

One definition of a pattern is: a succession of local similarities.

Pattern recognition software such as speech recognition, or face recognition use some of the same things we’ll be talking about here. There is also software for identifying patterns within music, which can be difficult because sometimes a repetition of a pattern is so altered that it could just as easily be defined as a new pattern.

They usually say that musical patterns are based on contour, pitches and rhythm. Once a pattern is identified, the third repetition of a pattern can be found merely from it’s contour even if the melodic and rhythmic aspects are significantly distorted.

A note or group of notes make poorly perceptible patterns only when they cannot be related to more salient patterns. Simple suffixes and prefixes of patterns cannot be considered new patterns.

The importance of a pattern within the music is a product of it’s length and the frequency of it’s recurrence. Another musical pattern they talk about is that the degree of slowing reflects the importance of a boundary. So, if either you’re playing a longer note such as a whole note at the end of a tune, that usually signifies it’s the most important boundary in the composition, or if the tune is performing a ritardando after the climax and approaching the final pitch and rhythmic event.

Some of the most basic patterns in music are if a note begins and ends a piece.

If it’s in a metrically important position, is louder than the rest and if it’s accented.

If it has a long duration and if it’s repeated.

If it’s the highest lowers or pivotal within a defining pattern.

Or a member of the harmonic relations, octave, fifth or fourth even if they are only consecutive.

More complex patterns would be motifs, antecedent phrases, consequent phrases, and sections.

Expert Systems and Effective Melodic Solutions

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.

Purpose of Music

On the surface it appears that music is for entertainment or as a money-making opportunity for the gifted or the lucky. But if one looks a little deeper it can be seen that music can be used to bring people together to build community in group performances whether that community is in the audience, in the ensemble or both. Music can be used in psychology to help people express their emotions when they find it difficult or impossible to use words. Music therapists use music for healing the sick or the bereaved through its power to stir the emotions. Music can be used to help people unwind after an upsetting day, to enter into meditation, to express the religious sentiment or create drama in the movies. The powers of concentration involved in performing and composing music can give a person a greater chance of success in the world. It can help people see themselves as having an influence on the world and therefore feeling contented if they create something useful and beautiful. A person becomes a co-creator of the universe with the source of all life instead of merely theorizing about life in lofty spheres of abstraction which alone leads to depression and a lack of passion.

Many people are becoming unbalanced as a result of modern life due to its complexity and the difficulty of living sustainable with nature and each other. A call to greater complexity, disharmony and distortion for no other reason than because it is the way we seem to be going is like intentionally stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff. There must be a balance between randomness and control.

I like aspects of modern education because it is sometimes saying that fields such as music are not separate boxes from other subjects. For example, music composition overlaps music theory, performance and aesthetics. These are obvious. What is not obvious is that music composition overlaps other fields such as religion, philosophy, mythology, architecture, mathematics, sociology and psychology. Music does not have hard boundaries that separate it from everything else and therefore cannot be thought of as a box. The same way that we cannot place ourselves outside nature. We are a part of nature, the trees are our external! lungs and there is no escaping the fact without them we would all die.

About the Music 2

My music also incorporates pop bass ostinatos (because popular styles are the authentic voice of the individual), rhythms from around the world (because I would like to think that I could love all kinds of people), reggae guitar parts (because it is the most widely spoken musical dialect),

I usually write modal pieces at a medium fast tempo which is heterophonic. Solely playing the singular melodic lines of monophonic or homophonic music generally implies a philosophical foundation that does not have or want a relationship with the neighbors.

The independant lines of Classical counterpoint recreates the feeling of too much western individualism. The heterophonic line of two melodies playing the exact same thing, similar to the steps of some ballroom dancing, comes from a philosophical position that two people should come together. In the case of ballroom dancing, it's a man and a woman no more than 5 years apart usually.

It's never 2 women or 2 men and its REALLy never 1 woman and 4 men etc... It is nonverbally communicating the culture's expectations for sexual and other kinds of relationships and marriage. The man leads.

The woman follows. There are certain steps to follow too. It means there is a right and a wrong way to live your life.

In order to be accepted you must become a dependable cliche' like everyone else or be outcast.

I want to make abundant music because we can all look forward or open ourselves now to the good things that life has to offer us. However, there is a limit. Creative people like complexity but too much will alienate the audience.

Popular styles almost never have more than 5 parts occuring simultaneously so I try to keep my music just under or at that limit. Well formed rhythms, as well, are defined as between 2 and 6 rhythmic events about every 5 seconds. So, I usually keep my parts near the high end or at that parameter.

These are just 2 of the ways I accomplish a feeling of abundance.

Building and strengthening ties between community members is a delicate balancing act because too many times if someone wants to appeal to blacks for example then the fact of the matter is that many whites, Irish, Scottish and what have you will, unfortunately, not identify or want to be associated with it. Or if you try to appeal to Asian Americans, you alienate regular Asians, blacks, whites, Scottish, Irish etc... In trying to appeal to too many people you lose everyone.

Many if not most traditionalists and conservatives won't like my music. I didn't make it for them. I'm affirming a completely different set of values that they're not ready to appreciate or understand.

I've thrown them a bone by not being ignorant of their concerns but I really don't share them at all. That's about 2/3rds of America, Europe, Australia and NewZealand right there who I will probably never reach.

I know why the rural bible belt identifies with country/western and Christian music in the U.S. and understand why conservatives identify with 19th centuy classical music. However, to be very blunt, in my opinion Country and Christian music comes from a biased philosophical position that they are the chosen people by God to be better than everyone else. And If they have money, then they believe this proves that a God favors them.

Perhaps, in a few short years when America is no longer a global super power cowering under big Asian players and American whites are in the minority in their own country, hopefully the arguments presupposing their innate superiority will be seen for exactly what they are, a bunch of nonsense thrown together by pseudo-intellectuals bolstered and supported by the uninformed, mentally lazy and/or the willfully ignorant.