Whats the process of the way I create music called?

[Aroused by JarJar]

Again when harmonizing a melody line using voice leading the melody is on top meaning the highest note one plays where as other notes of the harmony are formed below that note.

This is simply factually incorrect. It's not a stupid error at all, but a natural mistake. In fact, if you go back a thousand years, what Tapper Mike is describing is how the first harmonization of cantus firmus, "the melody", took place. Soon after, it went the other way (cantus firmus in the bass), then the melody went to the tenor in Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass settings, and now of course it can be in any voice and doesn't even necessarily stay in any one voice.

Voice leading is simply the intersection of melodic and harmonic writing, and emerges whichever you start out with.

[stringtapper]

As for your previous assertions that you Both aren't trying to start a flame war and that you find me unqualified to express ideas on this forum because you think I'm not as knowledgeable as you. I find the latter discounts the former. I intend to move forward regardless of your assertions. You of course are more then welcome to introduce concepts yourself and or attempt to discredit mine. Of course I'll defend any statements I have and will hope that others will also take the time to review my findings and experiment with the concepts.

Sorry, but you are absolutely using the term "voice leading" to mean something it does not. Full stop. End of.

So yes, you are not qualified to explain voice leading to someone on a forum. It's got nothing to do with "expressing ideas" as you say. You're simply giving wrong information that will only serve to confuse beginners. The core of your ideas may have musical merit, but when they are prefaced by demonstrably incorrect statements about basic terminology it undermines any good you can do with your own "ideas."

Voice leading is simply the way in which voices in a polyphonic or heterophonic texture move horizontally from one note to the next. It's got nothing to do with the melody "leading" (as in "guiding") the other voices. That's just not how the term is understood by… well, anyone but you that I have ever observed or talked to about it.

[jancivil]

He's using the term to show something else, 'block chord approach', such as Shearing two hand melody particularly, as conveyed by Hyman.

- such as in this statement: "Buckner plays in a locked-hand style with both hands moving together over the keyboard to accommodate the melody note (the top voice of his right hand)". So tapper mike has the melody leading all the other voices, hence 'voice leading'.

Voice leading means the opposite of that approach, it takes the 'voices' of a harmony as individuals. Cf., 'part-writing'. But in block chords, it's just parallel movement, there is no writing per parts, they move as one 'block'.

So whether or not someone can follow Hyman's voicings, it isn't part writing/voice leading and there is a red herring muddying the waters.
Can I mix those being they're both having to do with waters?

[V0RT3X]

Whatever happened to mashing notes together until you get something that sounds good?

All this has reminded me of why I decided NOT to study music but keep it as a hobby. Thanks for that, y'all!

I used to think this way, but sometimes I think getting into a musical education is kind of fun and a great way to express yourself. I want to learn more @ 28 and I don't have barely any training. It probably won't turn me into a musical god or get me famous, but it's interesting enough to help me understand more about music as a whole.


However one thing I find kind of daunting is how lots of the musical "geniuses" don't seem to make as much money as a rock"n"roll artist these days. I mean even if you spend the next 10 years learning complex theories and such, will it ultimately turn you into some kind of musical god bound for fame?

[ariston]

Whatever happened to mashing notes together until you get something that sounds good?

All this has reminded me of why I decided NOT to study music but keep it as a hobby. Thanks for that, y'all!

I used to think this way, but sometimes I think getting into a musical education is kind of fun and a great way to express yourself. I want to learn more @ 28 and I don't have barely any training. It probably won't turn me into a musical god or get me famous, but it's interesting enough to help me understand more about music as a whole.


However one thing I find kind of daunting is how lots of the musical "geniuses" don't seem to make as much money as a rock"n"roll artist these days. I mean even if you spend the next 10 years learning complex theories and such, will it ultimately turn you into some kind of musical god bound for fame?

Well, as to the first part: I was being ironic, but only partly. I guess that's due to my musical education, which began with formal piano and organ lessons. I got bored with playing other people's music and began to improvise. And "mashing notes" was actually my MO, but not haphazardly; I was doing that in a strategic way, like playing all the main chords of a major scale and seeing which notes "fit" and which ones grated. Later on, I learned how to describe what I was doing in musical terms - but only to a point. The only use I found for that vocabulary was when communicating my intentions to other musicians. So I had rudimentary knowledge of chords to begin with, but that was it.

In short: the music came first, the terminology second. That's why I'm always a little sceptical when people try to do it the other way around. Will a theoretical knowledge of music help you make music? Or will it constrain you, maybe even hamper your efforts, because you'd be trying to follow "rules" instead of your heart and your gut? I said what my answer was to these questions, and I have no idea what other people's answers are. Maybe it can be beneficial, but all this arguing about what "voice leading" is or isn't.... sheesh.

The second part: rock'n'roll is all about amateurism. It's about being able to play music without having to study, or be a virtuoso. The great leveller, in a way, for good and bad. I like it when people know what they're doing and have honed their craft, but I love the Ramones as well, or Maureen Tucker's drumming.

Sorry for the long post. I hope it's not too far off topic.

[jancivil]

In short: the music came first, the terminology second. That's why I'm always a little sceptical when people try to do it the other way around. Will a theoretical knowledge of music help you make music? Or will it constrain you, maybe even hamper your efforts, because you'd be trying to follow "rules" instead of your heart and your gut? I said what my answer was to these questions, and I have no idea what other people's answers are. Maybe it can be beneficial, but all this arguing about what "voice leading" is or isn't.... sheesh.

The only experience I have had in my life with a person that takes music theory as something in itself as an interest has been on this board, one or two people. And I have seen a kind of thing where a half-baked conception of things could be a stumbling block; certainly in some of the questions we see an impetus towards theory as if it's going to be a cart strong enough to pull the horse.

I can't be sure who you're talking about, though. I will be so bold as to say knowledge about music is a good thing for a musician, and music made from knowledge is probably the better approach than clueless trial and error. Knowledge is a good thing, I reckon. However information is not through itself knowledge.

Music theory is not a book of rules, or a recipe book. There are principles that are known to work for particular things, there are modes of operation, conventions that work consistently to the extent they became a style or convention, even a tradition and this can be conveyed in the signs or lingo called 'music theory'. I think *voice leading* is interesting, maybe it isn't to you, but maybe there is something at KVR that is.

As far as your distaste for this argument on facts, what do you think would go on if someone in a thread over to Production Techniques <parallel [NY style] compression> said, 'yes this is when you have two compressors set to do the same thing'? AS IF no one would come to correct that. Like no one would have a problem when the person with the fundamental misconstruction accused the objectors of failing to understand english.

But thanks for sharing!

[ghettosynth]

For instance, guitar players too often make lines based on finger patterns.

I observed this in my own experience, guitar imposes specific patterns, as well as piano imposes its own patterns. But don't you think singing imposes its own patterns too? There are lines that are naturally easy to sing and lines that are hard to execute.

I found it a funny exercise, to compose vocal lines on piano, or bass lines with voice... It usually turns out to require more gymnastics when playing/singing them, but also helps to break patterns and come up with some fresh ideas. Of course, I'm pretty bad singer and pretty bad player, so maybe I'm not too good example.

i've noticed these patterns of influence based on instruments, myself. i'm not a proper instrumentalist, so i think the instrument's note pattern layout influences me more than i control it. But that's also a nice way to break one's self out of habits. If i have spent all my life picking notes and patterns and progressions as i see fit in sequencers and trackers, not knowing what my own habits (bad or otherwise) are, i can be forcibly moved out of that habit by picking up an actual acoustic instrument and trying to do something with it when it is foreign to me.

Yes, just a different instrument can force you into different patterns. Sometimes those patterns open your eyes to things that you had taken for granted before. I've had a lot of fun lately playing my guitarlelie (uke with 6 strings tuned like a guitar). It's not because it's giving me new finger patterns, but, because it's tuned up a fourth to A, it's forcing me to think about how existing patterns in one key map to patterns in another while playing open chords. Of course I've done some of this before, but having to do this with every chord in order to sing songs in close the original key has forced me to think more about the connections between riffs that I take for granted, i.e., they are learned as part of the canonical "rock guitarist" lexicon.

And, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record/fanboi, push is fantastic for this. New patterns based on music ideas are quite easy to form. The orthogonal keyboard is really a useful tool for the "casual" performer. Moreover, the lit pads are an important part of it. When I record something in some key, and then play the pattern, the pads light. When I change the key that push thinks that it's in, the out of scale notes, no longer light. It's like playing a guitar tuned to all fourths except that each string is polyphonic. I get this immediate, within the context of my music, feedback about relationships between different scales, chords, and patterns derived from scale degrees.

The thing is, that I can then take these patterns back to the piano, or the guitar, and try to understand why my existing patterns have not allowed these ideas to develop. This helps me to both break existing patterns on the instrument as well as form new ones. FWIW, no tool has ever been as productive for me as push has for breaking "performance" patterns. Probably the only thing that came close was playing in a band. Playing other people's music forces you to learn new habits and attaches a goal to the effort.

With voice... i think i shaped my singing voice by three bands/artists. i don't know what my own style is because i've not done enough of my own work to really... grow into it and define it over time.

Right, I've found this also, my singing has been shaped by the songs that I've sung all of my life. This forces patterns, even if not a consequence of any physical properties of the throat, they are, nonetheless, memorized patterns. I find breaking from them more challenging than with instruments with a concrete map (e.g. piano, guitar). This has become concrete to me recently as I've been doing some simple vocal exercises to improve my singing and I realize how naturally I slide across, i.e. miss, certain notes in some scales. I'm not talking about notes at the head/chest transition either, these notes should be easy to hit, but my learned patterns cause me to skip them. This becomes more obvious when I try to improvise with my voice as it comes off as a poor emulation of a rock guitarist's slavish devotion to the pentatonic scale. It's better if I have some words to sing, but, that is another challenge all together.

[jancivil]

speaking of tuning changing you up on the paradigm, I have a couple of things I start with in Absynth that use the harmonic tuning [overtone series]. So while down to the bottom you can get to know from intervals something kind of predictable, as you go up, who knows what to call these notes. You get these fine distinctions such as in eastern intonations, as though 'several versions of a seventh' kind of deal. The octave on the keyboard has no meaning now. So I'm completely in the dark as to names and it's all distances, nothing is linear, it's absolutely ear and trial and error. It's totally but it is pure. Theoretically it's going to have its bottom C as its base, but practically speaking I haven't found this so meaningful, as the things I'm making have so much harmonic complexity. It's an M.O. to take me outside the whole box of naming conventions. There is not a lot of theory to go on here.

the keyboard itself, I don't really have fingering down so well and I don't have facility to run scales or anything, except I can see intervals. I'm a good bass player on a mono synth, though. so even where I more or less have a map, this to some degree frees me from an area of [un-useful] habits.

When I started really trying to compose my own raga, which is about a limited palette and principles of movement - and out of a vocal tradition, and note well, the melody done on a sitar is on the one string - via a guitar, the shapes are the shapes to form a music, not to be convenient to the instrument of guitar. This was an important paradigm shift. I am definitely guilty of letting my fingers do the walking out of a certain facility on that instrument in the past. But what I do now is quite more melodic since I started working in my head more. NB: it isn't that I can actually produce in performance the lines with my voice, your voice is probably better developed than mine whoever you are, but there is a connection of ear/head in place of thinking of positions. Which I still do but I have gotten to where I write melody for guitar off the map, as if I know the landscape offroad. That said, instruments have the backstory and the personality built in, and idiomatic writing is the baby to not throw out with the bathwater.

But that I don't sing reliably is not at all pertinent to what I'm trying to convey, I don't sing qua singing. It's about the head vis a vis the ear. If you aren't trained to sight sing or at least the other thing of singing as the_way you find intervals to transcribe something, as the primary M.O., this might be mystifying.

[ghettosynth]

....snip: pointless response

[jancivil]

I think that if you can't sight read, that you are going to be more productive "on instrument" than in your head.

I really do not know what that says except about you. I'm tempted to challenge your reasoning, but you know what, I don't wanna know. That isn't right, I can't imagine how one comes away with such a notion. It's a gobsmackingly false dichotomy.

Why do you think they require instrumentalists to sight sing in their training at conservatory? Why do you think the very first and crucial focus in any gharana is to vocalize, any guru is going to make you sing everything? You're actually arguing against musicianship.

The only thing I can take away from these remarks is, you aren't interested in what musicians are interested in, that most of the people I would try to convey to on this board aren't either and that comments on this board should pretty much be restricted to thin gruel for hobbyists. Another thing about such a forum, when you want to emphasize a limit to addressing the Original Post(er), there are OTOH people that scan the thing looking for good stuff. Compare # of reads to # of posts some time. I think addressing real musical values is not a thing to discourage and I find your post just suspect, frankly.

I think there is a failure to communicate here and that I can't really solve it.

[ghettosynth]

To the OP - if you are still watching this thread. An online friend of mine has written some very nice observations about various Beatles songs called 'Tickets to Write'. I've used some of his tips when I'm in a chord progression rut, and his tips come from the Beatles' body of work.

Here's the very useful 'Tickets to Write' by Matt Blick http://beatlessongwriting.blogspot.com/ ... write.html

Try just a couple of the tips and it will get you out of your rut. I realize upon listening to your tunes that you might not think that the Beatles and your style could mesh in any way, which is all the more reason to read through the Tickets to Write for some inspiration. Think of it as a sort of Oblique Strategy.

I meant to respond earlier to this, but, internet problems. These are great, sort of a more specific variant of the oblique strategies.

http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/

[Jace-BeOS]

To continue: from Renaissance choral pieces to Black Sabbath, what makes polyphonic music work pretty much boils down to singable-melodies/riffs. If you listen to the bands you mention, I bet you can sing almost every drum, bass, guitar and keyboard part.

That's the first and most important part. Hard rock musics of the authentic and shaggy kinds are kinds of modern folk music, so that means you're going to have a lot of naturally musical people but mostly without much formal musical education, and not reading from written notes. Each musician has to memorize their parts, and the best way to memorize a part is to make it memorable in the first place. The problem with using a computer is that it will memorize anything you want it to, whether it's catchy or not, or even if it is beyond human capability to memorize.

So in my opinion you should start singing and humming your parts when you're making them.


Well that's my 2 cents.

i wanted to just make a note that this was an interesting distinction for me, as well. Thanks for describing this. It seems to be the difference between how i make music on the computer first vs in my head first. In my head, i have to do a melody first, and build from there once it is transcribed somehow into the synths (if i get that far). If i start on the DAW, well, i could start anywhere and it might be built up from a bunch of interacting pieces without a "hummable melody line". i have found that creating music on keys or guitar, by playing with instruments/effects, is similar to doing things in my head with the "sing it" mode of construction... because it has to be at least somewhat playable to me, as i have to perform it into the sequencer/recorder... and i am only just barely comfortable on any instrument other than my voice But the results are more... memorable when i create that way, as opposed to building things in a DAW or on a tracker.

Neat.

Thanks!

[Jace-BeOS]

@ cj31387:

Nice music, by the way. Very lush and thick. Good sounds used. Kept my interest all the way through.

[cj31387]

So, I've written a lot of songs over the years with my four chord method. I would like to turn some of my best riffs/melodies into this modal vamping system you guys talked about. How would I best learn to do this? Are there any YouTube vids you guys might recommend to teach how to do this. I know barely any music theory. Basically I can just read the grand staff slowly. I want to learn how to compose in this totally foreign system (to me at least). If I have a riff, what are the best ways to treat it as a vamp and figure out what scales will work with it? I've been playing by ear my whole life, but with chords as backing that give me inspiration for leads. I really have little experience building a lead off of a rhythm that is like a lead but a vamp.

[jancivil]

Maybe you can limit chords to two chords, a 'two-chord vamp', such as E to D which suggest a [E] mixolydian thing, or Em to A which gives you the fabric for [E] dorian.
I - bVII; i - IV

so you still have that drive a change provides you; then see if you can wean yourself & get the same feeling without the backing, the same type of line over just an ostinato in a bass line or riff. I think you want to get independent and come up with lines that are strong just as lines? you can suggest these movements without them being explicit or already present physically, if that makes sense.