Precomposition: The Secret to Creating Great Music

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. My name is J. You might already know me because I have a ton of composition, music theory, music production classes here on this website. I've made about 130 online classes, and I love doing it. And I have someone told me once I have, like 1 million online students. Anyway, in this class, we're going to focus on the precomposition process. That means that before we start writing music, and this is true of any genre, whether I'm writing, dance music, orchestra music, film music, game music, rock music, pop music, whatever genre I'm working on on a given day, there's always a pre composition process. And that is a process of decisions that I have to make before I start writing so that once I do start writing, things are really smooth, and I don't hit any roadblocks. I'm going to spend a week or so thinking about all of these things and answering a huge list of questions, and that's going to make my writing a lot more successful. Okay? And if you are someone who finds yourself writing and then constantly giving up and you have 100 unfinished pieces, this might be why because you don't have a good precomposition process. Moth the road for you to set yourself up for success while you're writing. So I've been using this process for probably about 20 years now, ever since I started writing. So, dive in. Let's learn how I do this, and you will learn how to craft your own set of precomposition techniques that'll help you write the best music, finish pieces, and maybe even work a little faster. Let's dive in. O 2. What is "Precomposition"?: Okay, what is precomposition? It's a lot of stuff. This is everything we're going to do before we sit down to really start writing. Some of it is just technical stuff, figuring out the scope of the piece, what we need to be writing, what the commission is for, or whatever? Some of it is musical, getting down some music ideas, deciding on our big harmonic ideas, big moment of the piece. Some of it is inspirational. What is this piece about? What are we going to be inspired by for it, are we going to let the audience know that or not? There's a lot of different pieces to this. I think the most important thing is that no matter what style of music I'm writing, this is what I'm doing. I'm doing this precomposition process for any style? If I'm writing like dance music in a collaboration with another person. I'm going to go through a lot of the same stuff that we talk about here as when I'm writing a piece for an orchestra. The process is pretty similar. And the whole point of all of this is that I can be doing this precomposition process while I'm still working on another piece and preparing for this piece. Let me explain that again. Let's say I'm writing a string quartet. But the next piece I'm going to write is a piano piece. So I can be still finishing up that string quartet piece while I start the precomposition process for the piano piece, because I'm not writing a lot of music in the precomposition a little bit though. I'm coming up with ideas, I'm sketching, I'm thinking, I'm trying to find inspiration for the piece. So this works in all genres, and it's So it helps you to hit the ground running when you finally get to starting that piano piece, you're just off to the races and going fast. Not that writing fast is good, right? I get asked this all the time. And I just want to be really clear about this. Writing fast, if you can write fast, that doesn't mean you write better than someone who writes slow, does not mean that. There's no gold medal for writing fast. However, if you're in the media industry, film, TV, games, writing fast will serve you well. That is an important skill to have. But it's not going to make your music better or worse if you write fast or slow. Speed has nothing to do with it. I like to write fast because I do a lot of good precomposition work, so I'm set up so that when I finally do start writing, I write pretty fast. Okay, so all genres, all styles, you should be doing this on all the music you write. Cool. L et's tive in to our first big topic, and that is conceptualizing the piece. 3. Defining the Purpose and Context of the Piece: Okay, some of these things we're going to do in this class are a little abstract and some are a little more practical. We're going to start on the abstract side. Okay? So when we first dive into a piece, we need to just kind of conceptualize what we're doing. Big picture here, right? Like, what is this piece? What are we doing, and how are we going to do it? Okay? So the first thing I have here under this big conceptualizing banner is defining the purpose of the piece. This is a part of it that I don't think enough people think about. I see people all the time that that really kind of mix up the purpose of their piece, and then they're disappointed. But because the piece didn't achieve things that they wanted to achieve, but they didn't write it in that way. Let me give you an example. Let's say you wanted to write a piece of protest music, right? So you want to say something, like I don't know, water rights that comes to mind because I was just at a concert the other night about that. You want to write a piece about water rights, but you do it with a big program about some story about something, and it just misses the mark, right? Like, if you want to be a protest piece, then we need to think about that from the very beginning. So the way I think about the purpose of a piece of music is you've basically got three options, okay? One. Uh message or what I would call a protest piece. It's where you're trying to say something. You're trying to say a message. I like message because not everything is a protest piece. But there's some kind of abstract concept that you want to get across to people. Water rights, the memory of somebody that could fall into this category, any kind of message that you want to convey. The second thing is program. Tell a story. If you've taken some of my other composition classes, you know about programmatic music. I'm a big fan of programmatic music. I write a lot of program music. Program just means there is a program. In other words, there is a story for you to know. If you're trying to tell a story with the piece, we're going to set it up a little bit differently. We're going to make landmarks along the way. We're going to think about how the characters of the piece change. Again, we have to think we're being very abstract here unless you're using lyrics, in which case, you're not being super abstract. We'll talk about lyrics in a little bit But if you're just writing instrumental music, this is all very abstract, so you want to be very intentional about it. You're probably also going to include some text with this kind of a piece that explains the program or the story. You don't have to do that. You could not tell people the story. We'll talk more about that later. But sometimes coming up with that information first or at least an early draft of it can really help you shape the piece. The third thing is absolute music, absolute music, or in other words, entertainment. This is music that is not trying to send you a message, not trying to say something. It's not trying to tell a story. It's not programmatic. It's just nice sounding music. And it is for your enjoyment. There's nothing wrong with writing music in this way. I love writing and listening to absolute music, music that sounds great because it sounds great. There's nothing wrong with that. But if that's what we're going to do, we need to set up that expectation early on in our process and really be thinking about what it is we're going to be doing. Okay? We're going to go through all of these things more in this piece. We're going to talk about programmatic music and messaging once we get into the inspirational section of this class. So hold on to those for now. But this is probably the first thing that I'm thinking about is how do I get this all dialed in? Okay, next, let's talk about the audience. A 4. Identifying the Target Audience: Okay, let's talk about the audience. Who is the audience for this piece? This is really important because at least for me, this is going to kind of define how successful the piece is, right? If I say, this is a piece of dance music, it's for, you know, like a club audience. And then I write a string quartet, and I wonder why they weren't so into it, that's going to answer it, right? Like, I didn't go after the right audience. And this is true. I mean, I see this a lot for more traditional concert music composers that are writing music and then saying, you know, there was ten people in the audience at the premiere of my piano piece, and they're upset about that. But I tend to say, That's an audience that's not a bad audience size for a piece of abstract, you know, absolute music? If you want to reach audiences of 100,000 people, you need to be writing pop music. So make sure you know what kind of audience you're writing for so that your expectations are set up correctly. So is it a classical audience? Is it a pop audience, all of those things. So let's say classical, pop, et cetera by g. But then also think about, is it an educated audience. Did I spell that wrong? That would be funny. Is it an educated audience? This is what I spend a lot of time thinking about because If you're writing this piece for an educated audience, that means someone who understands music on a little bit deeper level than your average radio listener, then you can do some weirder stuff, right? And they're going to come along with you. But if it's an uneducated audience, I really don't like that term. But what I'm talking about here is music education, people who have studied music. Okay? If I'm writing music for You know, Joe Schmo, who hasn't studied music in college. That's who I really care about. That's, that's my personal main audience. You know, it's those people who are not music elitists like me. They are your average people who just like music. That's who I really want to write for. So I need to think, like, how weird do I want to get, how abstract, what's my harmony like? All of those things are going to go into making sure I'm aiming at the right audience. So that's something to devote a good amount of time to think about, right? Just making sure that you're reaching the right audience and you're aiming at the right audience with your music. 5. Genre (and Money): All right, let's talk about genre or style. Okay? This is something I always work out before I start writing the piece. If you're someone like me that works in a lot of different genres, then this is something you have to figure out. But honestly, this is pretty obvious. Like, if I'm writing a string quartet, I know what I'm going to do in terms of genre. I'm going to make it sound like me, which is it's going to be a very rhythmic thing that bounces around a lot, and uses some fun and quirky harmony. That's what I do. But if I'm writing a piece of electronic music, then I have to think, is this abstract, or do I want this to be more of a dance thing, an upbeat thing, something that has the potential for remixes, maybe something that I'm going to try to license to a film or a game or something like that. Those things all kind of come into this. And another thing that comes into this abstractly, indirectly, is how much should I say this? I'll say it. How much money do I want to make with this piece? That's something that comes in. Now, if it's a grant piece, if it's a piece that I got a grant to write, then that question is already answered. I can be as weird as I want. But if it's something where this is a piece that I want to be quite profitable. Then I'm going to go through all three of these things that we just talked about. I'm going to go through, is this a programmatic piece or an absolute piece? Probably a programmatic piece of music. Who is my audience? It's going to be an uneducated pop audience, and what genre are we thinking about? It's probably going to be dance music or pop music of some variety. Like, if I again, this is something that I see a lot of people get wrong. They say, why am I not making a living, writing very abstract music? Well, the answer to that is because you're writing very abstract music. That's just not a profitable thing to do in our society. It's a fun thing to do, and it's a rewarding thing to do, and I think there's a lot of value in it. But if you're looking to make money, that's not a good route. Thinking about genre and style and money, making money. Okay. Let's move on and talk about the technical things we need to worry about. 6. Instrumentation: Okay, in this next section, I want to talk just about the technical considerations that we need to think about before we start writing a piece. So let's start with instrumentation. Now, you might think, well, this is just an easy thing. When I start writing a piece, I know the instrumentation. There are things that can happen. So the main thing with instrumentation is like, you probably know what you're going to write, right? Instrumentation just means like what instruments are we going to use? So, let's assume we're talking about acoustic music. We'll come back to electronic music in just a second. But with acoustic music, you might say, I'm going to set out to write a piece for solo piano. Okay? Now, if you do that, it's most likely that that's going to stay the same as you write, but it could be that as you're writing, you say, gosh, if this had a clarinet and it would just be so awesome. You can do that later. You can add a solo clarinet in some cases, but not in all cases. If you're working on commission, you can't do that. The commissioner is going to say, this piece needs to be for this instrumentation, and they might be already lining up the performance of this. You can't just add a clinet out of nowhere. You've got to have it locked down. Now, if it's not for a commission and you can change the instrumentation while you're writing it, you need to think if that's a good idea because let's say I decide to add a clarinet in this. If this piece ends up being like a three movement piece and one quarter of one movement has a clarinet in it, this is not good. This is going to cause a lot of problems. Because anyone that wants to perform this piece is going to have to hire a clarinetist for this one short section, and that's going to be very expensive. So if you're going to use an instrument, if you're going to add an instrument, you need to go all in and, like, really add it and justify that we're going to have to hire another person to play this. So do it if you need to. But if you're on commission, it's probably not going to happen. And if you're not on commission, just make sure that you really use that instrument that you add. Okay? Now, if you're writing electronic, and this is a purely electronic piece, then you don't need to think about instrumentation so much. You can add things all over the place because it's just going to be for an electronic. But if you are working an electronic piece and you add an acoustic instrument to it, you're going to have to record that instrument, which is an added expense, or you're going to have to have really good samples of that instrument. That's something else to think about when you're thinking about the instrumentation. It's always good to not have it change after you start writing or after you decide on what it's going to be. But sometimes you just get lucky. I remember when I was writing my dissertation, it was supposed to be sort of an opera. But I was still working on the script, and I didn't really know what it was going to be about. But I had deadlines. I had to get working. So I started writing a string quartet, thinking that I can adapt this music to be for full orchestra and for the pit of an opera or something like that. I can change it. So at least I'm making some progress on the music. But then I got a little ways into it, and I said, You know what? Drink Cort, that's where it's at. This is what it's going to be. So I scrapped the whole thing, the whole opera, except for the music I already had. I just went forward with that. I was lucky enough to be able to do that. But that's not usually how it works. Usually, when I'm in this precomposition phase, I decide on an instrumentation, and I stick to it. Almost exclusively. So things to think about. Technical things, instrumentation. 7. Duration: Okay, let's talk about duration. Now, it might be that you don't need to worry too much about duration, but it might also be that you need to decide on it at this phase in the precomposition. There are a few reasons. First, again, are you working on commission? If you're working on commission, the commissioner is going to be expecting a piece of whatever you agreed on. 7 minutes. If they're expecting a seven minute piece and you give them a 14 minute piece or a two minute piece, you created a bunch of problems for them, that's probably going to result in you not getting commissioned again. You need to be in the ballpark. You don't need to be dead on if they're expecting a seven minute piece, but you need to be in the ballpark. Now, second, and maybe more important personally to me is that If I'm writing a piece that's 10 minutes long. If I sit down and say, this piece is going to be 10 minutes long. Then I'm going to approach it differently than if I'm writing a piece that's 2 minutes long or an hour long. So if the duration is 10 minutes, then I'm going to start the piece slow and build up to the big moments, and then go from there and at about 9 minutes, I'm going to start wrapping it up. So I need to plan for that, and that's what we're going to do in the next few areas. So even if I'm not on commission, I always, 100%, have a duration planned before I start writing. And you'll see when I show you these graphic outlines that I do, these sketches that I do, you'll see that they always have, a duration for the piece written into them. And that's just so I can plan the form and the flow and the pacing. All of that stuff depends on the duration. Okay? Now, yes, the duration can change. Okay? I can sit down and write a ten minute piece. But as I'm writing, I get to the ninth minute, and I'm like, Wait a minute. What I came up with here, we've got room to expand. There's more that can happen here. I'm not ready for it to end. And I can push in another few minutes. I can adjust that if I really have to. But you've got to start with a plan or else you're just meandering and writing potentially nonsense for a long time. Always start with a duration, even if it's changes later, start with the plan. 8. Software: Okay. Software. Very technical thing. This matters more than you would think. So there are basically four big notation softwares that you could use. Okay? So if you're writing acoustic music, those four applications are the three big ones which are finale, Sebelius, and Dico. Those are the very hard to advanced professional level tools. And then I'll row a fourth one in there, which is Mu score, which is relatively easy to learn, relatively cheap or free. And it's what a lot of people use. You can do great work in Mu score. I'm a fan. Don't worry. But deciding on that early on is important. Be because moving between software sucks, and it's going to slow you down. None of these programs want to be able to share files with each other. So if you start off and you're working on Mu score and then you say, Okay, I need to do some really advanced notation stuff here. Going to switch to Dico. You're in for a little bit of a speed bump on that. You can export as a middy file and then open it in DCO. You're going to spend a day adjusting things and making it look good. You can do it as a music XML file, I think, and that'll be a little bit easier, but it's still going to cost you a day or more in just adjusting things and getting them to look good in the new software. So decide on that. The same thing goes if you're doing electronic thing, if you're going to write your piece in Ableton, but it's for a film, and the session you get for the film is in logic, which is very common. Then you've got to convert your project from Ableton to logic. This is a pain. You don't want to have to do that if you don't need to. If you are working on a film project, talk to the people in the production studio and tell them or ask them how you're going to get files, what you need to do, and they might insist you use logic or not. I don't know. They might insist you use pro tools. So know what your software tools are, at least your main tools, like the Da or the notation program before you jump in. That's very important. 9. Collaboration: Let's talk about collaboration. If you're collaborating with someone, we need all of that stuff figured out before we start writing any music. This is the perfect time for that. Here's what we need figured out. We need to know who our collaborators are, and who's doing what, obviously, step one. But we also need to know all of the things we already talked about in this section. Are we in agreement on instrumentation? Are we in agreement on duration? Really important? And there's a famous example of that. Are we in agreement on the software that we're going to use? Very, very important. Let me tell you this funny story about duration. One of my all time favorite pieces of music is called Ballet Mechanique by George Antile. It's this crazy insane piece. Google it. It's insane. But powerful wild. It's like a circus of a piece. Anyway. So back around 1,900 or so, the composer George Antle, who was actually from New Jersey, but he was living in Paris, because that's where all the cool artists lived at the time. He was in Paris hanging out at this coffee shop, and he meets Man Ray, very famous visual artist. And Man Ray at that time is experimenting with film. So they say, cool, Let's collaborate. And Man Ray says, Okay, you go make some music, and I'll go make a little movie. And then we'll come together in a couple of months and put it together, and it'll be cool. And they both say, cool. Let's do that. But they don't talk about the duration. So they go off and do their thing. A month or so later, Man Ray comes back and says, I made this experimental film. It is really cool. It's about 10 minutes long. And George Antle says, cool. I made this experimental music, and it's really cool. It's about 25 minutes long. And so Antle said, Can you make your movie longer so that this works? And Man Ray says, Can you make your music shorter? So this works. And they both basically refused, and the thing didn't come together for close to 100 years. It wasn't until around 2000 that it came together. So it did come together. There was a version edited together by someone that chopped up the music. And that happened like 20 years later, I think. I might be getting this wrong, some of the timeline wrong. But many years later, it came together with a chopped up version of the audio of the music. But about 100 years later, it came together with a chopped up version of the movie and all the live pieces of it, because it was written in a way that some of the technical things in the music couldn't be done live until much later. And I was actually involved sort of with the actual premiere of the piece of music with the original video. Crazy weird story. But you get the point. So collaborators all need to know exactly who's doing what, and timelines. Establish this. Establish if you have a collaboration that requires a tight timeline. Everybody needs to get their stuff done by a certain date, or if we're on soft deadlines or no deadlines. I have a collaboration going right now with a singer where we're both very busy, but we really wanted to make this work. So we just said no timelines. I'm going to write some music. I'm going to send it to you. Do some stuff with it when you have time when you can figure it out. And I like to work that way, but if I didn't do that, if I was being strict about timelines, we would always be mad at each other. So decide what your timelines are going to be even if there are going to be no timelines. Cool. Okay. Let's talk about one last thing and the technical considerations, and then we'll move on to inspiration and research. 10. Film and Attached Media: Okay, last thing in this list is film or attached media. What that means is that if you're writing music to the film, make sure you have all the film files ready to go, make sure you have a session setup for those films, and make sure that those films are not going to change. It it has been my experience sometimes that you get reels or briefs or whatever you're going to get from the film studio. You need to score it. But then you finish it, you write the music, you're happy with the music, and then you get a new edit of that. Now you've got to change all the music or the music doesn't work anymore or So ideally make sure it's not going to change. Sometimes you don't have the ability to do that. And that's true with really any media that you might be working for. If you're working on a podcast, the same is true, if you're working on TV or sound design for some kind of project, just make sure you have all your files that you need, everything is set up, or at least you know when you're going to get them as much as possible. Sometimes there are unknowns when you're collaborating with film studios, but Just be sure that you know when you're going to get anything if you don't already have it, and really don't start working on at least that section until you have the media. Whenever that's possible. Okay, let's move on and talk about inspiration and research. The more fun stuff. 11. Lyrics: Okay, let's talk about inspiration in research. This is probably the second biggest category of stuff that has to get done before I start writing a piece. Everything prior to this has been very, like, mechanical. Like, make sure this is done, this is done. This is done. That's very easy stuff. Um, the inspiration and research part is what really can take a long time. I'm thinking about what the piece is going to sound like, what it's going to feel like. Everything I'm just really trying to imagine the best piece of music I can possibly imagine. And then I'm trying to figure out what is in that piece, what is it about? What what does it sound like? Feel like everything I can. Biggest part of all of this will be the musical ideas section, which we'll get to in just a minute. But this kind of research and inspiration is second biggest. Let's talk about lyrics. Lyrics are a relatively easy one for me because I don't work with lyrics hardly ever. There's a few different ways you can approach lyrics. First of all, if you're going to be working with words or something, you need permission to use those words. So, if you're writing chamber music and you want to set a poem or something like that. Make sure you either have permission from the author or publisher, or it's a public domain poem. If you don't know, this is a cool website. This is public domain poetry.com. Lists hundreds and hundreds of things, thousands. Here's a poem called Waiting, and this is public domain. You could use this in your music if you wanted to. So things to think about with lyrics. There are a number of famous stories about people who wrote a piece of music, using lyrics that they did not have permission to use and just kind of assumed that they would get permission. And they didn't get it. And so the piece was junk. I mean, you got to throw it away. You can't be used. You could try to fit different lyrics onto it. And there's some famous cases of one that's been done, but don't let yourself get into that kind of trouble. Give permission to use the lyrics that you want. Now, I bring this up also to say that maybe there are no lyrics in your music. Maybe it's acoustic music, but you're going to use lyrics as inspiration. Peruse that website. If lyrics are something that really get to you and inspire you, read those poems and see if you can find something that inspires you, you don't need to use it. You don't have to use it in your music. You can just let it generate ideas to get things moving. Okay. Next, let's talk about guide tracks. 12. Guide Tracks: Okay, let's talk about guide tracks and just using other music for inspiration. You know, I've heard of directors for movies, putting together playlists and actors, putting together play lists to get them in the mood for the kind of music or for the kind of scene that they're about to do. I think it's brilliant. I think it's great. We don't typically do that with music because we're worried about copying stuff. But you can. You totally can. In the electronic realm, we do this with something called Guide tracks. Guide tracks are another piece of music not by us, usually that we put into the session, just to kind of help us get a vibe, it can help us do a few things, like think about production elements, making sure volume is where it needs to be. But it could also be there just to help craft the sound. So I do this all the time. I really like it. I really help I really think it helps me think through the music I'm about to make. If you don't want to do this, if you're worried that it'll inspire you to just write music like what you're hearing, then don't do this. But let me show you a project. So here I have, this is a big podcast that I scored like about a year ago. It's like an hour long. It's big. But if you look right here, up here, this is a guide track, right? I just have it muted and set aside. But while I was working on this music, I was You know, occasionally, listening to this, opening it up, listening to it, soloing it, just to help me get an idea. Now, in this case, this guide track was one that the director of this podcast gave to me and said, This is the kind of sound we want. So get inspired by that. So use guide tracks in your session, if you have a session, if you don't have a session, just make a playlist. Think about music that you want to be inspired by. Don't steal that music, don't copy that music. But be inspired by it. It's totally okay. The copyright police aren't going to come after you for that. Okay. Let's move on. Let's talk about just general inspirational media across the board. 13. Inspirational Media: Okay, I just want to say in this video, inspirational media. I think for my music, most of it is inspired by some other piece of media. That is the kind of impetus behind what I'm doing. And by other media, for me, usually I mean books. I like to take a book and think about how would I translate this into music? I'm always thinking about translating, even though translating isn't the best term because it's very different what I'm doing. But that's the way I think about it. Like, and I'm not going to try to translate a whole book. What I'm going to do is think, Okay, I read this really cool book just recently, and there was this character named like Arturo, and Arturo. How can I represent Arturo musically? I'm thinking about that all the time. How can I represent this person musically or this other thing musically or this character from this movie? So how do I do that? Well, the first thing I'm going to do is start sketching, which we'll talk about in the next video. Just sketching some ideas, trying to figure out a form, a timeline, all of these things that will relate to this character, the story I'm trying to tell. Now, I'll come back to this concept a few times over the next ten or so videos. But the craziest part about this is that as I'm putting this together, this is going to be a piece that draws a musical picture of Arturo from that book. While I'm doing that, I'm not necessarily creating a program. That's a little different. But even if I was creating a program with this Arturo thing, I may or may not tell the audience about it. I might write a piece of music. With this idea. Like this is about Arturo. This is trying to put uro together. And then I might take that and say, cool. Like, that idea, working with that character and trying to musically depict that character helped me create a cool piece of music. Does the audience need to know that this is a characterization of this ro person from that book? No. So I might call the piece something like sonata for piano when it's about, a person from a book who has no arms and legs and lives his life in a fish tank. The book is called Geek love. I think I've talked about it before. It's one of my favorite books. So, I do not always let the audience know that that's what I did. Sometimes it's just a technique I used to write, and I immediately forget about it once I finish the piece. Sometimes it's a technique I used to write, and I tell the audience about it. And sometimes it's a technique I used to write, and I don't tell anyone about it, but I don't forget about it. And every time I hear a performance of that piece or the recording of that piece or I hear it in a show or something, I just kind of smile and laugh to myself because I have a secret that nobody knows. 99% of my music falls into that category of stuff. It's inspired by some other media that I keep secret. But it's usually me trying to paint a picture musically of a character or a story or even a place sometimes. Okay, let's talk about sketching and what goes into starting to sketch a piece. 14. Sketching: Okay, have you ever been in a museum and looked at a portrait exhibit? I have. I went to an exhibit of Vang Portraits, I think, like many years ago in Detroit. Reason I'm bringing this up, is that a lot of time, what painters will do and people who draw is they'll do studies and sketches of a painting while they before they get started on the big painting. Let's say you're going to make a painting, and there's going to be like ten people in it. It's going to be like a big family thing or something like that. Before a painter starts painting that, they might do a sketch, a study of each person's face in that big painting. So they might do a separate painting of just the person's face. And then and then after they finish that, they might say, Okay, cool, I understand that person, and they might do another sketch of just a different person's face. And then eventually once they understand all the elements, they'll be like, cool, now I'm ready to do the big thing. That's the way I look at sketch. So we're still, deep in the precomposition phase, and we are just thinking about the elements of the piece. Now at this point, I'm not really thinking about the musical elements of the piece yet. That is going to come soon. And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the musical elements of the piece and how we plan for that in the next section or the section after that. I'm talking about here. The thing that at this point, I'm going to start sketching and really thinking about and actually working out on paper is any big significant moments in the piece. And I'm really only thinking about them in terms of form and time. Okay? So I might say, this piece is going to be 5 minutes long. I figured that out by this point, and there's going to be this crazy thing that happens at 4 minutes in. Or it's going to use some kind of motive? And then I'm going to use that a whole bunch and then turn it upside down and use it again and connect it to this other theme? I'm just going to start kind of juggling themes like that in my head and just kind of thinking through roughly what it looks like. I'll think about Tempo. Is it fast or slow? Any tempo changes? Is it going to change? Is it going to have any kind of big shift? Is it going to do anything else out of the ordinary that I need to plan for? So all of these things, I'm going to start writing down and playing with. And I'm going to write them down in one of these. These are my sketch books, okay? This is my newer one. This is my older one. I love these old books. These are books that have, this one is not very little, but it's just like super blank paper. No lines or anything on it. And it just lets be right in any direction. Just be totally free to scribble. Sometimes I write music notes. But most of the time, when I'm working in that sketchbook, either of those sketchbooks. What I'm doing is drawing a timeline and doing what I call squiggle sketches or scribble sketches, depending on my mood, it's either squiggle sketches or scribble sketches. Good luck with that to the AI trying to figure out the subtitles for this. So let's look at this technique of scribble sketches now. 15. Graphic Sketches & Scribbles: Okay, so here's how I do these scribble sketches. I have one marked here. Basically, what I'm going to do? So here's one for a piece for Solo base. So this scribble sketch. You can see it's just a whole bunch of scribbles and wiggles and whatever. That turned into this big piece for solo base. Looks like that. And you can sort of follow along with that score in this scribble. Okay, so I'm going to take a little picture of the scribble and put it on the screen so I can kind of show you what I'm doing. Okay, so here's what we got. This one is a little more specific. They're not always as clean as this. But you can see what I'm doing here. I've basically set this up and said, Okay, this piece is going to be about 6 minutes long. It's probably what I had in my mind. Then in this sketch, we got down to 5 minutes and 40 seconds. We started with you can see, there's some tremolo thing here, and then there's b. And then b. There's a lot of weird sounds like that that go into this. Then just something of up and then moving around a little up and down. Here's 1 minute in. Then this idea, this tremolo idea, you can see how that turns into this, gets a lot more busy, a lot more frantic. At 1:35 here, back to the intro stuff. And then really wild, the range of pitches is going all over the place here. And then whatever that is, I don't know what that is. It was something that struck me in the moment. Frantic, about 2:10, some kind of gesture like that, that's going to get used again. That gesture is going to get used all over the place later. Every time you see a circle like this, it means that gesture. So all of these circles are that gesture. This says expand on intro riffs, range. So this just sushi sushi thing goes all the way up and down and just kind of gets crazy, and then we're back to some kind of intro riff with outbursts, more of the circle thing, more of the intro kind of thing, and then eventually to the end. Okay. So when I'm drawing this, I'm thinking about the texture. I'm thinking about the shape, and I'm thinking about the form. Texture is probably the biggest deal here. So if we look at the actual piece of music, When I sit down to translate this sketch into actual music, actual notated music. It changes. Sometimes, once I start writing in notes, I'll say, Well, that's actually kind of cool. What I came up with there, and I kind of want to let it run a little bit longer. I'll do that. It's okay. The sketch is, like, just a sketch. It's not the actual piece of music. So things change. But you can see, like, let's just look at this intro thing here, where it's it's, you know, kind of this tremolo thing, and then this do type these little outbursts. So you can see how that lines up, or are we tremolo thing, tremolo thing. There's kind of a big outburst, do. And then, you know, more kind of outburst kind of things before it goes up to big high thing and around. And, you know, it's a couple more pages long. So I love writing these little sketches because they just help me understand time. They help me get a full picture of the piece before I dive in. I have every single one of my students do this. I think it's really important and really helpful. I can say for sure, the pieces I've written that were less successful are the ones where I haven't done this. When I just dive in because I'm in a hurry. If I'm taking my time, I'm really thinking through things, I'm going to do a sketch like this. And there's bunches of them, and they're kind of fun to look at. Wow. There's some pieces in here I haven't thought about in a long time. A panana, a panana, a piano sonata. I think I have that I already showed you, I think, this piano sonata. The sketch for that, the first movement sketch looks like this. And there's a bunch of writing above it that I don't want you to see because that's the kind of material that I was talking about in the last video. That's the kind of thing that inspired that piece that I really don't want anyone else to know. That's just for me. So it exists only in my sketchbook. So do these graphic sketches. They're super cool. We'll look at one more of those later. I want to look at a piece called Dark Days, and we'll see how that turned from concept to sketch to music in the next section. So let's head that direction now. Next, we want to talk about program ideas. 16. What is "Program Music"?: Okay, let's talk about program stuff. This is probably one of the biggest elements of what I end up doing in the precomposition phase, which is really figuring out, what is the narrative that's going to guide this piece? There's always something. Okay? Even if it's abstract, And even if I don't tell anyone what it is, there's always something. And I'm not unique in this way. People have been using programs for hundreds of years. You know, Bach would famously write his name in pieces by doing B AC B flat, which is an H in German. It's a long story. Um, Programs became popular in music I think around 1800s. The idea was that you could give the audience something some text that would help that they would read first, and that would help them to kind of digest the piece. So you could give them some text in the program of the concert and they would read it, and they would say, Okay, this is a piece about somebody's new dishwasher, whatever. I don't know. And then, so as the audience listen to the music, they would be able to kind of frame it by this text that they just read and say, Okay, so we are musically depicting the dishwasher here, whatever. I would never write this about dishwasher. That's what program music is. The opposite of program music would be absolute music. That's music where there is no program. It's just one note sounds good, the next note sounds good. That is what's driving the piece. I have written absolute music, but it's not my favorite thing to do. I just find it boring, actually. I really like the programs because I fancy myself as someone who can tell stories and write about spaceships and all kinds of crazy sii things even though I write instrumental music. So I like to think that, you know, about these other things and develop who of the world for our music to live on. Again, when you have a program, the audience doesn't need to know it, but they can. Probably the most famous program in history is for a piece called Symphony Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. If you've taken some of my composition classes, you're probably familiar with this piece. The idea is Berlios. I don't remember the full program because I think it's five movements, and each movement has its own little program. But basically, he has this opium fueled dream about this woman he's obsessed with. And it gets weird. It gets dark, real dark. And there was this real woman that he was obsessed with. It was like a real thing. So he writes this piece, where basically, she gets, like, murdered in the piece and in this sacrificial pagan thing. And then we all read about it, and there's a piece of music. An intense piece of music. Look it up, Symphony Fantastic by Hector Berlioz, it's a great piece of music, crazy weird program. But that's what a program is. It's what the piece is about. It's what it's depicting. But for my purposes, what I really care about is that it's something that's helping me guide the story, right? Because And when I say that, it sounds very like Artsy Farzi like I'm telling a story with primarily instrumental music, whether it's dance music or acoustic music or anything in between. I don't think I'm really telling a story. I don't think the audience is going to hear that and be able to figure out the story. No. That's not how it works. If it's a good story and I convert it to music, it ought to be good music, right? So it's not about telling the story to the audience. The audience will figure out their own story. It's about using the story to craft a piece of music. That's really what it's about to me. Okay, let's talk about inspiration for programmatic music and where you might find it. 17. Program Sources: Okay, what are good programs that you could use? They're not terribly unlike the sources of inspiration that we talked about in the previous section. Any story could work, any person could work. Do a character sketch, say, like, this person I know is weird, and so I'm going to try to draw a picture of them. That's a program in some ways. Typically, programs have more of a narrative story to them. At least the ones that I work with do. So let's see. What's one that I could do? This piece that we just looked at, PHX t2g 11, this has a very specific program that I documented in the sketch. So when I made the squiggle sketch, I was kind of drawing out the program. The program for this particular piece is weird and kind of goofy. But the thing was, I was stuck in the Phoenix Airport for about three days. I could not get a flight out. I missed my flight, and I couldn't get another flight, and I was just there for three days, walking in circles, sleeping on those bench like chair things and trying to find a way to get home. And I had this commission for this solo based piece, and nothing else to do. So I decided to work on it. And so it really kind of follows the story of me living in the Phoenix Airport for three days. PHX t2g 11 is the title is PHX is Phoenix Airport Code. T two is terminal two, and G 11 is Gate 11, which I've recently been told doesn't exist anymore. There's no gate 11 at terminal two anymore, I guess. I don't know. Doesn't matter. But that was like the story. So I kind of outlined like the things I did to keep myself sane in those three days and then kind of plotted them on a timeline and that became the program. I'll show you a more explicit version of plotting a story on a timeline in a minute when we talk about this piece dark days, but so anything that has a narrative can be a program idea, a movie, a book, a friend, something crazy that happened to you. There's this guy I know that I went to grad school with. I won't say his name. And he wrote really, really weird music, like, weird music. He's a great guy. But he was into some really weird stuff. And one time, he went to a local small town city council meeting, like, out in the suburbs of Minnesota. And he sat at this boring, boring city council meeting, and he kind of notated the timeline of things happening, which was not very much, right? And the things that did happen were not very interesting because it was just a small town city council meeting. But he made a piece of music with that as the program. Just used that as a guide to write this intentionally, extremely boring piece of music. It's weird. I didn't really care for it, but I admire his dedication to his weirdness. But I think anything can be a program. You can find it anywhere you look. 18. Ideas: Okay. One more thing on this topic before we dive into look at a piece. That's that. I've been asked by students a few times how, if I worry about running out of ideas for pieces of music. And every time I get asked that, it really startles me. It's just very bizarre to me that someone would think about that. But apparently, this is something that younger folks think about. But whenever I'm asked, If I ever worry about running out of ideas. The answer is no. No, never. I'm never going to run out of ideas. I don't think anyone will. The reason is because I know how to work with a program. I know how to write programmatic music. As long as there are ideas in the world, I can find ways to make a musical version of them. As long as I'm living life, I'm getting up in the morning and experiencing the world. I can find ways to write music about that. If you ever feel like you're at the danger of running out of an idea, then go fall in love, go fall out of love. Climb a tree, do something illegal. Go on long drive. All of these things will generate new ideas in a heartbeat if you know how to work with a program. So don't worry about it. You're never going to run out of ideas. Okay. Let's look at this piece called Dark Days. 19. "Dark Days": Okay, so in this video, I'm just going to tell you the program about dark days and then show you kind of how it worked. I don't actually have a good recording of this. I thought I did, but I can't find one because this is a bit of an older piece, but it fits well with this idea. Um So here's the program. The program is, I lived in Baltimore for two years for grad school. And let's just say I did not particularly enjoy living in the city of Baltimore. It wasn't my favorite city that I've ever lived in. And things happening in my life at the time were a little tricky. There was some bumps in life in the two years that I lived in Baltimore. So after two years, finished grad school, I at least that part of grad school, and I moved to where I live now, which is Minneapolis. And I sat down and I had to write a piano trio for somebody. Piano trio is piano Cello and violin, or at least this piano trio was. And so I said, I'm going to write a piece about my time in Baltimore. And the way I'm going to do it is I'm going to take the 24 months that I lived there, and I'm going to put on a timeline of 24 months when all of these significant things happened, right? And then I'm going to speed that up to be 14 minutes. But keep everything proportionally where it belongs. And I just thought, you know, people don't need to know that this is a song or this is a piece of music about Baltimore. This is just my narrative tool for this particular piece. I called it Dark Days. And now I'm actually seeing in my sketch here, there's a different title that I totally forgot about until this very moment. And the full title was Dark Days, Colin, a tragically programmatic piece. Was the title I gave it back then. That's kind of funny. I didn't keep the tragically programmatic part. Okay, so here is me figuring out the timeline of all the stuff. I'm just going to flash this in front of you and not give you the clarity enough to read it because it's very personal, and I don't want you to read it. That was just figuring out the main thing. The events. Then smushed into my 14 minute timeline, it looks like this. Okay. So you can see there's a bunch of text here that hopefully you can't read, and these are the individual things that happened along the way. And there's some musical ideas written in here, too and just various kind of ways, notes about representing stuff. So like notes in the corner about how to do this musical stuff, interruptions, solo stuff, a Celerondo, just different little things that fit in with what's going on. So that eventually ended up as this piece, dark days. And, you know, I was somewhat happy with this piece. I didn't love this piece after I wrote it. It was it was therapeutic. It was therapy, writing this piece. And it So it wasn't super fun to listen to, because I kind of knew everything in it, and I didn't really want to hear like, musical representations of being mugged. I didn't really want to hear that again. So it's a piece that happened. It got a couple of performances, and then I kind of walked away from it, and never really pushed it because it wasn't the most fun thing to listen to. But actually, flipping through it now, after having not thought about it for probably eight or nine years, there's some good music in here, actually. U So, maybe I'll have to take a look at this. Oh. Yeah, I'm kind of remembering parts of this. Neat. So maybe I'll take another look at it someday. But that is one way in which you can work with programmatic music. Okay. So we've done a lot of stuff talked about precomposition. And all of this stuff that we've talked about so far is super totally real. This is my thought process as I start to write a piece of music, no matter what style of music I'm writing. Let's move on now and talk about actual musical stuff. So we're at the point now where I've got all the program, the form, a lot of stuff figured out, and now it's time to sit down and figure out some of my musical ideas before we start actually writing. So let's do that. 20. Musical Ideas: Overview: Okay, let's get into the actual notes and what we're thinking about. So first thing, first, I know this is almost getting ridiculous because I already showed you two notebooks that I use. But now we're moving on to a third notebook. This actually has lined paper in it, staff paper in it. So here, I just have it open to an empty page. So I like this little notebook because it has staff paper on one side and just a line paper on another so that I can jot down some stuff and then say, you know, write some notes about it on the line side. So, for the purposes of this class, I'm not going to use this. I'm going to use this notation that we're in Mu score here, and just so that we can all see. So I will hypothetically think through a new piece. So, here's the way that one of my old teachers taught me to kind of get started when we start thinking about the notes. I know this sounds silly, but this is something that this teacher told to me 20 years ago, and it stuck with me, and I still think about this when I start any new piece comes into my head, and I do it. So here's what you do. Close your eyes and think about the most perfect piece of music. And just listen to it. Just imagine you're sitting in this room listening to the best music you've ever heard before. Maybe you're sitting in a recording studio. Maybe you're sitting in maybe you're dancing in a club. Maybe you're sitting in a concert hall, maybe you're sitting in an orchestra hall, wherever you're sitting, listen. Listen close to the music that's happening. Okay? Now, our task for this next section is to write down as much as we can figure out that's happening on stage. We need to figure out what form are we hearing? What are some of the harmonic principles that we're hearing? Are there themes, motives that we're hearing? What is the harmonic outline that we're hearing? Are there any just really big moments that we could capture? All of these things are just part of this vision. What are we hearing? What is this piece? So, our goal, simply, is to write it down. Not too hard, right? It's obviously a lot harder than it looks or sounds, but we can do it. Okay. So let's start with form. 21. Form: All right, form. So we've already dealt with the big picture of form, right? We dealt with that in our sketch or our scribble sketch or In this step, what we want to think about is, what are the musical elements that separate each section of the form apart? Like, for example, what is the difference between the A section and the B section? As many words as we can put on that are going to be helpful. So we could say the B s changes meter. It has some kind of meter change that we feel. Maybe the B section changes key. Maybe the B section slows down, speeds up. What about the C section? Does it go back to the A section? Make sure it go to your sketch and see what you did in the sketch and see if that still works. If it doesn't do it, you can update your sketch or leave it, it doesn't really matter a whole lot at this point. But we're looking for the musical things that separate each section apart. Why does the C section sound like its own section and not part of the B section? What changed? See if you can put words on those. Now, sometimes, when I'm working on a piece, I can't really find any words. I don't have a clear enough idea yet of what those things are going to be to really nail it down. And that's okay. But if you can do it, the more kind of the more detail you can put on this will help you to put notes on it and ultimately write it if you know where you're going. So think about form from that perspective. 22. Harmonic Rules: Okay. So next, let's talk about harmonic principles. So this is like the key. What key are we going to be in. But it's a little bit more nuanced than that. So deciding what key you're going to be in is totally a good thing to do. Decide that. U But there's a reason that I like to think of this as harmonic principles and not what key are we in, because there's more to it than that. We could say, if you're doing something that is completely very diatonic, very tonal, then yeah, deciding on your keys or your key centers is a good thing to do here. But if you're not writing total mic, if you're not writing acoustic music even, you might be doing something more centered than tonal. That's what I like to focus on here. So centered would be like, I'm going to hover around F sharp. If you've taken any of my other composition classes you know about this whole F sharp thing I have, it's weird, but it works. Or you might say that, I have this one chord that I'm really in love with at the moment. It's this It's this sound. We can put a name on that. That's all fine. But really what I care about is, what all can I do with this sound? I might start exploring things I can do with this sound, I might say, Okay, I really like that sound. Let's see. Let's look at different inversions of it. Let's look at maybe can I do Something like this. I'm just going to play around with this one sound. Can I do any, scale your little things with it? Like, what would the missing notes be? I have C sharp. So probably Probably G sharp. I'm thinking, maybe if I treat F as tonic, I can kind of get all of those notes in there. I could also treat E as tonic and then I'm getting maybe we will treat E as tonic in a minor key, and then we would get something like that, although we get a C natural. That puts us in a lidiand. But now all of these things are possible. All I'm doing is just playing around and seeing, like, Okay, do I like this? Okay. Both of those are kind of interesting. Back to back, they're kind of cool. Back to these. So I'm just going to write as much as I can, just using this idea and seeing how it comes about. Now, if I am using cords, a diatomic core progression, I'm going to do kind of the same thing. I'm going to write down that core progression, and then I'm just going to see what I can do with it. Start playing around with it. This is like, take that melody. Pretend it's clay, and I'm just kind of molding it in different ways and seeing what it feels like doing. Like, what's inside of this idea? I'm just going to play with it as much as I can. Now, I have a good example of this. I'm going to write two chords on the screen here. I'll do them as half notes. I'll try to do them over here. Okay. These two rather dense chords. Let's hear them really quick. Okay. Neat. They're very similar chord. You can see they have a lot of similar notes and intervals in them like these, here it's G, here it's an F sharp, here it's G sharp, here it's an A. So they're very similar. They only have a few things different, and they're also very thick. The reason I'm pointing these two chords out is that this piece that I wrote that I talked about earlier, this big piano sonata. Three moments, 15 minutes. When I wrote this, what I did is I did this harmonic sketch, and I wrote down these two chords. These two chords were something I came up with at a practice room when I was in grad school. I just sat there, and I just really loved this sound. I got really obsessed with it. So I played with this sound for like an hour. I just played these chords over and over and over and over and over. And I played around with what else I could do with them, what was inside them, inversions, picking them apart into smaller chords, just seeing what I could do. Then I wrote this entire 14 minute very dense piano piece like this piece looks like that. It parts, and it uses just these two chords, the entire piece. Now, of course, it uses a lot more than just these two chords. But everything in it is derived from just these two chords, because I made this rule, In the precomposition phase, I said, this piece is going to be about these two chords. This is what it's going to be, this is what it's going to do. Everything is about these two chords. And I wrote the whole piece around these two chords. But if you're going to do that, you've got to really spend some time exploring these chords and doing what you need to do to get them to really to understand really what they sound like, what's inside them from all angles, molding the clay, seeing what the clay can do. I've never actually molded clay before. I don't really know if that analogy works, but I think it does. Okay. Let's move on to themes and motives. 23. Themes and Motives: All right. Themes and motives, in other words, melodies. I don't like to really think in terms of melody. I think in terms of themes and motives, but for our purposes right now, it's all the same. Now, I would say that you don't need to figure out what your melody ideas are before you start writing the music. I usually don't because I like the melodies just to creep out of the texture that I've created. Again, if you see my composition classes, you know about this. But some people do like to work on melodies. In the precomposition phase. And so let me show you a technique that I've used on the occasions that I have worked on melodies beforehand. I like to do this cannon idea. Here's what it is. So basically, I'm going to write a nice melody. Let's say I don't know. Let's say we're in e minor because that's what we were just in. Let's do that. And then maybe that. Leap, so let's step in the opposite direction. There's a D. Maybe I'll just fast forward through making this melody, so you don't have to tediously watch me pick notes. Let's try that. So here's what we got. Okay. Cool. So now, here's what I'm gonna do. Here's the cannon method. Wow, look at my goofy hair. Do you remember what a canon is? A cannon is like when we all s row, row your boat, but we do it staggered. We just I say, row your boat, then you start at the beginning, while I keep on going, that thing. It's also called a round, whatever. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to turn this into that. Now the reason I'm doing this is I want to here's another weird analogy, but Let's try. I want to treat this melody like an orange and I want to squeeze all the juice out of it. That was a weird analogy. Let me say that in another way. What I'm trying to do is I want to just listen to this in as many different ways as I can and start to understand what's inside it. I want to understand all the intervals, I want to understand what I can do with it. In order to do that, I'm just going to randomly play around with it for a little while and just see what I can get out of it. One thing I want to do actually is just for the purposes of this, I am going to add some instruments. L et's add more pianos. Actually, a sustaining instrument would probably be better. Let's add a bunch of violins. Whoops. There we go. Now we have a bunch of violins. This will give me something to play with just to really feel this out. Let's put this in the violins, and then let's put it offset by a little. And maybe this one will do by like a half note. Well, I think I can do it this way, and then that way. Okay. So this one is a half of a bar off and all the rest of the are bar off. So what this is going to show me is just all of what's in this melody, like the harmonic content, k? Might sound terrible, might sound brilliant. Again, I'm not trying to use anything I make here. Although it has happened that I've accidentally made something really nice sounding by doing this, and I kept it. What I'm really doing here is not writing any serious music. I'm just trying to feel what's in this melody. So let's hear it. Sometimes this is really funny. Oops. We're only hearing one. And I also want my tempo to be a little slower here. So let's go to Tempo Oops. And let's just slow it down. Oh. Okay. This is great. So what this told me so far was that this needs to be enough sharp. And now I got to find that everywhere. Okay. Okay. That helps. Let's try it again now that we fix that. O Okay. Pretty cool. Some interesting ideas in there. But I'm starting to get a feel for, like, the world that we're living in with this melody idea. One thing I just kind of want to try is taking one of these. Let's maybe do This one. I want to want to turn it into a baseline and see what happens. Let's take that down in octave. It's not going to play it. Let's switch this one to being allo. Now it's on an F natural. That's definitely not what I want. First note is E. That's what it should be. So we've gone enharmonic on all of this when it did some weird transposing, but it's basically right. So we have G, G flat, G F sharp. So it's basically right. Let's try that and see what that lower octaive does for us. I like that. Entrance. Okay, so now I'm getting, like, kind of a dark, sad vibe, and that's good. That's kind of what I like. So I could keep playing with this. Maybe I adjust some notes. Maybe I adjust the way I've kind of pasted it in there. And maybe I just see what cropped up. Like, what harmony is this? That I suddenly really like, right? So, play around with it. Start, you know, just crafting it, seeing what's inside it, see it squeeze it like orange, and get some orange juice out of it, and go from there. A 24. Harmonic Outline: Okay, I want to clarify one thing really quick about the piano sonata that I just showed you with the two chord thing. You don't have to do that. The idea behind that was, I wanted to see how far I could go with just two chords. Like how long could I stretch that out and play with it before it got boring. And you're welcome to try that, of course. But that's not all of what this is about, right? The point is, As you're working, as you're in this precomposition phase, come up with some kind of harmonic scheme that you can use to help make decisions faster when you're writing. In other words, well, let me give you a different project. I put out this electronic album a couple of years ago, and When you listen to that album, you're probably going to say, if you tried to analyze the harmony, you're probably going to say, this is a lot of diatonic harmony. This is a lot of, kind of typical core progressions with some kind of weird things here and there. That's probably how you're going to hear it. But the actual harmonic scheme of that album, was diatonic or progressions with ninths. That's what I did. That means that I was using mostly diatonic chords and I put ninths in the chords whenever I could. Ninth invert to seconds. I used a lot of seconds in chords, a lot of ninths in chords, some minor ninths and chords, some major ninths and chords, just as many ninths as I could. I made that decision because I wanted that album to be fairly tonal and traditional in the way that it sounds, but not too traditional. I wanted some oddities in there here and there. I played around with it for a while before I started writing any of the music and I decided that if I took a normal harmonic progression and started adding seconds and ninths all over the place, it really got where I wanted it to. It had these soft dissonances all over the place. That's what I mean by a harmonic scheme, something I'm going to use to craft the whole. Piece. That being said, if you want to play around with my piano snata, I'm going to give it to you now. So in the next little bit, I'll include the score and recording of the three movements. So you can listen to it and play around with it if you want. Okay. One more thing to talk about in this section, and then we'll move on to the wrap up. 25. The Big Moment: Okay, kind of last thing. One thing that I don't always do, but I usually do is figure out the specifics of the big moment. If there's a big moment in the piece, which there usually is for my pieces, that's going to be, kind of near the end, it's going to be the climax of the whole piece. I'm going to figure some of that out. And here's why. If this is my piece, this is the beginning, frame, this is the beginning, this is the end. For the majority of the piece, I'm writing towards that big moment, which is going to be right about here. It's going to be pretty close to the end. That's the golden Mean thing. This is really hard to do. I'm writing for this point right here. So if I already know what that point is, as I'm writing, I have a destination, right? Like, I'm heading that way. If I don't have that figured out yet, then as I'm writing, I'm just going somewhere. You know, I'm just driving around the neighborhood. I'm not going to the grocery store. Like, I want to know where I'm going so that when I hit it, I've prepared for it, and we hit it just perfectly, right? So I'm going to go back to my sketch, my squiggle sketch, and I'm going to look at what that big moment looks like in that And then I'm going to start putting some notes on it, and I might actually even fully compose that part of the music. You know, I might just randomly say it's going to be. It's going to piano, you know, this four bar thing and write it and just throw it in a file over here so that when I get there, I can go copy it and paste it and put it in. I can also listen to it, prepare for it. While I'm writing everything that comes before it. So I'm moving close to it. Think about those big moments and come up with a plan for those big moments, even if it's just completely right that big moment. There might be more than one big moment. I like in my pieces, at least in movements, I like there to be one big central moment, but there doesn't have to be. You could have multiple big moments. Okay. Let's move on and start wrapping things up. 26. Ok, Now Let's Start Writing The Music.: T. Okay, so after all of that, I start writing some music. The hope is that if I've really taken my precomposition step seriously, then when I actually sit down to write music, it's fun. It's not tedious. It's almost like I used to think of it like a paint by number. Do you remember like a paint by number when you were a kid, you got an outline of a drawing, and I had a bunch of numbers in each box and said, Paint everything that's the number 11, paint it yellow. Everything that's the number 12, paint it red. And then you do all of that, and then you're done, and you say, cool, I wrote the piece. Or I painted this picture. It's a little bit like that. I have a lot of the hard decisions already made, and I can just start going. But it's still a lot of work. It's still a lot of work to write music, but with good precomposition, you can offload a lot of the hard work to a different part of the process. Now, you might say to yourself, Okay, you've gone over like a whole bunch of different things that you do in this precomposition process. Do you really sit down and do all of these things and think about all of these things? The answer is yes, but keep in mind something I think I said at the very beginning, and that's that I overlap pieces. So right now. Let me tell you literally what I'm doing today. I am working on some string music today, and I'm going to finish it in the next couple days. It's almost done. But what I've been what I'm not writing, when I'm doing other things. What I'm working on, aside from basically every moment that I'm not at my computer right now, I am thinking about I am in the precomposition process for my next piece, which is going to be this big solo piano thing. I'm going to start it next week. And I have most of the details all figured out at this point. Later today, I'm going to do a little bit of sketching on it and play around with it. But while I'm finishing the string music, I'm working on my next piece. I'm in the precomposition state of the next piece. I'm trying to get all of these things down. Now, once I actually sit down to write, I might do one more day of just precomposition as day one of working on the piano piece. In that day, I'm going to start putting notes on things and really doing this stuff that we've talked about in this section. Because I haven't done very much of that yet for this piece. Although I have done some. I have actually one whole movement of this piano piece that I've already wrote. It needs some revision, but I wrote it because I was starting to play around with these ideas a couple of weeks ago. I just got really excited about this idea that I had and I started playing around with it and I played around with it so much and I ended up with something that I really liked. I'm definitely going to use that in the piece later. So I am doing all of these things, but I'm doing them kind of in the background, and at the same time as I'm working on the previous piece. Once I get about halfway through this big piano piece, I'll start churning on the next thing, and I already know what that next thing is going to be. I just haven't really started the precomposition process for that yet. There you go. That's how it works. For me anyway. 27. Thanks for Watching!: Last but not least this video I include this video at the end of all of my classes. And I just want to say thanks for being here. Thanks for watching this class. Thanks for participating in it. Hopefully you got something great out of it, and you had a good time. Check out some of my other classes. They're everywhere. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being awesome. Thanks for purchasing this class, and I'll see you soon in the next class. There's one more bit with some text after this. Please read it. Otherwise, I will see you in the next class. Thanks for being awesome. Bye. 28. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my e mail list here. If you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make ads or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. Please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.