composer – Page 25 – Daily Music Writing Tips

Tip #89 – Crafting Modal Interchange from a Tone Drone

Going back to an early topic of borrowed chords and altering a harmony by changing a chord quality to its parallel major/minor – here is another way on how to view it:

Say you have a melody that you want to craft around a single note drone. In this example, the tone used will be E.

So, E what?? E major? E minor? E Dorian mode? E Mixolydian mode?

Well… why not all give them a shot?

With keeping the tone drone constant in the harmonies (either as a chord tone or upper structure tension), try changing each section of the melody to be in a different mode. Below is the example with every measure changing to a different mode corresponding to E as the center tone.

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Improve Your Lyrics – Tip #5

Talking to some songwriters, some say that they want their lyrics to tell a story – to be almost cinematic. To be so descriptive that a person can easily understand the meaning of the song.

In the case where you want to make your lyrics absolute – meaning, without confusion as to what it is about – and story-like, don’t forget to add words to describe:

Who
What
When
Where
Why
How

We take these for granted, associating them with what your elementary literature teacher repeated nonstop. However, these points are critical when trying to convey an absolute story-like lyrics nature.

As you are revising your lyrics, look and see if you (or someone else) can easily tell the who, what, when, where, why, and how.

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Tip #88 – Breaking a Chord Rhythmically

Say you have a chord and a really good voicing too for a measure. It sounds great… but it is lacking a sense of motion that you desire.

Without disrupting the harmony, how do you accomplish it?

One way is by breaking apart the chord so that each of the chord members sound at different times within a period of length. You see this already in stuff like “boom-chuck” guitar accompaniment, Travis picking, arpeggiating, etc.

Besides breaking it apart, try to come up with a pattern as well for it. Below is a common pattern found in ragtime music used to break-apart a chord:

Notice that there are a few arpeggiations of single notes, and broken parts of group chords as well.

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Tip #87 – Using a Break, Be it Three Kinds

Break can mean a couple of different things in music, depending on the genre’s jargon.

One can use a break as an idea of a rest. A break – a sudden pause – in the music that can be used for dramatic effect or a place for breathing.

A break can be literal, using sounds of something crashing or breaking apart. This can be performed live, or used as sample.

Or, the most conventional meaning – where the rest of the ensemble stops playing (or holds back greatly in dynamics) while a single instrument takes a solo line. This can be used to surprise the listener while bringing attention to a specific sound source before the rest of the ensemble returns.

Try putting it into your new composition!

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How To Beat Writer’s Block – Tip #8

Take a look a the artwork masterpieces of Jackson Pollock. Simple, yet visionary and revolutionary. And most of what he did was drip, splatter, and throw paint randomly on a canvas.

With a piece of sheet music, and paint brush, and some paint – do something similar to the art of Jackson Pollock. Be random with how you splatter the paint across the sheet music. Let it drip random drops.

After it dries, interpret you new score. What lines of contour do you see? What noteheads on the staves are there? Is there a rhythm and flow to it?

Musical inspiration can come from anywhere, including art.

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Tip #86 – Backbeat Inclusion

This will be a short tip today.

In most music, especially those in the cannon of classical music, there is a hierarchy of which beats within a measured grouping get the most emphasis – and that tends to be beats 1 and 3 of a 4/4 time signature.

As blues, jazz, R&B, soul, etc. became more popular, so did the use of a backbeat – which is emphasizing beats 2 and 4 instead.

Funk came around, and the primarily emphasis on beat 1 returned back into the prominence of popular music.

And then disco/EDM with the classic snare hits on 2 and 4 revamped the backbeat.

So…

Point being, not all music has to tend to the “classical” pattern of emphasizing beats 1 and 3. And, one can even experiment with the backbeat as well. How about you just emphasize beats 2 and 5 within a 6/4 measure? Play around with it.

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Tip #85 – Basic Cheat Sheet to Jazz Style Harmonic Substitution

“It’s just a ii-V-I”

I heard that phrase a lot whenever I took a class in jazz or played with a jazz group. And rightfully so, as there are a lot of ii-V-I chord progressions found in jazz standards.

That being said, would jazz music get boring over time if it uses this progression over and over again? Maybe “predictable” is a better word, but the great jazz composer’s & arrangers new how to use harmonic substitutions to create interesting progressions that still resembled the original.

In the famous ii-V-I progression, the ii is the pre-dominant area. The V is the dominant area. And that leads into the I that is the tonic area.

A crash course in harmonic substitutions:

The I tonic chord can be replaced by bIII , III , IV , bVI , and VI since they all share a common tone on the tonic scale degree. In addition, minor and diminished versions of the I chord can work as well.

As for the dominant chord, they can be replaced by the dominant or major chord versions of the bII harmony. Also, they can be the dominants or tritone substitutes of the tonic area’s substitutions acting on the original.

Pre-dominant areas are more open, being the ii, iv, and tritone substitute in relation to the dominant area harmony.

Below is a compromised (but still relatively large) sheet of various combinations of the harmonic substitutions mentioned above with a few extras, based in a starting key of C:

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Tip #84 – New Paths with Multiple Harmonic Functions

You can probably recall a bunch of stories, television shows, movies, etc. where some character is on a journey. And on that journey, they come across a fork in the road that seems to lead into multiple directions. That one spot the character is in – the center of it all – branches into different pathways on where to go.

The same thing appears in music, as chords have multiple functions and various chord quality overlaps in different keys.

For example: If I play a C major triad chord, what would come next? Or better question; what key are we in? Because, a C major triad appears in multiple keys – all with different harmonic functions.

Below is a “cheat-sheet” of common chords found in music and the possible diatonic harmonic functions found in various keys:

Experiment, and see where it leads you to!

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Tip #83 – Making your Programmed Drums More “Life-Like”

Take a listen to some of the drum grooves found in the hit soul/funk/Motown songs of the 1970s and 80s. Listen really closely to what these R&B drummers do to the sixteenth-notes.

That’s right; they swing them! While the eighth-notes are played straight, locking right in between the quarter-note pulses, the sixteenth-notes (typically coming from the hi-hit or cymbals) are swung.

When programming your MIDI drums, you can either use a plug-in for changing the swing amount – or, use this style of notation below:

Obviously, you would not give this kind of chart to a drummer, as you can just as easily tell the musician to feel out a swung sixteenth-note beat. But, in the land of digital music, this is a great way on making your programmed drummer sound more “natural” as one might perceive it to be.

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How To Beat Writer’s Block – Tip #7

When writing music or lyrics, people sometimes are afraid of putting something down – as if they expect the first thing they write to be perfect, so they are petrified to be anything less than that.

We as composers have this belief of this fake phenomenon of hit songwriters sitting down and instantly writing a hit. Let me tell you;

It took them a LONG time to get up to that skill.
If they did write a hit song, it was probably there only one.

So my tip to you, is to write something – even if it is bad (in that case you can reflect on what you wrote and learn from it) – everyday. Set yourself 10-minutes in the morning as soon as you wake up for a creative free-write.

Think of it like this, the more you wait for a “hit” to come to you, the more your song writing will get constipated. However, the more you continuously write, the easier it will be to get those creative ideas out of the body and into the world.

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