There's a particular piece of feedback I find I'm constantly giving my students about their work.
Oh how should one say, um.
How shall one say director?
Too many notes your majesty.
Exactly, very well put.
Too many notes.
Instead of too many notes I usually say too many ideas but the sentiment is kind of the same.
When your music has too many ideas it lacks focus,
it's hard for the listener to follow where you're going.
Instead of a musical piece it kind of feels more like musical rambling.
I recently told a student I thought their piece had too
many ideas and they said "Well, what is an idea?"
And I thought that was a pretty good question so in this video I'm going to talk about
what is an idea in music and how to know when you've got a good one.
So when I talk about an idea in music I'm really talking about a motive.
A motive is the smallest grouping of notes you can have to form an identifiable characteristic unit.
To make that more clear here are a couple examples of opening motives to themes from Pixar movies.
It's important that you don't confuse the motive with the phrase.
A phrase is like a complete musical thought, a complete statement.
A motive is just a small little unit.
So a phrase could be just one motive but a phrase could also be made of many motives.
For example here is Moana's You're Welcome where a complete
phrase is made up of two different motives.
So how do you write a good motive?
Well first of all, a good rule of thumb I've heard is that a
motive should be about four to seven notes long.
You can have very long complex motives,
you can have very short ones, but four to seven is a pretty good guideline.
The most important thing is that the motive has two parts: a distinct interval,
or interval shape, and a distinct rhythm.
Distinct doesn't have to mean completely original, nobody's ever heard it before,
because there's only so many combinations.
It just means that for this motive, for this unit,
there is something recognizable that we'll hear if it changes or if it comes back again.
So for example in Up the interval is like this and the rhythm is like this.
From toy story the intervals are like this and this is the rhythm.
In Monsters Inc. this is the distinct intervals
and this is the distinct rhythm.
But here's the secret: the actual interval or rhythm
you choose does not really matter as much as what you do with them.
There's no formula that says "Oh yeah, if you use this interval it's going to be perfect for
this multi-million dollar movie," or "This rhythm is really going to make people sad."
The thing that is special is having a distinct rhythm and a distinct interval that people will
recognize, that you can use again and again and again throughout your theme,
throughout your piece, maybe throughout your entire score.
An excellent effort.
So for example all three of these Pixar themes
immediately follow the first statement of that motive with a variation of the motive.
A variation of a motive could mean you stretch the interval or shrink it,
you add a few notes, you take a few notes away, you made things longer, and so on.
So let's listen to a complete statement of each of those Pixar themes with the
idea of motives in mind and notice how few distinct different ideas there really are.
When you're trying to come up with a motive remember those two parts:
a distinct interval, or interval shape, and a distinct rhythm.
Then see how much mileage you can get out of
that idea that has those two parts without having to find new ideas.
Limiting the number of ideas you have in your piece is going to make it more memorable,
easier to follow, and counter-intuitively actually make it more interesting.
And there are simply too many notes, that's all.
Just cut a few and it'll be perfect.