There is no “writing” happening most of the time - the improvisation, recording and editing are all the same act, and the recording is the only meaningful form that the song ever takes. Then you edit your improvisation into a shape, improvise against that, edit some more, and so on. You come up with a beat and then record improvisation over it, either with audio or MIDI or both. The recording medium itself has been the major songwriting tool since the 1980s. That said, your picture of the beginner guitarist permuting the easy-to-play chords is dated, and hasn’t been the dominant songwriting method in many decades. There are as many compositional techniques in rock and pop as there are songwriters. This is why the most sonically adventurous music (hip-hop and EDM) is the most repetitive and formally constrained. With all of this timbral and spatial possibility, you need to keep other elements simple and predictable or the listener will be totally overwhelmed. You can make a synth sound like literally anything, and through studio technique you can make anything sound like anything else, in any imaginary spatial environment. In pop, you have complete freedom over the sonic content of every instrument. But fundamentally, an oboe is going to sound like an oboe. There are plenty of hip-hop songs with no melody and little to no harmony.Ĭlassical music thinks about timbre in certain ways - through orchestration and expressive articulation. Melody and harmony are mostly there to signpost where you are in the beat, if they’re present at all. In pop, rhythm, timbre, and space are the crucial avenues for expression. In classical music, melody is the crucial avenue for expression, and everything else is there to support it. If you wanted to teach a pop musician about the theory of his craft, what would you teach other than what is offered in any freshman theory course? (all right, you can skip the figured bass and species counterpoint). I have to add that I’m a little surprised to hear that pop musicians are baffled by the relevance of “academic” music theory to their music. The fact that many popular songs have been written by teams (mostly duos) of songwriters to me seems to corroborate my noodling theory - but I am very interested to learn if there are common practices, disciplines, methods, etc that have been used and transferred over time. rock/blues seems to based on noodling on a guitar and is directly the result of the tuning of the instrument and the ease with which a beginner can learn a few chords. To me the compositional technique of most pop and esp. I’m classically trained (I do recognize a blues progression when i hear it though) so i would like to hear more of your insights into the forms, styles and methods of pop music - your observation that “most of the creativity in pop lies in the manipulation of timbre and space”, for example, was very interesting. In a recent comment, a reader posed a good question:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |