Resources for music composition?
I'm curious if anyone has any good resources for learning music composition. My situation is that I've studied music for years, including being a music student for my first 2 years of college. I got out of music for a while, and am getting back into it now. I'm interested in learning more about music composition, but have been unable to come up with good resources on the internet. I know a lot of music theory (though have probably forgotten a lot, too), and have done some basic counterpoint exercises in the past. I can string together some nice chord progressions, and sometimes even a decent melody, but developing a musical idea into a full-blown song or other piece of music is more difficult for me lately. So I'm looking for something along those lines.
If it makes any difference, I tend to like instrumental music with American pop sensibilities. I play piano, cello, and tenor ukulele.
If this would be better under the "music" group, feel free to move it there. I was unsure as the music group seems to be oriented towards listening rather than creating.
Almost made a very similar post the other day haha. I'm looking into learning bass and trying to figure out some basic theory/comp stuff (I've been playing sax for ~15 years or so).
Thanks! I have Logic Pro X and Garage Band. Using the software is not an issue. I've written my own audio software in the past, including writing software synthesizers, audio effects and the like.
I'm strictly looking for information on how to develop a song musically. I did fairly well in my music theory classes, but theory is more descriptive than prescriptive. (I see lots of courses from Berklee College of Music in your list, which is interesting. I spent a summer semester there when I was in high school. It was a blast!) But I'll definitely check out the list of MOOCs to see if there are any composition-related ones.
I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but I think this series of tutorials/tools that Ableton set up is excellent (and really neat to play with): https://learningmusic.ableton.com/
Thanks! Looks very interesting.
In my opinion you just need to go at it, given you already have solid bases, there's not much else to do but practice. Also listen to a lot of music and try to copy it, you can also ask specific questions in specialized subs (r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/, r/Composition/). There's also a couple of people that gives good feedback on twitch (e.g gruber99).
Yeah, I've been dipping my foot in the pool, but I keep getting stuck and was hoping to find some ideas to get me unstuck. But just doing more of it is probably good advice!
Interesting idea. I'm not on Reddit, but I'll give those subs a look.
I recently got into using musescore to make lead sheets for songs I want to learn to play on accordion. Oftentimes even if I have the sheet music, I'm not wild about the arrangement. It might be overly simplified or too hard to play, or it's for another instrument, or it has page breaks and I can reformat it without them. Especially with music you find in random places online, it will often need some work.
To make sure I have the sheet music right, I'll play it before printing it out, and then iterate as I find mistakes or just things I want to improve.
Arranging isn't composition, but it's adjacent to it, and making your own variation on an existing song seems like a nice skill to have for any musician.
Agreed! I'm actually working on an arrangement of a song right now, too. Thanks for the pointer to musescore. I will take a look.
You could share any fragments you have!
Then we can talk about what's good, what's odd, and what's missing.
I bet you'll become more confident about the larger problems as you practice working the small problems through a bunch of little toy pieces.
If you give a bit more detail about what you're interested in working on, or what you've done in the past, maybe we can all figure out some prompts/exercises together!