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.

Arranging Verses and Choruses

I remembered there are a couple other ways to distinguish verses and choruses. That’s with arranging. Sometimes the chorus is a little faster or has added instruments or is louder or all of the above. I’ve heard people change the groove between sections too but I don’t feel it’s as effective. I think if the new groove is based on the original groove then that works and I’ve done that a lot but a completely new groove often sounds like it should be a separate song.

It’s probably a good idea to listen to your favorite composers and hear what they’re doing concerning all of the points in this thread. I’m good at analysis so I get my hands on scores. That’s the main way how I learned Indonesian gamelan music.

I’ll do something like get a Mariah Carey song book and write out the melodic rhythms of the tunes I like and analyze starting positions, rhythm schemes such as aaab, aaba, and I’ll just put the notes in that tune’s chorus’ starting note such as the first note of the scale or the fifth or whatever.

Here is what an old one looks like in my notebook. About every four lines is a new song. Bridges and transitions such as prechoruses are NOT included. The first four lines are Mariah’s tune Sweetheart, the next four are When You Believe, then Always Be My Baby, One Sweet Day, Dreamlover, Emotions, then U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday which takes up six lines, On New Years Day, the last four lines are their tune In The Name Of Love.

William Russo, in his book Composing Music, recommends writing new melodies to your favorite melodic rhythms.

http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh53/gongchime/MariahU2Marley.jpg

Relationship between the Bass Guitar and the Bass Drum part Deux

If the previous rhythm was a chorus and you wanted the intensity of the song to come down a bit for the verse or bridge sections, I've got a way of constructing that from the rhythm of the chorus. You COULD use an entirely different groove but frequently all that serves to do is to make it sound like the verse and chorus are part of different songs and should not be together in the same song.

Of course this is just one method of bringing the intensity down. It shows the original rhythm of the section and then less intense variations created through the technique of subtraction.

There are at least two other possibilities; where you leave only the down beat and perhaps it’s off-beat or where you subtract only the downbeat and perhaps it’s off-beat..

Book Summary: Anthropology of Music

The book Anthropology of Music talks about a new awareness of ethnomusicology's obligaton and a probling for what it is, does and the purposes toward which it is directed. It's the author's contention that ethnomusicology should focus on concepts about music, how music and behavior are interrelated and the sound of music. The author states that ethnologic behavioral concerns have not received an equal amount of attention by ethnomusicologists.

Performers and the performance context should be more fully at the center of analysis. The mere preservation of music has been overly focused upon,and ethnomusicology's role needs to be wider than that. More fully, ethnomusicology should have technical goals such as determining what music is to the extent possible, how music is made and what it's structure is both from a microscopic view and from the big picture.

Ethnomusicology also should have behavioral concerns relating to physical, conceptual/cultural, social, and learning what it means to be a musician, a listener or a participant in the culture in question. It should also be concerned with showing connections betwen ethnomusicology, the humanities and the social sciences. One of the problems that has been plaguing ethnomusicology has been it's inability to combine the social sciences and the humanties together.

The author states that the social sciences are concerned with the economic, political and social aspects of humanity while the humanities are concerned with art, religion, and philosophy. Social science stems from the needs of the body and the humanities stems from humanitiy's purposes. Social science engages in descriptions of behaviors while the humanities are concerned with human values.

The author believes that the thread connecting them is that they are both interested in what people do and why. The author goes on to say that ethnomusicologists have not consistently and completely applied the scientific method and have placed too much emphasis on the laboratory phase and not enough concerning the proper things to do before going into the field and in the field once they get there.

Ethnomusicologists should institutionalize a field method that is taken from ethnomusicology's base of accepted theory and then create hypothesis', field problems and research designs based upon the theory/theories. Concerning a good research plan there are four points to consider. Is the research possible? Does it have a goal? Has the methodology been recorded and which to employ based on a knowledge of the variety of methods available.

It should also say what the study did and did not accomplish. Musicology's neglected field phase can be broken down further to 6 areas of inquiry. 1 The material culture of music such as where the instruments fit within the taxonomy. 2 Song texts. 3 Categories, 4 The musician. 5 The uses and functions of music. 6 Music as a creative cultural activity.

Ethnomusicology also needs to determine the optimum number of song samples necessary to isolate styles and sub-styles. Lastly, ethnomusicology needs to be able to determine what aspects of structure constitute the determining factors of a certain style such as range, level, direction, countour, interval, interval patterns, ornamentation, melodic devices, melodic meter, duration values, structure, scale, mode, duration tone, subjective tonic, meter, rhythm, and tempo.