The creators of the site asked that I create a simple, catchy tune, so I did. Beware, though… if you listen to it too much, it will get stuck in your head for days.

Last year, I attended a concert in which an orchestra was about to perform Beethoven’s Symphony #5. Now, I’d already been composing music commercially for a few years, and I was feeling pretty confident about my own skills as a composer, thinking that I was a pretty awesome composer, if I said so myself.

However, any pride in my own abilities was pretty much crushed as soon as the orchestra started, though. The entire symphony was absolutely beautiful, and I sat in my seat amazed by the skill in what I’d heard. “Beethoven was able to come up with something this beautiful? 200 years ago? Without computers? WHILE DEAF?!?”

Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.

You do too. Beethoven¹, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach… we will likely never get the point where we’re considered a master like they were. In some ways, that’s kinda depressing.

But on the other hand, we also have advantages that they could never have dreamed about. We have access to instruments that weren’t even invented when they were alive. Every major song created in the last 200 years can be instantly available to us to learn from. Musicians are paid more than they ever have been in history.² And, most importantly, we have tools at our disposal capable of almost perfectly recreating the sound of an entire orchestra… by ourselves!

There has never been a better time to be a composer. I hope that the articles I’ve written so far have helped to inspire you, and I imagine I’ll be writing more in the future. If there’s a song you want to share, put it online³ and post about it in the comments! I’d love to hear what you’ve made.

Previous: Chapter 13: How to Get Noticed

Footnotes:

Now, honestly, I don’t know how to answer this question for you, specifically. The answer for every artist is different. But I do have some advice, and while it might be a bit boring to read, if you understand it, it should help you. (By the way, unlike my other chapters in this series, this advice can easily apply to all artists.)

There are two keys to long-term success in an art form: what you know and who knows you.

What you know is all of your skills, your talents, your work ethic, your creativity, and your commitment. You should already be trying to get better in these areas. If you’re not, and you just assume that becoming a successful artist requires no work whatsoever, stop reading now. You will never be a successful artist (and if you don’t at least improve your work ethic, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful at anything… sorry to be blunt, but it’s true).

Who knows you is the part that I’ll be mostly talking about here. These are your contacts, the people out there who remember how awesome you are as an artist. This group includes your friends, your classmates and your coworkers, but due to the Internet, it could potentially include any of the seven billion people on this planet. It is due to the people who know you that you will find fame.

You need both of these. Simply being talented is not enough. Emily Dickinson was a poet from the 19th century who wrote her poems in privacy, hardly ever sharing them with anyone. It was only after she died that her poems were revealed to the world by her relatives as the masterpieces they were… she was a woman of much talent, but had an extreme case of making sure no one knew about her.

Being known by millions of people isn’t enough, either. William Hung was a man who auditioned for the reality TV show American Idol in late 2003. When his audition aired on TV, he became known around the world by millions of people… for how bad he was at singing. He got signed to record deals, he appeared in TV commercials… he achieved a higher level of fame than most artists ever will, and is now living in obscurity. He was well-known, but had an extreme lack of talent.

I’m fairly certain that you do not want either of these things to happen to you. Chances are, you know you have talent, and want to work to have even more, but you’re just having trouble finding the audience.

How do you make sure people know about you? Well, there’s no one solution that will grant you this. You’re going to need to be creative. Here’s some ideas (in a very random order):

• Is there a band you like? Make a remix of one of their songs, and upload it to YouTube (giving the band credit for the original song, of course). If you do that, and you do a good job, people who are already looking for their song may find you.
• Make music that other people want to listen to. If the music you make isn’t liked by anyone else, you’re not going to get more famous.
• Become the best at one particular thing. There’s a man named Sam Tsui who sings many parts of the same song on a stage and is hugely talented at it. For example, check out his Michael Jackson tribute. That style is his thing… find your thing, and perfect it. People are constantly on the lookout for the artists that are better than the rest at something.
• Join a musical group. A garage band, a local symphony orchestra, your church or school choir… if you’re around other musicians, you all become each other’s audience. Surrounding yourself with like-minded artists is usually a very good thing.
• YouLicense, and other sites like it, post up job opportunities. In the case of YouLicense, you can submit to one one project per month for absolutely free. If you aren’t doing this, why not?
• Find local contacts. People who know you and actually live near you are, in my experience, far more valuable contacts to have.
• Does the composing program you use have a forum? If so, is there a place on that forum to showcase your work? Put your songs online, and post them! I guarantee that you’ll get honest and constructive feedback, and perhaps even some contacts from it as well.

Will all of these things work for you? Probably not. But you have to try. In the words of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. The more people who know you, the better your chance will be to score. ¹

Next: Chapter 14 – Humbled By Beethoven
Previous: Chapter 12 – Echo, Echo

Footnotes:

In real life, reverb and delay are the same thing – sound waves bouncing at various distances before reaching your ears – but when composing music, they’re simulated differently. Here are some audio examples of reverb and delay:

Reverb:

Delay:

Reverb and delay generally have different purposes for a musician. When using reverb, it’s all about presence. It establishes space and location in a way that no other audio effect can match. Are you in a cave? Are you underwater? Are you in the second floor of a house where thumping bass music is being played on the first floor? Reverb captures that.

Delay can also establish space when used properly on a whole song, but when used on individual instruments, it becomes a space-filling effect. The electric guitar is probably the most common instrument to use delay… it can be found in everything from U2 to Hillsong United.

That’s reverb and delay… but this post about echoes wouldn’t quite be complete if I didn’t mention a frequently forgotten and otherworldly audio effect; the reverse echo. Here’s a harp melody with reverse echo:

Reverse Echo:

Hear how the sound fades in before the harp strings are plucked? That’s the reverse echo. Creepy? A little bit.² Here’s how it’s done:

• Take the audio file and reverse it in your audio editing program. Go ahead and listen to it, because audio always sounds weird when reversed.
• Add reverb to your reversed audio file, and bounce³ it to a new piece of audio.
• Reverse that new piece of audio. There will now be a reversed echo effect on your original audio clip.

This is a great technique for giving an alien feel to any kind of audio, including people’s voices. Try it!

Next: Chapter 13 – How to Get Noticed
Previous: Chapter 11 – Lessons from a Shark

Footnotes:

The soundtrack for Jaws is filled with sweeping orchestral arrangements, original themes for the main characters ¹, and a high level of musical craftsmanship. However, when you think of the music in Jaws, what is the only thing you remember about it?

Ba-dum.

You don’t have to know a thing about playing a musical instrument to play the theme to Jaws. Just find a piano, pick a note on the far left-hand side, find the note directly above it, and play those notes alternately, increasing in speed and volume. And yet, it’s one of the most famous movie themes in history. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

But what can we learn from this?

Lesson 1: Simplicity

Do you want to make a memorable song? Then make it a simple song.

Simplicity is harder than it looks. As creators, all artists seem to have a belief at some point in their careers that the more complex something is, the more memorable it will be. Usually, this is not true. For example, the Death Star and the Starship Enterprise can be drawn to a recognizable level in about 15 seconds. Simplicity is powerful.

In music, it’s the simple songs you remember. The Beatles had simple themes, and guess what, they’re played on the radio a lot more often than Beethoven. On that note, what’s the most memorable thing Beethoven ever wrote? Ba ba ba bum. Four notes. Noticing a pattern, here?

Lesson 2: Dynamics and speed

The same two notes played over and over in sequence should be boring. In Jaws, it’s not. Why? Dynamics ² and tempo. By playing the notes gradually louder and gradually faster, the message is communicated: “Uh oh, that shark is getting closer. We are in more danger than we were before.” A song that never changes its dynamics sounds robotic or mechanical. In some musical genres, that’s what you may want (dance club music, for instance). Changes in tempo are less frequent, especially if you’re going for memorable songs that you can sing along with, but they have their place, and should be kept in mind. ³

Lesson 3: Intervals

An interval is the distance between two notes. Some intervals are pleasant, such as the perfect fifth (C and G, for instance). Other intervals are unpleasant, like the minor second, which is what Jaws is, or the tritone (C and F#). If you want to ruin a light, heroic, or joyful melody, a bad interval will probably do it.

Knowing what intervals to use where is one of the best places for scales to come in handy. If you’ve learned your scales⁴, you can more easily identify when you’ve put a “wrong” note in a composition.

Next: Chapter 12 – Echo, Echo
Previous: Chapter 10 – Occupational Hazards

Hazard #1: You’ve come up with a great song, but you have no place to record it.

Contrary to what some might think, composers do not just stop composing when they’re away from an instrument. In fact, I come up with some of my best songs when I’m doing pretty random things. Showering, washing dishes, driving, having a picnic… you never know when a great song will strike you, but what do you do when there’s no place to record it?

The solution is to always have some way to record it. Most cell phones have some kind of ability to download applications. I have one myself called “Tape-a-Talk”, which was designed for recording audio like a dictaphone. If I come up with a song, wherever I am, I can take a moment to hum it into my cell phone, recording it for later.

However, a cell phone isn’t the only thing that I’ve used for this purpose. For instance, one day I was walking to a church picnic, when I came up with a great song idea. I didn’t have a cell phone with me, but I did have digital camera that could take short video clips. So, I recorded myself humming into the camera. That melody later became my song Cumulonimbus (which can be heard in the Music Player).

Hazard #2: You’ve been composing for a few hours today, and your wrists are starting to hurt.

This is the most serious actual injury that you are likely to face when composing, and it’s known by many possible names, including “repetitive stretch injury” and “carpal tunnel syndrome”. Now, I’m not a doctor in any way, but here’s a few pieces of advice:

• Keep a good posture.
• Every 30-60 minutes, get up, walk around, and move your arms and hands a bit.
• Certain instrumental parts, like drums, can be very repetitive and will strain your wrists quickly when composed on a keyboard. If it’s a very repetitive part, try recording only a small section and duplicating it.

Hazard #3: I’m using headphones for recording, and my ears are ringing a bit.

OK, forget what I said in the last section. THIS is the most serious injury you could face when composing. Your hearing, to put it mildly, is pretty important, and while many composers have coped quite well with hearing loss, you don’t want to go that route.

• Avoid too much headphone time in one sitting.
• Use good-quality headphones. Do NOT compose with earbuds.
• Don’t crank up the volume as high as possible when composing, especially if you’re using a lot of high-pitched instruments. Low-pitched loud noises are easier on the ears.

You may also want to watch your activities in your daily life. If you’re part of, say, a rock band, you may need ear protection while performing. If your day job is working with loud machinery, use earplugs.

Hazard #4: Aah! I have my own song stuck in my head!

Yep, this is going to happen. The more songs you compose, the more likely it will happen, it seems. Try listening to something else for awhile. If you find a good solution to this, contact me. I’d love to know what do about this.

Next: Chapter 11 – Lessons from a Shark
Previous: Chapter 9 – MIDI Trickery

MIDI, while quite misunderstood by many, is an extremely powerful tool for recording. Because it only records the data of how an instrument should be played, it’s easy to edit and finetune a recording to your liking. However, you might not realize that certain MIDI tricks can make you a better performer than you actually are.

Quantize

Here’s one of my big secrets… I rely pretty heavily on the quantize function. Quantize is when MIDI notes are repositioned to more accurately line up with a specific interval. For instance, if you use a quarter note quantize on a melody, all notes will be moved to the nearest quarter note.

Now, overusing quantize can make a song sound very robotic, and while that’s sometimes a good thing, usually it will sound very unnatural, as no human performer can play that way. So, in most composing programs, you can choose how much quantize you’re going to use. I usually use a 60%-70% quantize… this will move notes close to being exactly right, while still sounding natural.

Another hazard of quantize is that the composing program has no idea what a song is supposed to sound like. After quantizing, always listen to your song… you’ll probably have a few notes you need to move to the correct place. Lastly, due to an issue called “recording latency”, you might need to shift a MIDI recording into the right position before quantizing.

Recording at a slower tempo

Take a listen to this song for a moment. It’s an amazing performance of Flight of the Bumblebee, and its speed makes it very difficult to play… at least, if you’re playing it live on stage. In the comfort of your home recording studio, it’s much easier to record instrument parts that are extremely fast. Just follow these steps:

• Remember the original tempo of your song
• Lower it to an slower tempo
• Record your song at the slower speed
• Increase the tempo back to where it should be

That’s all! The beauty of MIDI is that you don’t have to record your song at the proper speed. It takes some practice, of course, because a fast melody just sounds… wrong when you’re playing slower, but when you put the tempo back to its original speed, you can get great results from it. Oh, and this isn’t just an orchestra thing. This technique also works for really fast drum kit parts that are too difficult to simulate on a keyboard, such as rapidly hitting a hi-hat.

Next: Chapter 10: Occupational Hazards
Previous: Chapter 8: Song – Hunt for the Orb

Now, I’ve been giving composing advice for the last two months. Would you like to see how I used my own advice to help compose this song? (If not, just enjoy the music… if yes, click the link below.)

Still with me? Great!

The first step was to find out what type of song to make. Let’s look at the Chapter 4 questions, and see how some of those questions were answered:

What message should the song convey? The most important part of this particular song was the message. It needed to tell the following story (I’ve included the approximate times for each part of the story):

• night falls on the Mech Mice world (0:00-0:27)
• the Mech Mice team assembles, with Nightshade doing recon (0:27-1:21)
• suddenly, the team is attacked by insects (1:22-2:10)
• team defeats insects, but is then attacked by a larger predator (2:11-2:43)
• battle ends, but war is not over (2:44-3:15)

Is it like a song that already exists? Well, I was given pretty free reign to explore musical styles. However, one thing that was mentioned was the TRON: Legacy soundtrack, with its mix of strings and electronic instruments. I’ll talk more about this later.

Are there graphical elements that go along with the music? Yes. Most of the concept art that has been shown publicly for Mech Mice helped to inspire this song. Right now, you can see it at rocketsnail.com, but later it should be on the Mech Mice homepage.

What instruments make sense? TRON: Legacy used mostly electronic instruments, but had a large string section for the more dramatic moments. I decided that the best way to use this would be to have the regular orchestral instruments by themselves when the Mech Mice are only surrounded by nature, but when they are threatened or attacked, electronic instruments would come in as well. I didn’t really pursue this idea very far in this song, but I’ll try to add a larger electronic influence in future Mech Mice songs.

In Chapter 6, I spoke of how instruments could share the load between one another. This song is full of that. It’s a little difficult to provide examples, but notice that there are very few times when the melody is played by a single instrument. Usually, there’s at least one more instrument from another section backing it up.

In Chapter 7, I mention Composer’s Block, and I had it a few times with this song. For instance, I couldn’t think of the right melody to end the song with. It wasn’t until driving home from work one day that the ending hit me. I recorded myself humming this while I was stopped at an intersection ²:

The first part is the trumpet/violin melody, and the second part is the lower string bass line.

So, I hope that gives some insight into how the song was made!

Next: Chapter 9 – MIDI Trickery
Previous: Chapter 7 – Composer’s Block

Footnotes:

Obstacle #1: I don’t know where to start!

Sometimes, just starting the song can be the hardest thing. First, try asking yourself the questions in Chapter 4: Starting a Song for a Client so that you know what kind of song you’re making. Second, set your metronome (called a “click track” in some composing programs) to an appropriate tempo and time signature.

Now that you’ve prepared yourself a bit, you have to actually record your first notes. What’s the best place to start? Well, there’s no one right answer, but there are multiple ways you can begin:

Melody. It may be that a really clear melody line is what starts this song, with the other instruments coming in after to support it. This isn’t as common as you might expect, though… I frequently have to start with a non-melody instrument so that I have something on which to build the melody.
Lyrics. Even if you’re making completely instrumental piece, sometimes a few lines of lyrics will just pop into your head, and making an instrument play that rhythm will start the song for you. This can work for melody or harmony.
Bass line. This is my usual weapon of choice. I choose an appropriate instrument with a lower range, and record a bass line. It may only be a few bars long, but it’s always how I prefer to start. A house needs to start with a good foundation, and for me, even if I don’t know what the rest of my “house” is going to look like, the bass line is the best foundation. Plus, if you come up with a really fun bass line, the melody is more free to improvise to it.
Percussion. While I’m big on the bass line, the true foundation of most songs is found in its percussion section. Thus, many musicians will prefer to start with a percussion line and build up from there. There is nothing wrong with this approach, and many times I will start this way. However, if the clicking of my metronome is enough of a percussion track to begin with, I still prefer to start with a non-percussion instrument.

Obstacle #2: I’ve started my song, but I just feel creatively drained! What now?

Believe me, I’ve been there. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat at my keyboard for an hour with absolutely nothing useful to show for it. This is a true composer’s block, but if you’re on a tight deadline, that song’s gotta be made no matter what. The solution? Get away from that computer for awhile and do something.

Go for a walk! A twenty-minute walk in your neighborhood can be a great way to compose… if you can time your footsteps roughly to the tempo of your song, your brain can be actively composing music even when you’re nowhere near an instrument.

There’s another benefit to stepping away for awhile, too. When you come back to the song, you can listen to it with “fresh ears”; in other words, you can listen to it as other people will hear it. Too often, after a few hours of composing, you can get to a state of not really hearing the song because you’re paying too much attention to individual instruments. Listening to it after an hour of being away from it will let you listen to it in a way you hadn’t before.

Obstacle #3: I’ve tried those things, and I’m still blocked. Any other suggestions?

Well, for starters, are you being distracted by anything? Say, a game that happens to also be on your computer? Or one of those Internet sites that you just HAVE to check every five minutes? Yeah, those can kill your creativity.

Last but not least, maybe you really just need to scrap the song and start over. My song “Monkey King” was scrapped and restarted from scratch four times. Take the advice of Thomas Edison… “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Next: Chapter 8: Song – Hunt for the Orb
Previous: Chapter 6: Sharing the Load

Footnotes:

Let’s say you’re composing something, and you have a trombone line that goes like this:

This is okay, but the trombone is doing a lot of short, staccato notes. Trombones are stronger when notes they perform are not so close . Let’s try giving the load to another instrument… in this case, how about a low string section? ¹

See? Same exact notes, but now the trombone is only playing half of them. The original melody played by the trombone is now played by the cellos.

Let’s try something else. The trombone will keep the same melody as in the last clip, but the rhythm of the trombone will be played by a snare drum.

That works well too… you get the same staccato rhythm, but the trombone line becomes stronger. How about changing the snare drum part a bit? And let’s add a timpani for a bit of accent as well.

While we’re here, let’s bring back those cellos from before. Let’s also add in some lower strings called double-basses, which will do the exact same thing the trombones were doing, but one octave lower.

Now, let’s compare this latest clip to the one we started with. Is it better? Well, that depends on your musical tastes and the needs of your song. I certainly find it more powerful, although the snare drum might be too military. Notice, though, that the notes themselves did not change. I literally copy-and-pasted the MIDI notes from the trombone section down to the strings. Other than the fact that the octave was changed for the double-basses, and a few new timpani notes were added, it’s the exact same tune. Here are all five clips put together, in case you’re curious:

Bottom line: making more than one instrument do the same thing is not bad! Many songs get their power by having multiple instruments compliment one another, and yours can too.

Next: Chapter 7: Composer’s Block
Previous: Chapter 5: Truth To Materials

Footnotes: