Just saw a very interesting video looking at music theory / analysis at a different way than "chord chord chord chord chord" (to paraphrase the video) 😜
Instead, this video argues that we should be focussing more on the horizontal movements of the parts (i.e. "voice leading"), which thus helps draw your attention towards the flow / journey of the piece more...
Link: "Inside the Score - Most musicians learn harmony wrong"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJYj57TUKj
TBH, I very much agree with this, as someone somewhat biased on this front.
Maybe it's because I learned the violin first + then never really "properly" learned / mastered playing a keyboard in a traditional way, but that whole "chord chord chord" thing never sat right with me...
1) It always felt overly artificial, in a "post-hoc rationalisation" / technocratic way, which feels exactly like the way that school teachers teach us to analyse literatures and films (which, as you may guess, I'm not actually a fan of either).
Being a few decades removed from having to do either of those now, they always felt rather *wrong* to me. I mean sure... the artist may have used such a technical framing for a brief window in their creative process to get the initial setup (such that it hit certain in-joke criteria / added a deeper layer of meaning). BUT, I also feel that artists are actually less inclined to go through all of these sorts of machinations + calculated plotting (aka "getting the puppet to dance by filing your taxes" - as an early puppeteer-turned-Pixar-animator once put it). Instead, most of the time, they simply do things a certain way as that's:
a) "What felt right"
b) "Reflected the vision [they] had in mind"
Certainly that's largely been the way I've gone about these things (and perhaps granted, that's why I only operate as a hobbyist doing this for fun, instead of professionally for work with any level of success)... nevertheless, that's my current POV on this...
EDIT: Looks like I'm not the only one with similar views on both these points! In particular, this pair of comments... LOL
Leading on from that...
2) Trying to muster up a bunch of chords / chord progression, then trying to "fit" a melody to that also always just felt very backwards to me.
TBH, I've never really been able to do it. This may again either violinist-training (OR just the way my brain works), but "of course" a melody should just flow and exist for itself, instead of having to be strung between telegraph poles, meeting certain hooks on those poles...
* I mean... why would you even bother trying to restrict yourself to choosing notes that belong to the chords you've picked, if / when melodic fragments just come to you, in a much more free-flowing manner instead?!
* Also, HOW do you even try drawing links between disjointed notes, and drawing something out of that?! I dunno... that just sounds way harder!
* That said... TBH, maybe things have improved in recent years, as I now can and have gotten away with a lot when laying down some drone / ostinato line, then improving whatever melody comes to mind over the top after listening to that track for a while). But again... the focus in each of these cases has been more on "doing what fits", focussing on flow / transitions, vs trying to "make things fit some masterplan"
~~~
I mentioned earlier that I'm somewhat biased in liking the approach this video advocates for.
Well, that's because the way I actually write / record / make my music these days (*) is largely layer-by-layer (layering up the voices one at a time, considering each one's contour in isolation with how it fits with everything else there).
(*) Actually, come to think of it, it's probably how I've actually written most of the music I've done. It's just that in recent years, I've been able to more heavily lean into it and play with it more, as I now have the tech + equipment to make it easier to experiment with this more at last, thus meaning that I've been able to gain a lot more experience doing this.
Sure, I do think I need a little more high level planning sometimes, so I can more effectively have sections where a different mood hits more precisely... but that's more a problem when trying to make pieces longer than my standard output (I.e. ~1 min...)
On a side note:
Of course, the bigger constraint to making > 1 min pieces is that:
1) I suck at imagining how things fit together, so need to evaluate *OFTEN* using playbacks...
2) Only playing back the region that I changed doesn't always feel the same / allow as much "in context" appraisal of the WIP result
3) My patience for sitting through playbacks any longer is limited! Hence, long pieces = less iterations can be fit in
No comments:
Post a Comment