MikeDavis69
10-01-2010, 07:06 AM
Hello everyone,
First a little personal background to put my request in perspective: I am a middle aged guy that used to play piano by ear growing up starting when I was about 7 or 8 years old and never had any real formal lessons outside of a few months worth when I was aroung 14 or 15 years old. Problem was, I never had the patience back then because I could play stuff by ear without really knowing what I was playing that sounded to me much better than the "Teaching Little Fingers to Play" type books the piano teacher was using so of course I stopped taking lessons. My playing continued on through high schooll and college where I played trombone and learned music that way, of course without much theory or anything more complex than the music we played in band or in church orchesta. Piano to me was more of a stress relief up until I had been married a few years and wound up having to sell the Roland D-20 keyboard that I had bought when I first got married due to needing to pay the bills. Fast forward about 15 years to early 2009... Having always been a DT fan from WDADU I found a video where Jordan was demo-ing Omnisphere. I was smitten with the desire to play music again so I did a little research, went out and bought Omnisphere, Sonar 8 and a Midi Keyboard.
Over the last year and a half or so I have been playing a lot and find that the old talent was never lost just needed to be refreshed. I am at the point now where I am trying to compose and write some stuff and find that I sit down to play and just improv and think Hey that sounds good so I start to record tracks in Logic (I switched to Logic from Sonar back in Feb or so when I got an iMac). Problem I run into now is that I find that I can get about a minute or two worth of song written, put in a bass line, throw in some apple loops for a drum track (Stylus RMX soon hopefully) and it sounds pretty good to me. But I always at that point get "writer's block" and can't figure out where to take it from there since the whole thing is usually based upon some phrasings that I found while just improving. I have tried throwing a few phrasings together that are in similar keys and that works OK I guess but to me anyway it sounds like two phrasings that were thrown togehter LOL.
I am very interested to know what the rest of the community here does when you sit down and think "Hey I am going to write a song". Do you rough out a chord progression and build from there? do you get a bass line first then put in accompaniment? Essentially what types of XYZ formulae do each of you find to work the best to come up with original material?
TL:DR version:
I have limited skills that are slowly improving, what techniques do you use to compose songs?
Thanks!
Mike
First a little personal background to put my request in perspective: I am a middle aged guy that used to play piano by ear growing up starting when I was about 7 or 8 years old and never had any real formal lessons outside of a few months worth when I was aroung 14 or 15 years old. Problem was, I never had the patience back then because I could play stuff by ear without really knowing what I was playing that sounded to me much better than the "Teaching Little Fingers to Play" type books the piano teacher was using so of course I stopped taking lessons. My playing continued on through high schooll and college where I played trombone and learned music that way, of course without much theory or anything more complex than the music we played in band or in church orchesta. Piano to me was more of a stress relief up until I had been married a few years and wound up having to sell the Roland D-20 keyboard that I had bought when I first got married due to needing to pay the bills. Fast forward about 15 years to early 2009... Having always been a DT fan from WDADU I found a video where Jordan was demo-ing Omnisphere. I was smitten with the desire to play music again so I did a little research, went out and bought Omnisphere, Sonar 8 and a Midi Keyboard.
Over the last year and a half or so I have been playing a lot and find that the old talent was never lost just needed to be refreshed. I am at the point now where I am trying to compose and write some stuff and find that I sit down to play and just improv and think Hey that sounds good so I start to record tracks in Logic (I switched to Logic from Sonar back in Feb or so when I got an iMac). Problem I run into now is that I find that I can get about a minute or two worth of song written, put in a bass line, throw in some apple loops for a drum track (Stylus RMX soon hopefully) and it sounds pretty good to me. But I always at that point get "writer's block" and can't figure out where to take it from there since the whole thing is usually based upon some phrasings that I found while just improving. I have tried throwing a few phrasings together that are in similar keys and that works OK I guess but to me anyway it sounds like two phrasings that were thrown togehter LOL.
I am very interested to know what the rest of the community here does when you sit down and think "Hey I am going to write a song". Do you rough out a chord progression and build from there? do you get a bass line first then put in accompaniment? Essentially what types of XYZ formulae do each of you find to work the best to come up with original material?
TL:DR version:
I have limited skills that are slowly improving, what techniques do you use to compose songs?
Thanks!
Mike