Starting a composition is a difficult task. Getting your inspirations, thinking creatively, applying your creative thoughts to your music and supplementing your ideas with additional composition are all difficult tasks to accomplish.
For starters, your current state of mind will greatly affect the music you write – whether you feel angry, joyful or sad chances are your musical composition will in some way reflect this mood.
Different times of day and different seasons affect your composing as well as current affairs and any stress’s you might have.
The varieties of factors that can influence your composition periods are immense and hopefully these few pointers will demonstrate some methods of breaking out of the psychological restraints placed on you.
• Colours – If you are looking to compose a piece of music based around a certain mood find a relevant colour that matches for instance orange gives the impression of energy and drive. Eventually you will learn to bias your mood to suit the composition you are aiming for.
• Character – it is well known for actors to really get inside the character they are portraying through their acting. Understanding key emotions and various behaviors help the actors ‘ live ‘ as their proposed character. If you are creating a theme for a character (think darth vaders theme tune) you need to be demonstrating and describing that character through sound. If you follow the same process as an actor would you will eventually unravel hidden details that will help refine your composition, make it more realist and detailed and allow for it to be much more creative and expressive.
• Nature – a lot of creativity and inspiration can be got by observing nature. From birds communicating through a song like speech to the rustle of leaves in a summer breeze. Trying to emulate nature is an excellent way to begin a sound-scope – or incorporating nature into a character theme for example to express an angelic quality, singing like the birds (fast trills on piccolo or glissandos on the violin)
• Memories – another great source to tap into is your memories. A lot of emotion will go into compositions that are personal in some way to yourself. Spend a few minutes reflecting on your past – try to imagine the memory in great detail – sounds, smells, colours the weather – anything that will give you a good image and story to compose about.
These are just a few sources for inspiration – use your imagination – it has never ending possibilities!
With so many possibilities to compose about and now that your creativity is running, the next area to discuss is music theory.
The last thing that you want to happen is to have all these wonderfully creative ideas for your composition but being held back by the lack of musical knowledge.
A rugby player could develop his passing techniques and his scrum techniques but if he doesn’t know the rules of the game he won’t be able to perform during a game.
Although music composition and as a whole is not bound by any rules you still need the knowledge of writing music – in the same way as a poet needs a knowledge of his language to write a poem.
Some of the key areas you should know about and be constantly revising are:
• The Staff, Bar Lines, Clefs, Time Signatures.
• Note Values, Rests, Phrasing, Rhythm
• Articulation, Instrument Specific Techniques (pizz, con sord)
• Key Signatures, Circle of Fifths, Accidentals, Cadences
• Major, Minor, Diminished, Pentatonic, Diatonic Scales
• Modes
• Chords, Extensions, Inversions, Sequences, Arpeggios
• Instrument Ranges, Timbres of Each Instrument, Difficult Areas of an Instrument (The break on clarinet for instance or seventh position for trombones)
Of course it is not absolutely essential you know about all of this but it will mean that your creativity is weakened due to lack of a means to fully communicate.
Use music theory books – go through them and notate comments on the pages, take notes on to blank flash cards to memorize scales and extended chords, use past music theory exam papers to test and analyze your knowledge and then act on your weak areas, purchase a aural perception CD to recognize different cadences and the general sounds achieved from different combinations of notes and chords – there are many ways to learn all of this but find the way that you are comfortable with and stick to it.
Finally the last piece of advice in this article is to keep your composing active.
Aim to compose a short piece of music each day, maybe before you go to bed you can reflect on your day through a composition. Mix it up – compose for different orchestrations and different abilities.
Composing is challenging but by keeping active like this will greatly benefit you and your compositions – and you never know – you may accidentally stumble upon your masterpiece!
Practice makes perfect. These three words are heard every day and time after time these words are ignored. But why? Music is such a vast subject that for anyone, even the professionals, mastering it is near impossible. With years of work one can be very knowledgeable in specific areas of music but it would take more than a lifetime to fully understand every aspect of an instrument or music theory.
With that in mind hopefully people should start to understand that having a one hour lesson once a week is not even close to enough to gain substantial progress and development on a musical instrument.
This series of articles offer tips on practicing music which will hopefully demonstrate the benefits, enjoyment and fulfillment that can be gained through practicing music.
1. Goals are key. It is human nature to take pride in reaching a goal whether a promotion at work or winning a competition. If you have a set goal to reach you will be more willing to put in the work required to achieve it. Some examples of goals could be to learn the latest song you’ve fallen in love with, to be able to sight read in a certain key, to develop faster, more technical playing or to reach a certain exam grade before a certain period.
2. Little often is better than a lot occasionally. One key point to remember is that repetion is the quickest way to learn something due to your brain and muscles ability to develop and store a so called ‘muscle memory’. It will take a substantially longer time to learn and retain your new knowledge if you practice for a long period but only occasionally. See tip 3 on how to easily incorporate regular practice sessions into your daily routine.
Another benefit of practicing a little often is that your concentration levels are kept up throughout your practice session. Brass players will understand this the most – after playing a trumpet or any brass instrument for approximately an hour your lips start to feel numb which in turn begins to restrict your playing abilities. The knock on effect of this is that the longer you practice without a break, the more harm ultimately you will cause yourself – both mentally and physically – it will knock your spirit and could even do damage to your embouchure. Obviously this applies to all instrument groups; as is well documented repetitive strain injury is common among musicians. The primary cause of this is improper technique but as the name implies too much repetition through a movement can create serious effects. Therefore if you are practicing for longer periods be sure to take regular breaks – 5 to 10 minutes for every 50 minutes for adults and 10 to 15 minutes for every 25 minutes for children.
3. Routine. Imagine this – every morning you wake up, maybe make a cup of coffee or sort through the post and eventually at some point you will go to the sink and brush your teeth. Now most people do this without any thought – it is just something that gets done. This is the effect of getting into a routine. If you set aside a time each day to practice, away from distractions if possible, you will get into this routine making it much easier to practice, it becomes a part of your day to day life.
4. Practice with a partner. Most humans love competition – especially if you know you are the winner – and by tapping into this you’re making your practice session less of a chore and more of a game. Set challenges between you both and find some reward for the winner. The other benefits are that you gain an outsiders opinion and criticism on your playing, the opportunity to practice duets and you will have some company rather than being locked away in your bedroom.
This is just a glimpse at the different methods you can adopt to improve your practice and in the next article I will demonstrate some more music based tips to help you improve; using a metronome to develop your internal body clock, a fun method for scales and arpeggios and how and why you should be incorporating sight reading and music theory into your practice sessions.
For now just focus on your desires and on the reasons why you started music and give the tips above some thought.
Mp3 digital music is one of the most popular forms for music to take these days. Digital music just seems to make sense, and is a natural step forward in the music world today. Everything else is digital these days, why wouldn’t our music be?
While music is still purchased in the form of CDs, it is very often converted into mp3 digital music for use on a computer or mp3 player. Indeed, sometimes it seems like CD players are all but obsolete now, and I almost never use mine anymore. However, it is nice to have music backed up on CDs, and I try to keep my CD collection current even if I’m not listening to them directly very much. I have a sort of inherent distrust of computers and all things purely digital, and I’m just waiting for my digital music players to explode one day.
Mp3 players have a lot of nice advantages to them over CDs. First of all, they are of course much smaller. Most mp3 players can easily fit into your pocket, unlike bulky CD players. Even the smallest portable CD player is enormous compared to the average mp3 player. Also, mp3 digital music can be stored on a hard drive of an mp3 player or computer, and so no CDs are needed. You can load up all the mp3 digital music you want on your computer, and never have to worry about losing or scratching any of it.
One of the most popular portable digital music players today is Apple’s iPod, and since it’s made by Apple it just has to be different. Therefore it does not use the mp3 digital music files other players use, and instead uses its own spiffy Apple format exclusive to iPods. As an owner of both an mp3 player and an iPod, this fact continuously frustrates me, as it is nothing short of a pain in the ass to transfer music from one player to the other.
Mp3 digital music is also of a fairly small file size, which is handy. My laptop has a 120 GB hard drive on it, and I can fit my entire music collection on it in the mp3 digital music format without making a dent in the overall space available. The mp3 digital music format poses some serious threats to the music industry, as it is so easy to share and pass around.
Few things in my life do I use more often and enjoy than my mp3 music player. Well, maybe it’s not all that great, but I do really love the idea of mp3 music players. I’m so tired of CDs I could just scream. Sure, they’re way better than the different forms of music storage mediums that came before, but that’s not saying a whole lot. There’s nothing more frustrating than putting on your favorite CD only to hear it skip like crazy during the best songs.
Even taking extremely good care of my CDs, they still somehow get scratched all the time. Furthermore, just trying to keep all my CDs organized is a major hassle. I think I’ve spent many hours putting CDs away in different folds and organizing the different CD cases, and while this used to be kind of fun back when I was in high school and didn’t own many albums, now that I’ve got a large collection it is a total drag. For these reasons alone, I’ve been a big fan of mp3 music players since they first started hitting markets several years ago.
The first mp3 music players were ridiculously expensive, but I just had to have one. Maybe I’m just a technology junkie, or maybe I had just finally had enough of CDs. I do remember the first mp3 music players came out shortly after I’d had my main CD holding folder filled with 90% of the music I’d collected over the years stolen. I’m sure that also had something to do with my decision to make the plunge and get an mp3 music player. I’d already spent a small fortune rebuilding my CD collection, so I guess I figured why not spend another small fortune, get an mp3 music player, and never have to worry about stolen or scratched CDs again?
While I haven’t been worrying much about stolen or scratched CDs since then, I have been worrying about crappy mp3 music players a lot. The first one I bought was such a piece of garbage compared to the newer ones, its not even funny. Fortunately, the mp3 music player I have now is pretty sweet. It’s made by Panasonic, works with my car and has all sorts of neat little features.
Of course, now that the mp3 music players have gotten good, Apple just had to come out with something better. Their iPods are in fact pretty nice, but they of course have their own spiffy music format that doesn’t work with other mp3 music players. Isn’t that just so typically Apple?
