Your Music, Inspiration
and Style
How to access the grand river of musical ideas
like a great composer
by Rich the TweakMeister
You are sitting there at your keyboard, surrounded by the latest wonders of
music technology, waiting for the muse to strike. You have endured the learning curves of your gear, you
have tweaked your computer into a smooth and speedy audio processor. Some of us
never get beyond this point. We finally have the DAW in shape and its time
to make music we find ourselves staring at a blank screen. Was all of this for
nothing? Maybe I don't have talent?!! The horror!
Yet some of us seem to be born with
inspiration. The music just comes to certain people like a flash of
illumination, a glint of light, coming from a never ending river of ideas.
Fortunately for us, the topic of the inspiration behind music, closely
intertwined with ideas surrounding style, has been thought about, talked
about, written about for over a hundred years. We are going to explore
some of these discussions, and then we are going to tell you how to get there.
How can we access the
grand musical river of ideas like the great composers? Or at least actually get
off the floor and make something!
What is Inspiration?
Stop looking for it; stop
waiting for it to arrive; it's not coming. Now get down to work.
The composer is a person who composes, who exerts effort towards making a
musical composition. Inspiration is not something to be sought
after, but a term that other people label your product with after it is all
done. "Wow dude, that was inspired!".
Ah, yes. Your ego swells and you think
of how great of an artist you are, how you must be touched by the divine, the
recipient of a message from heaven. Tweak taps you on the shoulder. Uh, dude,
sorry: Wrong Path! That's not what
happened. The music you came up with was the outcome of a composition session,
where you worked to make musical phrases fit with drum beats, basslines, leads,
maybe vocals. You may have done some reflection on various elements of melody,
rhythm, harmony, form, etc. tried hundreds of patches to find the right ones,
perhaps even programmed your own and, in the end, it came together in a way that
people found meaningful. It means you found things that worked.
In short, you probably got lucky. Lets look at some thoughts of Aaron
Copeland, written in 1939, in his classic What to Listen for in Music.
The idea may come in various forms. it may come as a
melody--just a one line simple melody which you might hum to yourself. Or
it may come to the composer as a melody with an accompaniment. At times
he might not even hear a melody; he may simply conceive a accompanimental figure
to which a melody will probably be added later. Or, on the other hand, the
theme may take form of a purely rhythmic idea. He hears a particular kind
of drumbeat, and that will be enough to start him off. (Copeland:p23-24).
So inspiration is a matter of
finding something we like. Fortunately, for us, the art of starting a
composition is not totally an academic affair anymore, where we jot down ideas on
manuscript paper, requiring that we know music notation and years of training.
We have new tools, built right into our sequencers. We can hear notes as we
place them on a grid, a stave and can move them about. We can start
with something as simple as a 4 on the floor kik drum (i.e., just a grid of kick
notes placed a quarter note apart), then walk a bass figure over that till we
sense a groove. Or we can doodle around on the piano, letting the hands go
where they want, till the hand itself finds a repeating pattern it likes, or a
little melody that is "cool". Suddenly you find something and then you
hear it all and a piece of music is born. But what goes into this
hearing? How do you hear a musical idea?
Stravinsky
by Picasso
Igor Stravinsky had this to say
about inspiration. "An accident is perhaps the only thing that
really inspires us"" he writes in his Poetics of Music" written at Harvard in
1942. "A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about.
Both of them go grubbing because they yield to a compulsion to seek things
out...he is in his quest for pleasure" (p55) Whoa. Did you get that? Accidents.
Pleasure. We exert effort looking for that shred of musical
illumination, digging and sifting through debris until something tweaks us
internally and we realize we have stumbled on something oh-so-infinitely cool.
What? The world reknown creator of The Rite of Spring says its all a
happy accident!? Is it that simple? What does this mean?
It means let the
hands and mind play about with the tools. It is in your nature to find
something that makes you smile, rocks your socks, chills your banannas. Call it pleasure, call it cool, hot, kickass,
trippin', pimpin', schveeet, cookin', the tish, call it mo'fo dope, bro! It's the same thing.
Trust it is already in you.
Stravinsky would say that there is nothing more mysterious in the process than
any other craft. It is the pleasure in putting a piece together that
brings it from spark to final form. If there is no pleasure, we run
out of gas, the idea never reaches fruition. Yet, if we are observant,
bring in elements to the composition that increase the pleasure (fun), the piece
moves forward, onward to completion. I call this the "fun factor" and it
relies on one thing.
Style
But what elements do we bring
together to make a song? How do we get this sense that our discovery is
"fun, hip, cool, dope"? What is a great composer relying on when she or he makes
these decisions? This brings us to Style. Whether you have
discovered it or not, are aware of it or not, you already have style.
Style refers to the way you work, the way your organize your musical thoughts,
and how you observe the way they relate to the larger musical culture.
Let
me be specific. You turn on your computer. Boot the sequencer.
Set the tempo to 140 bpm. Load your set of hot 808/909 samples (off your
TweakHeadz CD rom of course) and reproduce a classic 909 pattern. On top
you do a line of 16th notes using and analog bass and tweak the resonance so it
rises and falls. Your roommate barges in and says, "Dude, cool Trance
piece!": Of course, you knew it was Trance. S/he knew it was trance.
How'd that happen? You both have a similar idea of what makes a piece of
music sound like trance. You share a musical culture. Are you
born with musical culture? Nope! It's something you acquire as time
goes on; it's totally learned.
Does this mean you have to study
all the forms of music, styles of contemporary music that are out there until
you can dissect and take apart each one? Not really, but of course a bit
of dabbling certainly helps. What you need is basic familiarity of the music
that is around you in the world. For one reason. So you can
organize and hear it in your head.
Ok, here it is: When you are in the
process of working with musical elements, you are combining, experimenting,
juggling, adding, deleting, moving, cutting, pasting, etc. This is all happening
in your mind before you move the mouse. ("Maybe I should transpose this like a
Queen finale, maybe I should add a sequenced synchro FM bass like Orbital, maybe
I should slow the tempo and make it more Moby, maybe I should add an Enigma-esq
choir") You want to fill your head with styles so you can come up with your
own. While these artists actually do exist in the real world, the way you relate
them together to come up with style only happens in one place: your mind. The
cool thing is that you have already done much of this work as you
watched TV, listened to the radio on the way to work, browsed titles at
iTunes.
For instance, you are working on
a massive orchestral piece with a great melody and all the sudden you get a
crazy idea while listening to Cuban jazz on the radio. Yep, you need "a hot rhythm".
You try an Afro-Cuban
bongo track under your score and and it rocks! You play the piece and
a new meaning unfolds. It now makes sense, and you keep the
change and go off in a new direction. Ah, pleasure, keep this piece going!
So what happened? You got lucky! And Stravinsky would commend
your powers of observation and your sense of style. The point? If
you never in your life heard an Afro-Cuban beat you could not have come upon
this solution. It is the drawing upon musical culture that makes style.
This also holds true for production values. Why are we centering the kick
and making it the loudest element in today's music? Why are we chopping
out little bits of audio to make abrupt silences to punctuate music? Why do we
have the itch to glitch? Why are we using pitch shifters on our voices (i.e., Cher's
"Believe") That's the Style of our Times, my friends, or as some composers
of Stravinsky's generation put
it, the Style of an Epoch. An important point is
not to do these things because everyone else that is famous is doing it.
That makes you a bit of a robot, a copycat. The point is to willfully
add these or not add them. That's your style. The larger your
musical cultural awareness, the more diverse your style. Is this hard to
do? Not at all. You don't have to perfectly mimic any one style to
borrow from it. You do not have to sound exactly like 303 Infinity or
Aphex Twins to borrow a trance technique. Were not reproducing cover tunes for
your next gig at the Hole In the Wall.. Remember, your are doing your
music, not theirs, and there is danger in judging your music by
other popular songs.
Be Yourself
Stravinsky puts it well:
"So the danger lies not in the borrowing of
clichés. The danger lies in fabricating them and in bestowing
on them the force of law, a tyranny...."
Ok, let Tweak, decipher these pearls from
academia. We should not succumb to "the style of an epoch".
That is, if all da producahs and homeboys are doing trip hop in da hood, does
that mean you have sound just like them? No! Stop lying!
You are NOT them. And you are not fooling anyone. Just because all the
trance-masters are using the snare roll of 16th and 24th notes for which rises
in intensity and filter cutoff does that me you have to too? Of course
not. But go ahead, use it. You may want to use a
technique sometimes because it takes the listener where you want
them to go. Stravinsky says:
...the style of an epoch
results from a combination of individual styles, a combination which is
dominated by the methods of the composers who have exerted preponderant
influence on their times.
Rather than mimic any form, an approach that will inevitably lead
you to feel you music is not good enough, borrow from your vast culture and make
your own style and make your music good. You are then in a class by
yourself. You will be regarded as an inventor of music, not a follower, an
originator, not ... a wanabee. And you will know that it is totally true
inside yourself, with no
homies, ego or divine light propping you up. It will no longer be a matter of "waiting"
for inspiration. It is just a matter of whether you feel like composing
(working) today or not. You know you will never run out of musical ideas.
Best of luck in your
discoveries., I am
Rich the TweakMeister
|
musicians
hangout
