How Music Works-The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond by John Powell:
Pg. 212
Imagine you are training to be a TV comedy scriptwriter--you are a fairly amusing person and you have developed some writing skills. You have thought up a funny situation but it just doesn't work very well once you have written it down. If ou take the sketch to your tutor, she will use her experience to try to find ways of getting the maximum amount of audience pleasure out of your original idea. She will probably suggest changes, such as:
As far as the original musical idea is concerned, that's no great mystery either. You don't necessarily start with a tune-it might be a rhythm or a bass line. It might be something you found yourself humming or something you misplayed ont he piano. For example, the English composer Vaughan Williams based the second movement in his Third Symphony on a single mistake he heard an army bugler make while he was working as an ambulance driver during the First World War.
..The difficulty is not in producing tunes. It's in remembering them and then developing harmonies and, finally, writing it all down or recording it.
In a nutshell:
1. Come up with one or two (generally very short) musical ideas.
2. Write them down or record them (there are computer packages to help you).
3. Use them to develop accompanying music (i.e., if you started with a tune, try different accompaniments; if you started with a bass line, develop a tune and/or chords).
4. Write it all down or record it.
5. Now organize the overall timing. Just like a well-told joke, does it need to be made longer by repeating bits? Does it need thirty seconds of droning, mysterious introductory music?
6. Write it all down or record it.
Pg. 212
Imagine you are training to be a TV comedy scriptwriter--you are a fairly amusing person and you have developed some writing skills. You have thought up a funny situation but it just doesn't work very well once you have written it down. If ou take the sketch to your tutor, she will use her experience to try to find ways of getting the maximum amount of audience pleasure out of your original idea. She will probably suggest changes, such as:
- maybe it's too long or too short
- maybe all the interesting stuff happens too early or too late
- maybe there are too many or too few people involved
- maybe you need to remove a line which gives the punch line away too early- or add one to make the joke clearer
As far as the original musical idea is concerned, that's no great mystery either. You don't necessarily start with a tune-it might be a rhythm or a bass line. It might be something you found yourself humming or something you misplayed ont he piano. For example, the English composer Vaughan Williams based the second movement in his Third Symphony on a single mistake he heard an army bugler make while he was working as an ambulance driver during the First World War.
..The difficulty is not in producing tunes. It's in remembering them and then developing harmonies and, finally, writing it all down or recording it.
In a nutshell:
1. Come up with one or two (generally very short) musical ideas.
2. Write them down or record them (there are computer packages to help you).
3. Use them to develop accompanying music (i.e., if you started with a tune, try different accompaniments; if you started with a bass line, develop a tune and/or chords).
4. Write it all down or record it.
5. Now organize the overall timing. Just like a well-told joke, does it need to be made longer by repeating bits? Does it need thirty seconds of droning, mysterious introductory music?
6. Write it all down or record it.