Views : 769,838
Genre: Education
Date of upload: Jan 31, 2020 ^^
Rating : 4.939 (537/34,403 LTDR)
RYD date created : 2022-04-09T19:03:52.664683Z
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Top Comments of this video!! :3
I was in a composition class a couple of years back, and we were given an assignment to write a song based off of a poem about grief. About half the class ended up doing theirs in a major key and all happy sounding to subvert the expectation of it being grim because it's about grief. Needless to say, only a few of the songs actually worked. This one woman wrote a song that actually built very dramatically in tension before coming to a sudden stop where she turned her focus around to overcome the grief. Sometimes making your work memorable isn't about making it the most unique; it's about making it fit the narrative.
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The best tip for songwriting I've ever heard is "do it for the song"
Don't try to show off or do something complex just for the sake of complexity.
Complex harmony and technical playing have their place, but a shredy guitar solo isn't necessarily the best in a slow acoustic ballad. And a melodic guitar solo might not be best for the brutal tech death song you're doing.
Everything has its place, so learn where that is and don't force it into somewhere it doesn't fit.
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So my grandfather is a classical violinist who played in the BBC SSO.
I remember, as a kid, playing him a melody I'd written on the piano.
I remember starting to feel a little embarrassed halfway through and apologising to him as I realised that what I'd written wasnt . . . Very . . . 'Clever' (I was put through, and passed my ABRSM grade 5 music theory at about 11 years old? My mum is also a classically trained musician so music as an academic pursuit was a big thing in my family).
He gave me some of the best advice I've ever heard.
He said, "dont apologise - write the music that sounds good - that's you're starting point. Some of the greatest pieces of music ever written started with very simple, but very beautiful ideas. Simple can be good - do more with less".
That's when I realised that writing music is a case of . . . Be clever if you want, but only if it serves, and doesnt detract from, the music.
You can be clever and end up with good music - but you have to be very careful about how you do it.
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Deciding to use one of your own works to exemplify the mistakes one can make when arranging pieces of music instead of choosing someone else's, is an incredibly generous act of your part that speaks very highly of you. This is one of the reasons I love your channel.
Also, I love the concept of hand-drawn images matched to your voice and it always makes me wonder how you came about with that concept for your videos and how you actually execute it. I imagine you first record your voice and then play it back and pause it every now and then to make a drawing that matches each sentence while filming your hand, and then edit it. Nevertheless, it's a very cute, simple yet incredibly awesome concept.
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I've been thinking about this a lot lately! One example from my own endeavours: I had this really nice melody, and it was pretty simple: almost all stepwise motion and basically just straight crotchets with the odd triplet. But it was only the first 8 bars of what needed to be a 16 bar melody, so I added this whole new bit with a ton of fancy syncopations and octave leaps, and I thought it was great until I listened all the way through and realised that the second half sounded completely incoherent. So I replaced it with a barely altered repetition of the first half, and guess what? It worked better like that.
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4 years ago
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