/comp/ - Composition General

"I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."
- Johann Sebastian Bach

Previous thread: An experiment in a pen-and-paper composing general, made for all the composition autists

This differs from /prod/ in that it is more focused on the actual writing of music, not the production. That is not to say /prod/'s electronic music is unwelcome, by all means, post here! But post with the intent on discussing composition. And remember, this is NOT /classical/. Any music, such as jazz, pop, rock, country, electronic etc. is acceptable

Post clyps and accompanying notation so we can give accurate feedback.

STUFF /COMP/ DOES
>the /comp/ YouTube channel
youtube.com/channel/UCqUEaKts92UIstFjrz9BfcA

>the /comp/ weekly challenge
[email protected]

THEORY
>Fux's Counterpoint
opus28.co.uk/Fux_Gradus.pdf

>Orchestration (Rimsky-Korsakov)
northernsounds.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/77-Principles-of-Orchestration

>Teoria - Music Theory General Guides/Articles
teoria.com/index.php

>Arnold Schcoenberg's "Fundementals of Music Composition"
monoskop.org/images/d/da/Schoenberg_Arnold_Fundamentals_of_Musical_Composition_no_OCR.pdf

>Jazz harmony (from the course at Berklee)
davidvaldez.blogspot.com/2006/04/berklee-jazz-harmony-1-4.html

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
>Basic composing
youtube.com/watch?v=hWbH1bhQZSw

>Free Notation Software
musescore.org/

IMPROVISATION
>Fake books for jazz and blues soloing
drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BzW9o5O35hQzMzA0ZmI0MWEtZGFmNi00OTQ0LWI2MjMtOWUyNzgyNmUzNzNm&usp=drive_web&ddrp=1&hl=en#

Other resources (full of lessons and books): pastebin.com/k3xddxwr

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/c/sophiamusik/videos
youtube.com/watch?v=b0eeidrMxPk
clyp.it/htv5xioa
youtube.com/channel/UC1-TVkjyqNNsDMMQ3NhWkQw/live
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flute_Sonata_in_C_major,_BWV_1033
youtube.com/watch?v=Ph_ERXCaBKg
clevcode.org/cicada-3301/
clyp.it/tfb1bzeg
youtube.com/watch?v=tGj0vnMgRsw
youtube.com/watch?v=CWVxd17VRf4
youtube.com/watch?v=6umf9Jvkt34
vocaroo.com/i/s1efyBut9HxZ
youtube.com/watch?v=84Sn-KzsV94
youtube.com/watch?v=_hUJKqHTOEI
clyp.it/sivv535k
clyp.it/gowlbwfi
clyp.it/fadrkxqm
clyp.it/fo1pre4t
youtube.com/watch?v=GoDwzWbqPEk#t=17s
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

THE /comp/ COMPOSITION CHALLENGE #3 METERS July 8st - July 15rd

Compose a short piece (around 1 to 2 minutes) with three distinct meters in any instrumentation. Treat these time signatures as meters, rather than just throwing in a different time signature for a bar or two for phrasing purposes. Consider making your meters distinct by considering whether the time signatures you choose are duple or triple; simple, compound or complex/irregular.
BONUS CHALLENGE: Make at least one section of your piece polyrhythmic/polymetric

Post WIPs, talk about things to consider when changing meters, post pieces that have strong metric changes, post polyrhythmic pieces.

Is there anything that catches a composer's attention visually more than a pic of sheet music?

>tfw the b below middle c plays really loud on your keyboard sometimes no matter how hard you press it
It's jarring to be playing quietly then suddenly hear the b pound at me and drown everything else out

So, I'm trying to do a Toccata for the challenge, but here's my problem:

I've all kinds of ideas for a Toccata in minor key, but I'd actually want it to be in a major key (like widor, Bach f maj, some Pachelbel Toccata). The vibe just feels so different, and I'll have to mess around on the instrument for a bit first.

If all goes well, I'd end up with a piece that could be played as a wedding march or Introitus.

great opportunity to practice transposition

>A2 on my synthesizer is missing the fundamental and only plays all the overtones, regardless of the patch you're on
I really don't understand how this happens, and it looks like I'm the only person this happens to

So is the ITAOTS compilation ready yet? Sorry for pressuring challengeguy to do it, but I'm really curious.

>THE /comp/ COMPOSITION CHALLENGE #3 METERS July 8st - July 15rd
>8st
>15rd
I don't know why this bothers me so much, even if I know it's probably because of copy-paste.

sorry, not too many people gave me midi so I've been manually inputting notes whilst watching youtube videos

7/8 variation guy here. I posted the midi in the thread, did you get it? I cba to make a new BS email address for shenanigans.

Yeah I got yours, thanks

Yes, a paycheck.

>tfw E3 is broken and have to press it much harder than every other key to make a sound at all

Question from last thread:

Can any of you who know a little theory comment on the merits of this guy as a composer?

youtube.com/c/sophiamusik/videos

He has been linked to Cicada 3301, but nothing conclusive has come out of it. Can you detect musical clues?

what is that even

An ARG.

I looked at that last thread. What sort of thing would we be looking for? From what I heard they were all (well, both) nice short pieces.

Any formal anomalies? Patterns that allude to famous works, perhaps? Interesting mathematics? This kind of thing.

How you rate him as a composer, technically?

This piece was singled out on a website that claims his music plays in the room where Botticelli's Birth of Venus is displayed: youtube.com/watch?v=b0eeidrMxPk

Might be a good starting point.

Just a fun short jazz rendition I wrote in 20 minutes. Nothing too serious, but I kinda like how the melody turned out. May "borrow" it in the future.

clyp.it/htv5xioa

Forgot to mention it's a rendition of Linkin Park's Crawling.

So what's the deal with the weekly challenge? We send them in and a winner's chosen or is it just an individual challenge for fun?
Also what are WIPs?

I think you need to proof read that harmony, bro. E#maj7?

It's an individual challenge and all the scores will be patched together.

WIP means work in progress I guess. So scores that you are working on?

Yeah, my bad. Is just supposed to be an Emaj7, thanks.

Would any of you guys be interested in a separate more lax stream? The other stream is amazing and props go to the OP for making it, but just for my own sake and productivity sometimes I'll stream myself composing (to myself lmfao) but I'm fairly versed in theory up to level III and would love to take questions about what I'm doing while I'm streaming etc

Just trying to help anybody out desu

it's just an individual challenge. I'm not going to stitch together this weeks since it's not a piece designed around that. I mean I could I guess, as a show case kind of thing. But it's just more to challenge yourself, there's no winners.

WIP stands for work in process, just to get feedback as you write

>Any formal anomalies? Interesting mathematics?
Honestly I think the problem is that I'm too open to such things and they don't stick out to me too much.

Well, my inner overanalysist is stirring, so I think I might take a look.

Still, though, while researching Thomas Schoenberger I just keep finding reasons to lose respect for him. His website just seems carefully worded to annoy me.
>describing yourself as a polymath
I mean, that's just kind of conceited
>music for infants
I can totally understand this, his passion is his passion. It's really just that the association of the words "classical" and "infants" seriously annoys me on a base level
>Using original compositions employing polyphonic melodies reminiscent of both Mozart and Bach
>polyphony
>Mozart
I mean it could just be they're polyphonic melodies which happen to be reminiscent of Mozart's highly-homophonic music, but

I don't know if that page was written by him, but looks like standard marketing.

>close bond with your infant
>Mozart effect
>music, mathematics, and chess

>naming his son fucking Wolfgang

Okay, I think I'm way too biased against him at this point to really judge his music carefully.

i'd be up for it senpai

C'mon, you can't be dissuaded from an interesting puzzle by these things.

I'd love to see that.

Do it.

I have nothing related to use as pic so I'll post something unrelated.

When would it be? The weekends in general are a better time for the average person's schedule, but paradoxically weekdays seem to be when /comp/ is most active.

Cool, didn't think I'd have that much interest. I do it randomly (since I compose in a pretty non-scheduled way) so my proposition is to just post the link up and post in the thread if I am streaming. I'll be doing some stuff here in about an hour or so if any of you guys want to try and catch that.

Otherwise, if you guys feel it'd be better to stream at a particular day and at a certain hour then let me know. Either works desu.

Could ya post the link now senpai, just so I can be notified

I mean, I also have no idea where I might start.

So how did this guy get linked to 3301 in the first place? I feel like that would probably be important to know.

Yeah absolutely

youtube.com/channel/UC1-TVkjyqNNsDMMQ3NhWkQw/live

It's been a while but it was the relationship between some musical clues and stuff you could find on his channel, including, but not limited to, upload dates coinciding with or anticipating 3301's events. His 'about' page used to contain a reference to BWV 1033, claiming it wasn't authored by Bach.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flute_Sonata_in_C_major,_BWV_1033

It has changed, but you can still see similar comments of his here: youtube.com/watch?v=Ph_ERXCaBKg (scroll down)

See also the message about BWV 1033 here: clevcode.org/cicada-3301/

So have any of you been able to get your pieces performed? To me it's always been a dream.

Part of our composition papers at uni involved having pieces played. I also entered all the competitions I could find, and had quite a few pieces played from those. We organised some concerts, had pieces played in them (as well as playing myself as part of the ensemble).
We also have annual composition workshops where each student gets a piece performed and recorded, I try to get along most years, but its pretty intense so I only tend to go every other year.

Any good composition course should include having pieces played by real performers, so I'd recommend studying at university/college if you want to live that dream.

It's great, a really valuable part of going to a music college.

If you're an instrumentalist yourself, expect to get recruited into playing other people's compositions as well. (If you're a good instrumentalist, expect to have quite a busy schedule in just the composition concert alone.) Well, that's also educational, and fun.

If you're still here, as the bones I like it, I'll give it a play when I get home, but you need some serious editing and revision on the piece. For example, this was mentioned before - E#maj7? Not only is this an absurd notation, it's a b9maj chord, which needs some serious reharm to work, or it needs to be in passing. Are you sure you didn't mean Emaj7? There's all sorts of notational errors other than that, too.
>4th bar; F#7b5. Mixo/dom chords can't do b5, they sound way too much like something else. Not to mention, in the key of E, F# needs to be dorian, which would be F#mb5. This would work.
>You proceeded to do both errors two more times. You need to review notation
I do like the comp though, don't get me wrong. Your lead sheet seems to be well thought out. All of your chords are painfully boring though. In the future, you don't need to put down notes for the piano player. In fact, it's detrimental. Any pianist that can't read chord charts fluently, proficiently, and with ease is not worth your time. The piano comp on here has no syncopation and has a worrying lack of 3rds in the chords. It would be much better to give the pianist the chords and have them do as they will.

>t. a jazz pianist

>bach
>industrious
try fucking skinny puppy if u want industrious and not this christ awful harpsicord pussy shit wewew hey bach why dont u take a harpsichord and make a harpsinoose and fuckin harpsihang urself my man

forgegt ableton
forteg logic pro tools
forget frooty lops
music college: its the #$1 most expensive daw of all time

lmao why don't you just steal all of that software? audionews.org is the shit. I've pirated literally thousands of dollars worth of software from them

...

lmao if they wanted to go after me they would just ask my ISP you mongoloid. the government hasn't gone after pirates in years, and hasn't even attacked uploaders consistently in a long time.

>t. an uploader and cracker on a vidya release group

They could go after the site, dipshit. You could've ruined it for everyone.

the site's been up for years and is well known. I'm pretty sure it even has its own subreddit, and is mentioned constantly on tracker forums

>I share a board with people this stupid

Oh, also forgot to add this, you may need to play the full chords and see for yourself as I could be wrong, but I'm like 80% sure that following a m7b5 chord with a I is a bad idea. In all the standards I've played, ii [m7b5] is always followed by V7, as per standard ii V I. There is, of course, no set rules though. You could do Coltrane subs, use vi instead of ii, etc. but going from ii to I is usually not musically kosher.

I hate these useless threads. Could you please go back to making "Classical music" threads?

Why would we want to circlejerk over famous composers and become /classical/ rockists when we could improve our own skill at composing?

shut up faggot just get out, go back to k-pop threads

just because you don't understand actual theory doesn't make a thread useless

Composing for someone gives you direct experience with how the instrument works. How the instrumentalist plays their music, how they express, articulate, shape the sounds you're writing. It's invaluable as a composer

It's not a digital audio workstation, so if you happen to go to a music school for this purpose please don't treat the performers as if they're a digital audio workstation. It'll end badly for your piece.

>you will never write something as good as jeux d'eau
why should i even bother still composing

Composing is always more fun when you stop comparing yourself to the greats.

Why on Earth would a jazz musician go back to making classical music threads? Especially when there's already a /classical/ thread still up?

Since this threads started appearing, everytime I search for "classical" this thread pops up instead of /classical/. Yes, there is a /classical/ right now, but there aren't any normally.

It's in the paste. If you search jazz this will pop up as well, because it's in the paste

why are you so concerned about whether people make /comp/ or /classical/ threads, especially since you are clearly not well educated on either subject

kek

I don't know, really. I don't even listen to music. Success, user. You will be a gr8 musician some day by circlejerking with retards in here : )

how do i write for ensembles/ i notice a lot of the time different sections will rest and the other will take the melody and they will switch. like the french horns play the melody with string and occasional flute accompaniment then the oboes and clarinets take over with the strings. however sometimes i hear the sections blend. how do i know who to give the melody too and how to blend it?

tried to improvise some counterpoint for the first time. didn't really go so well.

clyp.it/tfb1bzeg

youtube.com/watch?v=tGj0vnMgRsw
Sounds really similar to this

Besides the purely practical aspect of giving players rest, there's no easy answer to this, user. The shortest answer is that you must gain personal experience with it - that is, by writing music that trades the melodies around yourself and find approaches that YOU feel work. You will find patterns and rules of thumb as you go along, but don't misunderstand: it's a personal thing, and different composers have wildly different ways of doing things. At first, you can try emulating your favorite composers, and then try and do something different and see what happens.

play with a metronome more, your timekeeping is lacking, as is your syncopation. My favorite exercise to help with syncopation is pretty simple, but really hard and effective for me. Take a simple standard with easy ii V I progs, and do a very simple bassline in the left hand with chords in the right. Once comfortable, do the bassline and chords syncopated. Once you're comfortable with that, switch your left and right hand. Do the bassline with the right (on the upper part of the keybed) and chords with the left. It's absurdly hard, but force yourself to stay in time and do lots of practice. good work though

yea kind of. i mean it wasn't the most complex scale, just wanted to start getting a feel for it.

bump

>looking further into it
>open something in a new tab
>power outage
Spooky 2bh

Honestly, the more I look into this the more I doubt it. I'm even beginning to doubt the original message sent to that you linked blog (I mean it makes considerable reference to "false 3301s". Maybe it's an elaborate joke), but one thing I think I can be sure of is that Thomas Schoenberger is not connected, and is just courting a cryptanalyst audience.

>a quote from someone else on his blog
>"But what really fires our imagination is the sheer mystery of Schoenberger’s YouTube channel. Many of the videos seem interconnected, weaving a melodic ocean of sound and image that defy the staid state of Classical Music today. This is the new Beethoven of classical music, using graphic images as thunder, lighting and rain, a musical Moses, urging us to some netherworld promised land."
>link to youtube.com/watch?v=CWVxd17VRf4
It's as though his intent actually is to annoy me.

I still have unanswered questions regarding this:
>Bach’s hand can surely be sensed, too, in the fully written-out parts of the first Minuet which bears relationship to a movement of a concerto by Bach’s Merseburg contemporary, Christoph Förster
I've found academic sources saying the same, and weirdly not one of them states which Forster concerto it is. But in an academic paper mainly concerning CPE Bach the following is written
>at least movement IV reworks a preexistent keyboard composition by Christoph Förster
This is in reference to the claim that the BWV 1033 is in fact written by CPE and/or his elder as composition practice, though. Meanwhile the email to the blog reads
>It was composed by a man named Christoph. CPE misidentified the piece as his fathers..Pity. CPE was a teen, so forgive him.
So does that mean Forster reworked his own keyboard concerto and then CPE later misidentified it as JS's?

One other thing I can say is holy shit did CPE Bach have horrible handwriting.

Seriously, though, that comment was a lot more revealing than any of my skimming of academic papers.

>someone complains about how boringly the harpsichordist is improvising the figured bass
>replies that the harpsichord line is bad because it was written by Christoph [Forster]
>(the half-of-a-movement that academics theorize was related to Forster doesn't even have any figured bass in it - the harpsichord part is actually fully written)
>someone mentions the obvious, that who wrote the part and how the figured bass player improvises the part are two separate things
>replies with a dash of Navy Seal in there, continues arguing about the essence of Bach's style, claims he's studied figured bass (using the synonym found on Wikipedia to establish cred)

bump
Fuck, there was a great video analyzing a Mozart chamber piece about this, trying my best to find it.

Ah, here it is.
youtube.com/watch?v=6umf9Jvkt34

It's a great video on string quartet writing, and ensemble writing in general.

decided i need to start practicing my composing, so I tried to write a piano piece. What did i do wrong? What did i do write? Any suggestions?
vocaroo.com/i/s1efyBut9HxZ
How do I write a better bass clef?

nice, write more

You need more harmonic variation. You play a Dm chord twice in the first section, and no other chord. There are hints of the V in the second and third bars, but no arpeggios or anything. Try to play more arpeggios and broken chords, and with a harmonic progression. It's rather difficult to tell the meaning of each section with no strong harmonic reference. That's one of the ways you can make the bass better. I like the counterpoint just looking at it, but I don't really havetime to analyze it.

>What did i do write?
I don't tend to correct people on their typos because that's just uselessly condescending, but in this case I was genuinely confused for a second as to what you meant, because "write" appears two other times in your post.

What you did objectively wrong:
There's a spelling mistake in measure two, it should be Eb, not D#.
(that's about it, unless you count not following Fux as an objective mistake.)

It sounded quite interesting. The whole syncopation and arriving at cadences a step ahead was cool. The melody needs a lot of work, but there are some principles you seem to understand already - motivic recycling and sequences are used (although often they were used without modification, to the detriment of the harmony), and both sections have a nice, well-defined contour, of a mountain in this case. On the whole, well, it's obviously a beginner's piece as you say, but it's clear there's musicality there.

>How do I write a better bass clef?
I'm not sure you want to go between block chord and single notes so suddenly. Measure 6 is the worst offender of this, but even in the first measure something sounded off about it. Block chords are one thing and single notes are another thing, and it sounds like a dress suddenly going from lace to leather if you use them together too clumsily. (On the other hand, if you do so deftly, it might sound like some exotic material created from lace interspersed with leather. But, uh, you might want to go to /fa/ for that instead)

Also, in the second section it got oddly boring. If you have a bass part just as active as the melody in the first part, a listener will get used to it and the sudden half notes will sound odd, especially considering the level of activity in the melody seems relatively unchanged.

Finally, read Fux's Counterpoint, it's surprisingly easy and will help you a lot. Note that a lot of the rules established by it are pedagogical in nature, and just suggestions in actual composing.

how do i use counterpoint without sounding like baroque music. i really dont like most baroque music and i get nothing out of writing in that style

Just look at Classical and most Romantic music, and a lot of 20th century as well.

any 20th century or medieval examples? those are my favourite eras

Thanks for the help.
I don't understand what half those words mean, I guess i've got homework.

Er, sorry, I can explain what things mean if necessary.

I'm not quite sure I understand the motivic recycling. Which measures show motivic recycling?

Well, this fugue by Hindemith doesn't adhere to the exact rules specified (pretty obviously), but it sort of exemplifies it: youtube.com/watch?v=84Sn-KzsV94
(starts at 14:57)
You can hear the spirit of the law, as it were, in it - all parallel thirds, sixths, octaves, etc. are just one voice, and multiple voices are born out of contrary motion.

That said, Faure's Elegie is a lot more what I had in mind, how counterpoint works in homophony:
youtube.com/watch?v=_hUJKqHTOEI
(Well, I don't like this cellist's expression too much but it has the sheet music)
Faure's melodic lines are often hidden inside of block chords, but they're clearly audible, and for the most part move contrapuntally with each other. (Also, this is a lovely and well-composed piece, and you should listen to it in general)

Ah, right, I just generically meant that motifs are used and then used again. There's probably a better term for that.

The most blatant example would be measure 9, with what the melody does there. In measure 10, the melody is the exact same thing, transposed a perfect fourth up. In measure 11, the melody starts doing the same thing transposed another perfect fourth up, and though the eighth notes change in contour, it's still the same rhythm, two quarter notes followed by four eighth notes. So the motif is recycled like that, but changed in interesting ways.

Another example is measure 1 and measure 4. This time it's not a sequence, at all, but the rhythm is still the same, and the general contour is similar - lowest note on beat one, highest note on beat three and then it starts going back down on beat four.

Thanks for the help man

>audionews.org
How should I go about downloading software online like Finale 2015? Do I need a proxy to start or a virus protection software first?

Can you rec contemporary tonal electronic music with elaborated development?

Hey, /comp/, I want to to go about learning to compose rnb/soul/ similar to Frank Ocean, Miguel, Jame Blake, and all those endless pop songs from beyonce to kpop, that make use of this colorful style. I've only learned traditional tonal music thus far, and don't know where to begin. This kind of music is really mysterious to me, and those most I can do is transcribe stuff by ear very in a very shoddy manner.

Learn jazz harmony. RnB and soul all evolved from/with jazz. Pian is the best instrument to learn for those genres. Are you a /prod/ucer as well?

bump

>RnB and soul all evolved from/with jazz
thanks, I did realize they were related, but I wasn't sure. So a jazz foundation can help me in learning rnb?
>Pian is the best instrument to learn for those genres
that's my main instrument
>Are you a /prod/ucer as well?
Yes here are some beats/musical ideas from random rnb chord progressions and tonal trends in the genre that I managed to transcribe.
clyp.it/sivv535k
clyp.it/gowlbwfi
clyp.it/fadrkxqm
clyp.it/fo1pre4t

I have no idea why or how they work though. For example, in the first beat I hear this progression all over the place in rnb, especially in songs by Lido, such as in his song titled money: youtube.com/watch?v=GoDwzWbqPEk#t=17s
I find there are a ton of chords that are actuall two chords stackedo on top of each other and also lots of 9ths and m11ths.

Which program will let me do the following?

>Insert a .PDF of sheet music
>It turns it into editable notes
>I can just edit the clef, and it automatically adjusts all the notes for me

I need to sight read a lot of stuff in Treble, but it's so much easier to read in Bass cleff for my instrument. While I need to work on reading Treble, for now I'd just like to "translate" into Bass clef really quickly for many pieces.

Will you ever be able to write effectively for piano without being really good at it?

>I find there are a ton of chords that are actuall two chords stackedo on top of each other and also lots of 9ths and m11ths.
This is a prime tenant of jazz harmony, though you usually don't think of them as "two chords stacked on to each other".

That progression, and probably all progressions you'll find in R&B and soul, is a variation on the ii-V-I progression, the basis of jazz harmony (and again, R&B and soul)

If you're a producer looking to make R&B/soul, I advise you to again look at jazz harmony. I'm not much for percussion myself, but considering contemporary R&B is influenced by funk/disco/disco, I suggest you look into those genres. Maybe learn a little Latin percussion, some reggae, for that extra bit of spice. Syncopation is the main aspect of most of these styles. Good luck.

No program does that. You'll have to transcribe it

why wouldn't you?

Because you'd have a better understanding of capabilities and it would be easier to write fast scalar stuff