WAYS TO CREATE MUSIC

There are many ways to create music today, with or without computers, although endless possibilities have arisen since the creation in the 1970s and 80s of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like GarageBand, REAPER, Ableton Live, FL Studio, Steinberg Cubase, Pro Tools, Audacity, Logic Pro, Studio One, LMMS, Reason Studios, ACID Pro, Cakewalk, Rosegarden, Ardour, MuseScore, Mixcraft, Bitwig Studio, Qtractor, and MuLab. I didn’t even know what a DAW was until I started taking online music classes from Berklee School of Music in April 2019.

From simple to complex, here are some avenues you can take to create music that is uniquely your own:

1. Sit down with a piece of manuscript paper and a pencil and write down what comes to your head. Or sit down at your instrument and play and improvise whatever comes out of your right brain. Seeing a blank sheet of manuscript paper makes me smile with anticipation because I want to fill it up with creative musical ideas. Personally, this is my favorite way to write music. I also turn on my iPhone Voice Memos app to record my ideas as I play what’s in my head.
2. Record the sounds around you. It’s called sampling. Composers do this all the time, especially in electroacoustic and electronic music. For example, they could be sounds in your house. I listened to a song about someone’s day that started off with a ringing alarm clock, a toilet flushing, water gushing from a faucet, and the sound of teeth being brushed. You get the picture. It was cleverly done and made me laugh!

Before COVID hit, I used to take walks on the boardwalk near my house and would record the sounds of birds and wildlife. Once, a red-winged blackbird caught my eye, thanks to a friend pointing out the bright yellow and red streak on its wings. I took pictures and videos of it, listened to different recording of its call online, and researched about it. I was impressed by how fiercely this bird protects its young against much bigger prey, including humans. Then I wrote a song about it and turned it in as an assignment and entered it in an international composers’ competition.

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was fascinated with birds. He wrote Le Réveil des oiseaux (1953; The Awakening of the Birds), Oiseaux exotiques (1956; Exotic Birds), and Catalogue d’oiseaux (1959; Catalog of Birds), which incorporate meticulous notations of birdsong.

Messiaen also used whatever was at his disposal. During World War II, he was imprisoned as a French soldier at Görlitz. In these horrible war conditions, he wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941; Quartet for the End of Time) using a clarinetist, a violinist, a cellist, and a pianist. He made the best use of what instruments and players he had on hand at the time, and they gave a concert for the other prisoners and guards. For more information, click here.

Just like Messiaen, use anything you can. Use your voice—singing, spoken, or a mixture of both singing and speaking, called Sprechstimme (German for “speech-voice”). “In music, [Sprechstimme is] a cross between speaking and singing in which the tone quality of speech is heightened and lowered in pitch along melodic contours indicated in the musical notation. Sprechstimme is frequently used in 20th-century music.” (https://www.britannica.com/art/Sprechstimme)

You may own a guitar. Knock on the wood for sound effects. Practice singing or rapping every day. Use whatever technology you have available. Use the voice recorder on your phone to record yourself, sounds in nature, sounds in the city, or sounds inside your home. The point is to use what you already have at your fingertips.

•  Use technology to your advantage. You can create a loop of drum riffs, then improvise while recording yourself. Go back and listen to it. Keep the ideas you like and mute or discard the rest. Then develop your saved musical ideas. Ask a music friend for feedback.
• Write with a specific style in mind. For my arranging class, I wrote an arrangement of “Dust in the Wind” in a reggae style for keys, electric guitar, strings, and drum set. That song was over 90 bars long, the longest arrangement I had ever written at that time. It stretched me out of my comfort zone, causing me to grow musically into an unknown music style. Be creative. Bust out of your comfort zone!! You’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you create musically.
• Combine different styles to make your own unique sound! Instead of trying to fit into a box pre-determined by the music industry, create your own box. Maybe it’s a Latin-jazz-fusion for dulcimer, banjo, fiddle, piano, and voice?! (I just made that up.) It’s really a personal choice.
• Listen to the musical styles you enjoy and try to imitate them. Do you like a popular singer’s music? Then listen to the form (ABA, theme and variations, sonata form, etc.). What is the song’s structure? Can you identify the bridge, the hook, the key modulations, the audio effects, the mixing, percussion and rhythmic devices, the instrumentation, and the background singers? What role does each of these elements play in this particular song? What elements draw you to it? Which elements can you incorporate into your music style?
• Keep learning! Take a class or two. Earn your next degree. Take music lessons. If you cannot afford it, audit the class, or try Coursera. Their classes are inexpensive, paid once a month, and you can earn certificates for learning and post your certificates on your social media pages. Learn from local and online musicians. Join local and online groups of musicians, composers, arrangers, music producers, and music teachers. This will further grow your musical capabilities, knowledge, and networking. Musicians are more willing to answer your questions than you think. Put yourself out there and continue to expand your knowledge of music and the music business.
• Collaborate with other musicians and artists. Create something new! Contact music groups to see if they are looking for new musical material. Find like-minded artists to do a live or virtual concert—but first make sure to register each of your songs with a performance rights organization (PRO), like ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), or SESAC (originally the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers).
• Interview musicians you admire. Contact musicians online to see if they are open for an interview with you for your podcast, blog, event, or just for your own knowledge. Learn from their life experiences. Write down what they tell you, then put it into practice. Use that knowledge to help others so they can replicate your success.
• Play your instrument in an ensemble or two. When I started playing in military chapels at the age of eleven, it forced me out of my comfort zone. I had to learn chord progressions and to watch the conductor’s or music minister’s lead, and I learned how to improvise and to read music more fluently. Even now, as I play for churches, choral groups, singers, instrumentalists, and ensembles, it is good to sit on the hot seat, sweat, and pray for Jesus to help me at the piano.
• Create music directly in your music software program (i.e., Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, or MuseScore). Although this is not my go-to, it is a faster way to write music if you’re in a rush. Another time-saving way is to record yourself into your DAW, then dump those tracks into your prepared score. I’ve done that with transcriptions. I’ll prepare my Finale music score with the proper instrumentation, then dump the Ableton tracks into the score. After that, my job is to edit the score in Finale. Sibelius and others also have this capability.
• Use your sample or a previous song you’ve written and chop up the audio to use it in a different way, like as a beat. You can create music from this and/or make a collage by adding several different styles of songs, with a totally new result.
• If you get bored, change the meter, change the tempo, change the harmonic structure, change the timbre, change the instrumentation, but think with an overall structure in mind, like ABA, ABACA, 12-bar blues, or verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus/chorus.
• Add something out of the ordinary, harmonically. For example, if your song is in a minor key, end with a Picardy third. (Raise the minor 3^rd to a Major 3^rd to lift the ending.) I love to use this technique with the Christmas song “What Child Is This?”

I hope this article has given you food for thought in your creating of music. These are just my ideas and the tip of the iceberg. As internationally acclaimed composer, conductor, and concert pianist Mark Hayes once told me, “Grace Joy, keep writing music.” I want to encourage you to do the same!

I am curious, though: In what ways do you create music?