Actually I don't know, well, I open my DAW and start with a 2 bars drum loop and some samples, then the chaos! I have no clue about music theory, just the basics as you(all)!
here is an example, I start with 2 bars loop and I end up here:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B7HZ7-BHOQB/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Then I continued and I end up here:
https://www.beatstars.com/beat/instaremixwhispers-3750658

 

The 70s... prog bands filled stadiums.

 

Your music choices must be very limited then.
If you are talking pop, then it's always been simple. Otherwise, music has grown massively if you look beyond the charts.

 

@Lager - For a minute, let us assume you are correct. What do you trust?

 

According to 2323etc. Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters and/or Steven Wilson never existed, of course.

 

...or Yes, Gentle Giant or King Crimson.

 

Guys, I think you massively overrate how influential or considered good as musicians were/or still are these guys/groups, out of them I have really listened to only Zappa (but I was born in the 90s, so what do I know...) Btw, Pink Floyd are massively overrated, imo. Young generation doesn't give a fuck about The Beatles etc, just like your generation wasn't too interested in old popular/folk music.

 

One of my favorite songs when I was fifteen was one called "When Laura smiles", an english folk ballad composed in the XVII century. If you are unable to keep an open ears attitude you never will be nothing in music.

 

Last edited: Jan 15, 2020

But who was influential then?

They were popular that's why they were influential. They influenced musicians who influenced musicians we now listen to. May be there were more generations. Not two, but three, four...

We know what music is from music around us. Music we listen influences us. Music we play infuences other people. May be massively, may be not, it depends on our auditory and our popularity. And if we aren't popular but it's musicians who listen to our music (and consider it as "great", as an "ideal" and a "standard") our influence is enormously huge.

 

Last edited: Jan 15, 2020

Or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Rush, Kansas, PFM, Flash, Nektar or Dixie Dregs.

 

I only trust to nothing ...

 

Yes, has grown massively but only the music-theory-unrelated ones.

If the Jazz is factored out, you can't find any contemporary powerful music that uses music theory to greatest extents.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 16, 2020

I learned to play the guitar from a beatles songbook then I used to experiment with the chord shapes I learned from that.I had an old cassette recorder which I used to record chord progressions then I would play the recordings back and I used a cheap mike( which I wedged into the arm of a sofa as I had no mike stand) to record the output of the cassette recorder speaker into a hifi tape deck while playing along to the recording(I thought I had invented multi track recording).

Then I met a guy who had a portastudio which had just come out then he also had a very primitive drum machine and various crappy keyboards and effect pedals which we put everything through it's amazing what we managed do with the limitations we had.Then came midi and we started using an Atari he had a very early version of cubase I eventually moved onto Clab creator then Notator but still followed the basic formula of getting a rhthym track down and then building up chord progressions on top followed by melody.Usually we would mess around playing chord progressions and singing whatever melodies that came into our heads.In band situations it was usually jamming that was the method of coming up with tunes.

I studied theory and would try out the ideas that were inspired by that by trying out various voicings and more elaborate progressions.I learned to read music and started getting more into the orchestration side of things and then I started changing from coming up with chord progressions and adding melodies to doing the reverse coming up with melodies and then harmonizing them.Then Sibelius the notation software came out and I started spending more time experimenting with changing time signatures also I was learning to play Thelonious Monk songs on piano which brought me into further harmonic experimentation.At the same time I was always surrounded by traditional Scottish and Irish music and that was learned purely by ear that lead to an intuitive understanding of how that music was constructed.

Depending on what I'm using instrument wise it'll be a case of chordal stuff if I'm using a keyboard or a guitar or if it's a woodwind or stringed instrument like a fiddle or cello it'll be a melody line first then when it comes to recording it it'll be a case of getting a rhythm track down followed by chord progression then melody after that I'll tinker with harmony and orchestration.
If I work in Sibelius I will almost always come up with melodic ideas first and I add harmony and orchestration as I go usually along the lines of 8 bars of melody followed by harmony and slowly orchestrating as I go along making changes when things don't sound right or good.Using notation to compose feels a lot more like architecture than dabbling on an instrument and letting the ideas suggest themselves but often I take ideas generated on instruments and notate them in Sibelius and build them up in there.It's a weirdly different feeling working in notation for me it feels more in my head in a logic structured way whereas the instrument based approach seems to be more spontaneous I feel like I think a lot more using notation like everything I do is carefully deliberated but the instrument approach is freer and more improvisational.

 

I call these guys experimentalists. Experimentation approach is mostly ear-based. In this approach, theory is for the most part an obtrusive element rather than helpful one.

 

I decided to google it.

This link seems to have something in it for everyone. I have my own opinions but it's not about me.

https://bobreynoldsmusic.com/16-tips-on-composing-music/

 

There is, of course, no way @Lager can trust that quote.

 

I enjoyed this composition maybe you will

 

I like the question (a lot) and have succumbed to writing too many words as a personal answer.

Firstly, although it might look like a generational issue, I don't really see it that way. I think in every generation there are, sadly, people who just get locked into only whatever their peer generation is playing with. But there are also, in every generation, musicians who just want to get their hands on anything and everything that might be interesting and they don't care whether that means a modern DAW or an ancient Stradivarious violin.

So, my mini essay bypasses all considerations of generational divides and just discusses what can be useful - to anyone.
What I'm discussing here is also drifting into armchair psychology of music making, sorry about that - but so be it.

---

Embedded in what I think of as the development process (for a composition) is the ongoing act of deciding "What should happen next?" Asking and answering that question is sometimes a conscious act. sometimes a subconscious act.
Like many skills, e.g., driving a car, we do it much better when it's handled subconsciously.
(If you have to consciously think about which pedal to operate next, you'll probably crash your car)

When you're asking and answering that "What should happen next?" question subconsciously, then (by definition) you don't even notice it happening, but it is still driving your compositional process.

Why mention all of the above?
In order to discuss the differences (e.g., 'speed, access, effectiveness') between composing in your head,
or composing with an instrument, or composing with notation software, or composing in a DAW.

Take a (contrived) simple example, e.g., assume you already have a verse, and now you want to compose a chorus.
It's just an example - it doesn't matter if your music doesn't ever use things like verses and choruses.
The discussion applies far more generally to any situation where you're deciding 'musically what should happen next'

Assume your verse is already a 'melody over a chord sequence'

Option [1] Do it in your head
You can mentally sing the verse melody and then just take a mental leap (trial and error) into the unknown and (eventually) find something else (for your chorus). Of course, it's not really 'the unknown', the mental space you're exploring is a weird inner musical landscape that you have personally built by listening to thousands of hours of music. You won't have the faintest idea how you actually find that next melodic phrase in that musical landscape, but it's not really as random as we think. It's not a random space of notes that you're exploring, it's your musically coherent inner musical world - built from real music.
So this 'in your head' approach has these two big advantages...
a) it's 'super fast and super flexible' - you can just do it over and over again in real time, explore at the speed of thought!
b) it is 'musically guided' - by your lifetime's accumulation of music listening. That what enables creative quality
Those are the huge plus points... now the limitations.
A limitation (for me definitely and I suspect for most other people too) is that what I hear in my head is always a weird composite of melody and harmony.
It's actually impossible to hear a melody in pure isolation without an implied harmony (that's a separate discussion).
But actually explicitly hearing that harmony is a really fuzzy vague process.
'Hearing the chords' for me is vague in the same way that recalling a visual memory of a face is vague.
You can definitely recognise the remembered face, but it's nowhere near as clear as actually seeing that face.

Option [2] Using an instrument (especially a chordal instrument)
Everything that I described above for 'working in your head' applies here too, but we can also discuss whether it as direct, and as fast, and whether we're exploring consciously or subconsciously, and whether we're now working more visually instead of just using mental audio, etc. In short, 'composing with an instrument' is now a glorious can of worms to discuss.
Skilled instrumentalists can convincingly demonstrate that they can be totally integrated with their instrument. They are playing with their eyes closed, they are lost in the subconscious process of hearing and playing with no conscious distractions. At that skill level, they have all the speed and access advantages described above for the 'in your head' approach. They also have the huge advantage of overcoming the 'vague fuzziness' of the 'sounds in your head' approach. On an instrument, it's absolutely audio-clear what's happening.
Improvising, as a compositional device, must surely be the oldest and most fruitful source of creative output.
It is not a coincidence that Bach spent vastly more time improvising on an organ than he spent actually writing stuff down.

Working with an instrument offers another big advantage, i.e., the option of interrupting the subconscious playing and deliberately making (much slower) conscious choices.
A player can simply stop and stare at the keyboard and consciously contemplate the "what should I do next" question.
And with an instrument they have the optional benefit of 'visualising an answer'.
This draws upon all the musical knowledge that they have tied up in their years of meddling with the instrument.
SOME (but not all) of that instrument knowledge can be described in music theory terms.
Compared to subconscious playing, this conscious visualise approach is relatively 'slow motion' but still brilliantly accessible.
You can imagine something and then immediately access whatever you imagined, in super fast time,
no longer than it takes you to just move your hands.
So to summarise...
as with the 'in your head approach'
a) it's 'super fast and super flexible' - you can just do it over and over again in real time, explore at the speed of playing!
b) it is 'musically guided' - by your lifetime's accumulation of music listening. That what enables creative quality
c) The limitation of 'vague fuzziness' in your head is removed.
d) you have visual access to music knowledge,
with a subtle but real distinction between 'instrument-oriented music knowledge' and 'knowledge of music theory via an instrument'

It should be no surprise that the 'do it with an instrument' approach is so eagerly exploited and traditionally well respected.
I think anyone turning their back on this approach is voluntarily missing out what is easily one of the most rewarding aspects of involvement in music - if you don't yet dabble with an instrument, it is never too late to change that choice.

Options [3] and [4] Using notation software or a DAW.
Of course both of these can be used alongside options 1 and 2 above.
If the roll of the software is to capture (record) the choices that you're making working 'in your head' or 'at an instrument'
then it's all good news. It's a very enabling bonus.
But used in this way, this 'capture-record' function is not actually serving a compositional role.
It is just capturing the outputs of your compositional activities that you are conducting in your head or at an instrument.

The more interesting question is can the software actually directly assist the compositional activity?
or is it always just a recording device?

So, back to those compositional choice questions - 'asking and answering' the 'what should happen next' questions.
Can software assist here?
If you like 'composing in your head' and you don't play an instrument then the software really can serve a fabulous role.
It can allow you to remove the 'vague fuzziness' of what you're mentally hearing.
You can check the accuracy of your thoughts by inputting your informed guesses into the software and asking it to play them for you. That is a really huge direct benefit to your compositional process.
But it's worth noting that compared to directly checking your thoughts on an instrument it's a much slower process.
That lack of realtime manipulation is a really huge disadvantage for software.
(please read that more carefully before bothering to tell me about how software is realtime)

Where we drift into contentious territory is when people prefer to offload the responsibility for those compositional questions to the software. i.e., instead of personally 'asking and answering' the musical 'what should happen next' questions, they prefer to just ask the software to generate 'something - anything' for them.

The arguments emerge from opinions about whether that is a musically valid approach.
is it lazy, is it dumb, is it creative?

So, now some entirely biased personal opinions about that.
Part of my opinion says "whatever delivers interesting results is all that matters".
So if someone is just randomly meddling with pre-canned loops and having a chaotic personal party chopping things around, then they are (probably) still doing one very important thing, which is they are making personal choices about what to keep, and what not to keep, and what to end up with, and those choices are reflections of their personal preferences based on accumulated musical listening.
In the crudest sense, that's all composition really amounts to
and so I (perhaps begrudgingly) acknowledge that the process can be called composition (in principle).

What matters far more to me (than whether to call it valid or not) is whether a random process like that can actually ever be as useful, or as powerful, or actually deliver creative results that match the quality of the more traditional approaches, approaches that try to directly access and creatively exploit all that personal inner musical knowledge.

I will try to remain open minded about those questions.
I will explore all the crazy approaches that working with music software can enable.
I will even be happy to explore what working with AI can offer if and when it shows enough promise to be interesting.
But while exploring those current and future options...
I definitely won't be shooting myself in the foot or limiting my options.
And the surest way of shooting myself in the foot would be to ignore the proven power of 'doing it in your head' and 'doing it with an instrument'. Currently at least, in my personal-only opinion, the musical quality of what modern DAW twiddling produces lags a very long way behind what the hundreds of years old traditional approaches continue to offer.
But I say that without any negative cyncism.
I say that while eagerly exploring any and every crazy new approach that I can get my hands on - whatever works!

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2020

That is so gorgeous

----
It also reminded me of this guy (Purdie) chatting about drumming
www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1j1_aeK6WA
not really similar (not so funny) but just got reminded of it.

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2020

Extrapolation R us