revision of my first composition

[mickomoo]

I posted this a few weeks ago, but after no feed back and some revisions I figured I should post it again. I was experimenting with orchestral vsts, but I have no idea what I was thinking when I first wrote this...

[Calum]

I posted this a few weeks ago, but after no feed back and some revisions I figured I should post it again. I was experimenting with orchestral vsts, but I have no idea what I was thinking when I first wrote this...

This is a lot better but it still has that strange mickimoo sound! This strange ambiguity. Things seem to be far more in time and the quality of the samples is much better.

I just think the writing is at times very strange, like when you had the organ playing a single line which was exactly the same as a the choir line. It was very thin textured. Perhaps I feel like you don't thicken out your pieces. A section can be bereft of a bass, some kind of mid-chord and a high melody. Not that you have to follow these strict rules but a grounding in conventional writing would help I feel.

Yeah, everything is quite strange but things are vastly improved!

It feels like there are some parts which are missing at times or too quiet.

[mickomoo]

This is a lot better but it still has that strange mickimoo sound! This strange ambiguity. Things seem to be far more in time and the quality of the samples is much better.

I just think the writing is at times very strange, like when you had the organ playing a single line which was exactly the same as a the choir line. It was very thin textured. Perhaps I feel like you don't thicken out your pieces. A section can be bereft of a bass, some kind of mid-chord and a high melody. Not that you have to follow these strict rules but a grounding in conventional writing would help I feel.

Yeah, everything is quite strange but things are vastly improved!

It feels like there are some parts which are missing at times or too quiet.

I know the middle needs work, part of the problem is that I was only committed to re-recording it and not rewriting it. I think my compostion has improved in my later songs, I just need to re-record them all. But what parts particularly where peculiar

[Calum]

I know the middle needs work, part of the problem is that I was only committed to re-recording it and not rewriting it. I think my compostion has improved in my later songs, I just need to re-record them all. But what parts particularly where peculiar

I think it was the whole thing really - it was all quite ambiguous - i didn't know where it was going or what anything was really doing. There were no really hummable melodies and you didn't really frame the melodies or tell us: THIS IS THE MELODY AND THESE ARE THE CHORDS THAT BELONG WITH IT NOW I'M DOIGN A VARIATION ON THE MELODY WITH THE SAME CHORDS. HERE'S THE MELODY BUT IN A MINOR KEY. As lame and constructed as that sounds, i think that is what works in music. It becomes second nature to write music which is quite obvious to people - once you can write music which is simplistic on the ground level you can go beyond this to make it more interesting whilst still retaining conventional musical techniques which allow people to enjoy music and satisfy their expectations.

I'm not saying follow all the rules and be a slave to what people what but i feel like you need to clearly decide THIS IS MY MAIN CHORD SEQUENCE, THIS IS MY MAIN MELODY lets work with it in a coherent structure. At least to begin with!

Your orchestration is also quite weird - it doesn't fill out all the frequencies and isn't a full texture as we might expect and desire. Sometimes you'll have a melody which is just doubled in unison by another instrument and that's a really thin texture (you did this with the choir and organ). Be a little more conventional and have either the organ playing chords in a lower register with the choir (or solo voice) singing a melody higher. You just had both doing single lines in the same register which sounded weak and a little strange.

Basically i wish you'd be quite conventional and plan or atleast play by the rules to begin with so that you can create successful interesting pieces. Instead of what seems like quite an improvised mess.

I'm being a little harsh but... this is what i feel would make your compositions "better" to a larger audience.

[erineclipse]

Calum is right, there is a certain weirdness to your pieces, temporally. I can't really place it, the timing seems off somehow, I don't know if the tempo is off, the notes are too random or what. Also, he was right about the improv thing as well, there doesn't seem to be any global structure to your pieces, just random riffs that don't really mesh well together... the distortion guitar got really annoying after a while too...

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Well, let me go check my underwear. I nearly shit myself when that distorted guitar hit.

Seriously though, I do agree your compositions often feel rather dissonant and random. As mine did when I started. In my opinion, what a lot of your compositions lack is a solid harmonic structure and melodic direction. It sounds like you have lots of ideas going at once. Too many ideas. Perhaps try starting with a simple chord progression for the melody to follow and then build off of that. Seems you like to write melodies more though. So you could find it easier to do it in reverse. Make a melody, then put chords or counter melodies to it.

What I'd recommend doing, and you may already be doing this, is learn about the different "non-chord tones" and how to use them. Such as passing tones, appogiatura, suspensions, changing tones etc. Lots of people don't learn about those things and feel they're un-important but understanding them will greatly improve one's ability to write melodies.

[mickomoo]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I greatly appreciate that! I know in terms of composition I have a bit to work on. I think this work especially, because it was my first only centered around riffs, specifically the guitar's. Everything else came at random and admittedly was unnecessary or adds to the awkward nature of the song. In some ways it works, and in many like you all said, it's kinda hard to follow it. When I rewrote it, I mostly focused on timing and mixing, thinking that would improve the song. I honestly don't have much of an idea of how to "improve" the writing, but I think I'll let it stand as a sorta book end of my skill. It was my first composition, I was a bit overambitious (you can tell by the number of tracks), and it shows where I need to improve.

To some extent I think I'm a better composer than when I wrote this, well at the every least I don't start writing solely based off riffs any longer. I'm basically going to take it slow now, and rather than starting on new music, I'm going to rerecord the music I've already made and hope to improve from it. Thanks again everyone.