I am definitely not a composer, but want to work on this area because I know it would help me as a musician. I am very tied to other people's notes on paper and have a hard time coming up with my own. Do you guys ever have trouble starting a composition? How do you get better at this? I have taken theory, piano lessons, ear training, read books about composing and I still am very terrible at it. What can I do?

Hi Amy,

What I usually suggest students do is learn how to immprovise first. To free the "inner voice" so to speak so when it comes time to compose, you won't stop and get stuck on every single bar.

Having said that, after you can improvise, I have students learn how to compose using an 8-bar phrase. I have a video at Youtube that illustrates this here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejJtUdqW8ko

Hope this helps,
Edward Weiss
http://www.quiescencemusic.com

Hi Amy,

Do you make up songs in your head? Do musical ideas pop into your mind when you least expect it? If so then I suggest you simply start with a notebook and notate these ideas. Work on your ability to write down what you hear in your head. Later you can work on harmonizing these ideas and working them into pieces, but it all starts with writing down what you hear in your head. BTW, if you don't make up songs in your head and/or musical ideas don't just pop into your mind the maybe composition isn't what you're destined for. That's OK too.

I sometimes get musical ideas popping into my head and I have written some of them down. There are days that whole songs come to me, but I can't write them down fast enough and I have no idea where to start with the accompaniment and stuff. But then there are days when I'm too busy with life to let myself think like that. I think a notebook is a good idea, but what about when I'm driving and singing something? Is there a way to remember it when I get home to my piano?

My cell phone has a voice recorder, and every now and then I find myself singing little melodies into it when I'm out running errands or away from pencil and paper.

I also feel it's import to NOT wait for inspiration. As any writer will tell you, the only cure for writer's block is to write anyway. Even if it's garbage, get something down on paper.

I wrote 10 drafts for a baroque dance yesterday, all of which are terrible. A few summers ago, I wrote 3 four-bar melodies every night before bed. Most of them were bad, but there were a few that were actually pretty good, and some of them ended up becoming complete pieces.

Schoenberg's book, "Fundamentals of Music Composition" has lots of good suggestiong. Another source is Goetschius's book "Exercises in Melody Writing" which is available free from Google Books.

You might start by just writing down a figure, like an arpeggio then expand what you wrote. Combining figures isn't bad either.