Hope this is not the wrong forum to post this..

Well the thing is, whenever I try to create some music or even a simple riff, it usually doesn't sound good, or not the way I would like it to be.. How do I compose music? I mean.. should I listen to a lot of musical styles and pick what I like from everything and create something of my own or.. ? I'm lost.. Thank you if somebody replies

Composing is like playing an instrument, you have to practice constantly to get better. So if you don't like your first piece, analyze it and find out what's wrong with it, then write another piece and incorporate what you found out, and so on. When you do this, you'll find after a while that your written music is much closer to what you intended than before.

Composing is something I never planned to do and now the ideas seem to be endless. Let me try one suggestion and see if it might help you. Think of a piece you really like [ of course I think it helps tremendously to have been playing lots of music in my life] and pick out a section that gets your attention. Play around with the combination of melody/rhythm. Maybe you think the rhythm is catchy and you can re-arrange the notes to something that is uniquely yours. For me poetry is extremely inspiring .

I can get into more details but don't want to get complicated. I'd love to know if anything here helps.

rada

It can take a long, long time for the music in your head to make it to paper without getting mangled. It may be frustrating, but start with very simple things and try to get them on paper. With practice you should be able to gradually produce more complicated things. You may never get 100% of what you want, but then again you'll occasionally get happy surprises that will take you in a new direction.

I don't know what styles of music you're drawn to, but a good exercise is to listen to music and try to follow the lines in the background and see what makes them tick. You'll probably find they aren't always very complicated to be effective.

Thanks for the answers everyone :}

First off, Rada, I would love if you'd explain what you wrote in more detail, that would be appreciated.. When I try to play with a song that I like and come up something of my own I always end up having something very similar to that song..

What music I like is mostly metal.. progressive/industrial and such.. so I dont know if that helps

Hi Jugo,

I wrote an article a while back about this very subject. Actually, I've written many articles on this subject. Here's an excerpt from an article that may help you. It's titled "To Learn How to Compose, Learn How to Improvise"

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Most students are baffled as to how a piece of music is constructed. It's as if learning how to compose is something only gifted individuals do. And while the intuitive sense behind creating melody itself can not be taught, the craft can!

Form is to music what flower arranging is to the florist. You see, it's all about creating a structure. In flower arranging, the goal is to create something pleasing to the eye. This is accomplished by how the florist places the flowers. He's not going to stack them all to one side. No. He wants to create something that allows the eye to go back and forth. Something that the viewer can take as a complete experience. Music is much the same way.

If we played the same thing over and over we get monotony. If we vary the music too much we get incoherence. The solution? Go back and forth between sections! Now this is easy to grasp intellectually. The difficulty comes when students attempt to create their first composition and end up with something less than satisfactory. And this is because most students haven't learned to trust their intuition.

You see, to be able to compose, you must have the ability to move forward without criticizing yourself. This is THE most important skill and one that can be developed through learning how to improvise. I always suggest students learn how to improvise first. Then when the internal critic is gone, they can move forward with their ideas. It seems strange that improvisation should come before composition but if you want to develop quickly you do really need to free yourself from judging the product and have the ability to move forward. Then, when you learn how to compose by using sections, you won't be as daunted and stuck at every little detail.

Edward Weiss
Quiescence Music
http://www.quiescencemusic.com

Try improvising a lot. The best composers were also great improvisers and no doubt got a lot of ideas this way. It will allow you to be able to more clearly depict the sound you are trying to make as you improve in your skills.

Improvising, of course is a great idea but I remember feeling like I didn't know how to do that.I have a private joke....I think a good melody travels in steps...or skips...see that's my joke...what else is there? You need to know your scales, chord progressions and just about anything else you can learn to give some foundation to being able to improvise.Look at or listen to a melody you like. What is the composer doing? What do you or don't you like about a particular melody.Geez...I don't know how to stop. Private lessons always help too!

rada
btw....if you are not a good note reader and don't think you'll invest your time that way I suggest finding a local pianist/entertainer that probably plays a lot by ear and maybe teaches on the side....

oops...wrong thread...deleted

I started playing piano around a year ago, things I wrote then were extremely dull, I now write things that are much much better, it's all practise. I've developed quite a keen sense of relative pitch which helps a lot with creating melodies. The best tip I can give you is that you should not be confined to a scale, melodies are very dull if they stay in a scale, experiment with a few half-step intervals in your melody that resolve on a note that's in the scale but leave the scale for a brief moment. (difficult to explain)

The main thing is you'll get better. Good luck.

It can be intimidating if you've never been encouraged to do so. But really you should start simple and go from there. Piano is probably the best instrument to improvise on because it's visual. You have to limit yourself on the keys, however, or you will get overwhelmed. Try improvising a melody (only one note at a time) on black keys only, or a 5 finger pattern. If you don't know what to do at first, just start making noise. I call this "doodling". Doodle for a while until you get comfortable with the fact that you're not playing from sheet music.

Then try this again, same limitations, but try to listen in your head for what the next note should be. Try not to make too big of a leap between notes to start. Sometimes singing the note helps. Then you try to match that pitch. It will take a while before you can get the exact note, but you will improve with practice. This is only with melody so far.

Once you get comfortable with improvising a melody, then try adding a harmony. Think of your chords within a certain key. I recommend doing only C major to start. Remember that the most important chords are I IV and V, (C, F, & G), your major chords. When you are comfortable you can fiddle with other chords, and with playing broken chords, etc.

Improvising on piano is a good exercise, but what you really want to do is learn to improvise in your head and sing to yourself. You're much more likely to find the melodic turns that satisfy you and you're less likely to settle on a half baked idea because it just won't seem satisfying.

Plinking out notes on the piano and then writing them down leads too easily to a reliance just on the action of making sounds rather than the substance of what you're creating.

We're talking about a beginner here who doesn't know where to begin. Often the composing process can be stumped by the desire for it to be "good" to the point where nothing is written in the end. Random improvising isn't the end goal, that was my first step. Notice I told him to try and listen in his head or sing what the next note should be then match that. Also, when you compose, you throw away a lot of stuff that is bad or mediocre, and keep the good part. Once you combine a bunch of good parts together, you have a good piece. But often people get overwhelmed with the idea of making a good piece from the start. This is a way to get there.

That's not how it worked for me, but there's nothing wrong with starting as you said. Ever since I was 3 or 4 the music came to me in my head. The first challenge was learning to get it on paper. I couldn't do much until I knew at least something about music notation (and then piano playing helped - but later got in the way).