When you first think about composing music, it can be daunting. A little scary, even. How on earth do you go about putting together sounds to make a coherent piece of music, that expresses what you want it to say?
Here’s a simple overview of the way I think about my process when I compose music.
A caveat: A large proportion of some of these steps I may do in my head. For instance, I don’t, as a rule, record ideas on paper or the phone whilst out and about. I have a reasonably good musical memory, and I can usually transcribe into theoretical terms mentally to make the idea much simpler. I then mentally hang that in a memory ‘hook’ to come back to when I’m sat at the DAW… but I digress. Depending on deadlines the ‘getting it down’ and refining’ steps (3 and 4 below) may blur into the same session at the computer.
- Gather
If you have any interest in music, the gathering process will have happened already, possibly since before you were born. What musical ideas, pieces or songs that already exist do you like? What is it you like about them? Is it the melody, rhythm, harmony, chord progression, the beat, the instruments, the emotion, the speed, the style, the repeating structure, the hook? That’s your starting point. What other information needs to be imposed on the music (if any)? What duration, what media does it accompany, is there a music composition brief from elsewhere? Bring all your starting information together, either mentally or physically. - Ferment
Now think about these elements. Consciously interrogate why you enjoy listening to them. Is it the way you connect to the composer or artist through the music? Is it the emotion you feel at certain points within the chord structure? What is it about the beat at that speed that gets you fired up? What elements of the brief need fleshing out? Do you have all the information you need to be clear on what’s required of you? And if there’s no external brief, now’s the time for you to decide what it is that you as the composer want to say. What do you want to express through this music? Joy, regret, irony, thrill, calm…?
Does all of this conscious exploration of the starting material spark any new ideas? If so, skip to step 3: Get those notions down on the written page, record the audio, notate it or sequence it in a DAW.
Then go do something else. Sleep on it. You’re handing over all this lovely raw and thoroughly interrogated information to your subconscious to make associations and build patterns that you never saw consciously. This is the fermenting stage, and if you can afford it in your hectic schedules and tight deadlines, it’s where the most creative ideas can come from. Allow the subconscious to compose music for you. - Get it down
Whenever a musical idea comes to you, try there and then to get it recorded somehow. You can do this on the written page with manuscript paper or just text – the latter could be on a simple text app on your phone or computer if you’re working on something else at the time, or you’re out and about.
You can record the audio somehow, either onto a dedicated recording device, onto a phone app (a voice recorder is fine, but try to find something that records in higher quality than some of the readily installed apps – you need to be able to hear it clearly enough later when you get to step 4. Perhaps you’re at a keyboard or with an instrument or set up to sing – then you can record your experiments to a DAW (digital audio workstation – like Logic Pro, Cubase, or DigitalPerformer – or a simple audio track laying program (like Audacity orAmadeus Pro).
The important thing is to get the idea down in enough detail to jog your memory later on, so it doesn’t have to be completely and fully fleshed out. How good is your musical memory? Err on the side of caution, but the bare bones of it are fine for now.
Try your best to reserve too much judgement at this point, especially earlier on. Sometimes you have to get the less appropriate ideas out first before the better ones can flow.
Feel free to repeat steps 2 and 3 as time allows. - Refine
This is my favourite part. This is the point where you bring together any rough ideas to see if any has merit. There are many ways to evaluate the worth of an idea, and sometimes it’s only clear when one idea is placed in collaboration with another that it suddenly sparkles. Again, try to reserve heavy judgement at first and get into a mind set of ‘play’. For example – what if I turned this melody on its head?Would it express more clearly what I wanted it to say if it started on a different beat or if it had a more unpredictable rhythm? Could I place the melody at a higher pitch, or would it work more effectively in the bass? What if I found a way to blend two melodies? You get the idea. Play.
This is the stage I’ll start to orchestrate too – I’ll start putting different elements of the music to different instruments or instrument groupings (if I haven’t already done so in step 3 above). Sometimes the value of a musical fragment isn’t clear until you’ve heard it as a call and response between piccolo and tuba, for instance. Sometimes the harmony you create for a melody is more effective without the melody.
Practically, I work in this stage either at the keyboard or violin followed by the DAW, or I go straight into the DAW.
Most importantly, at this stage, are you feeling what you want to feel when you hear these musical structures that you’re pulling together? Is it close to the emotion but needs a little tweak to nail it? Is it expressing what you want the way you want it? If not, does that matter? Is it saying something more interesting in its unexpectedness? - Repeat
It’s always an option to go back to the start, especially if you’re getting a bit stuck for whatever reason. And then, of course, after you’ve had a taste of writing your own music you’re going to want to do it again!
After all these steps comes production where the polish happens – session recordings, full orchestration, possibly a little restructuring, and sometimes mixing and mastering depending on the composer’s responsibility within a particular project. But that’s a story for another day.
It can sometimes seem a bit mysterious how a composer composes music. Perhaps this little overview can shed light on how simple the process can be. This isn’t the only way to write music, but it’s definitely an effective one, and generally is the process I return to again and again.
Photo: by Heather Fenoughty