I would like to know how you all go about building an arrangement for a new piece of music. Where do you start? In what order do you do things? Do you have any well proven methods of working to share?
You need to be a member of Composers' Forum to add comments!
Replies
For me, I clear any preconceived musical concepts from my head before I sit down to compose. Using the DAW, I will choose my palette, find the sweetspot of the instrument, and without meter, start recording lines one after another. Whatever comes to me at that present moment gets laid down as a pattern on a track. The wilder and crazier, the better. I may record 20-30 of them in about 1/2 hour. Maybe 100.
The next part is my favorite. Using a scoring layout in the DAW, I can then easily and quickly move parts around, copy/paste, replicate, invert, position until some fundemental theme begins to emerge. Not unlike sculpting. In all cases, it is never, ever suspected and always surprising. Once this core theme emerges, I then adjust the parts to build it up, reinforce or remove if I'm going for negative space. The main point here is that it's fun and I work with constant musical feedback. I always either look for the humor in the piece or some drama. The piece will tell you where it wants to go. With synths, I look for arpeggiations with delay to start, then backfill with atmospherics
I've scored using Finale and other tools but this technique by far has been the fastest, the most creative and joyful.
That's pretty much how I did my quartets. When you say "without meter" do you mean you record without a clicktrack? I usually do that when I first lay down a melodic foundation, because if i start searching for the right song tempo the inspiration is gone. After I get it down I tap the tempo in to get it right. But I'm usually get so into the details that the flow of the work slows down a lot.
The weight of the thing for me is that I feel a great responsibility that I get the arrangement just right, I owe that to the melodies, and there is just so many directions a song can go, even if the music tells me where to go in large.
Art Hughes said:
Alan Medeiros said:
It's very hard to say how my melodies come - sometimes it's inspiration, sometimes it's hard construction work, in a cerebreal way. Most of the time, inspiration and brains co-operate.
Much more important for me, however, is defining the form of my composition in the first place. Whatever I do, whether it's writing, drawing, or composing, it's the "grand design" where I start. For instance, the first thing I knew about the oboe quartet I'm currently working on, is that it will consist of four parts. When I zoom a little bit in, I know that the Scherzo will be a reggae, with gamboling cello and after-beat chords (and hidden counterpoint) played by double-stopped viola and violin. A syncopated oboe melody sings above this, in the beginning, instruments change tasks later on.
The reaggae-scherzo will be in ABA-form: the B being a trio with South-American and out-of-this-world allusions.
Only when I'm this far, I can start thinking about melody!
For me the title of a piece is important for me to figure out before I think of going from the simple melody phase to the completion of a piece. I, like you, have melodies just sitting on my computer waiting to be plucked up and worked on.
I tend to do most of my composing when I'm not at my computer. I get many ideas on how to sculpt the music when I'm driving or at work. I have a hand held recorder that I sing the melody or arrangement into until I can get to my workstation and lay a more completed track down.
That's very true, But could it not also be said that the technique and the compositional skill is what brings the content out? If I write a speech I can use the most exquisite and cultivated language, build all my sentences just right and yet have nothing to say. The opposite is to have the most heartfelt and important message to deliver and not being able to express it, so no one can understand it and take part of it. In one case we have something very beautiful without any form of meaning, and in the other case we have a lost message.
In the case of Beethoven, I would say that his astounding technique made it possible for him to deliver a musical message that was very restrained to begin with. I would not be able to make so much with so little in such a extraordinary way. I have to have more to work with before I can make music off it, because of lack of technique. But that's not to say that my melodies have more content than a E♭ major chord. How many notes does it take to make a melody?
Fredrick zinos said:
-
1
-
2
-
3
of 3 Next