- I'm gonna share with you mistakes I've made
that did not work for me.
(orchestral music)
If you're looking for a good way to waste time,
I've got one for you.
While you're writing, keep listening back to the music
you've already written.
If I had a minute back for every minute I spent
listening to the first few bars of something
I was just starting to work on, I would be 10 years younger
right now.
Stop spending your writing time listening.
Write first, edit later.
Not only are you not actually producing anything
in that time, but you're training your ear
that those few bars are a loop and they have nothing else
that comes after them.
- This is starting to get a little bit repetitive.
It's no wonder that I hear from students all the time,
that it's easy for them to come up with those first few
bars, and then they can't figure out what to do next.
If you spend so much time listening to those first few bars,
you'll never be able to move forward.
There are also specific training techniques
that did not work for me.
For example, somewhere, I picked up this idea
that to learn to orchestrate, you should copy scores
directly by hand. That didn't work at all.
Years ago, I copied out
Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
by hand, thinking I would learn how to orchestrate
like Debussy, but I really didn't learn anything.
- Why'd I do that?
- It was just a mindless exercise in busy work.
And all I ended up with was a sore wrist.
Instead, what I probably should have done was written
a score reduction, and then looked at how Debussy
used the orchestra to express that music.
I'll talk about how to do score reductions
in a future video.
So please subscribe if that's something you'd like to see.
Number three.
Another mistake came directly out of the tools I use.
With just the simple touch of the L key on my keyboard,
I can loop a region in Logic.
All of a sudden I can go from a single bar idea
to an infinitely long piece of music.
- Well, that was easy.
But looping is unnatural.
If you want something to feel organic,
it needs variation and change.
Looping and copy/pasting are just so easy to do,
that sometimes I just do it by default.
That's one reason why recently I've been trying
to shift my writing process to be more notation-oriented
and away from the DAW.
There are certain mindsets and patterns we fall into,
depending on the tools we're using.
And in the case of a DAW, it's not only so easy
to loop and copy/paste, it almost feels like it's designed
for us to do it that way.
Number four.
Probably the biggest mistake I made in college,
was trying to be fancy before I really knew
what I was doing.
Essentially, trying to run before I could walk.
I remember in one class, I did a big band arrangement
of Princess Leia's Theme before I really had a basic grasp
of big band arranging.
Or if I had an assignment to write a simple AABA tune,
I always had to do it in 7/8,
or use some really weird scale.
- I don't know why I make it so complicated.
- I was always trying to get ahead of myself
by being unique, or interesting, that I was never really
taking the time to absorb the fundamental lessons
that I should have been learning.
It's like trying to discuss international economic policy
in a foreign language before you even really know
how to order lunch.
One day, a professor actually pulled me aside
and pointed out that I was doing this.
And he told me the best assignment he had ever received
was from a student who did the most textbook,
boring, vanilla voicings you could imagine.
The student who submitted that piece
showed that they understood the fundamental concepts.
And even though they weren't pushing the boundary
of 21st century music, it sounded great.
They had learned the lesson.
Meanwhile, I was trying to adapt neo-romantic film music
to a sax quartet.
- It's not good.
- I wish I could say I listened to that professor
and learned my lesson right there, but I didn't.
I still kept searching for new information,
new things to try.
I've read so many books about orchestration
that tell you what range instruments can play,
but not really how to write for them.
I've read so many books on musical form
that tell you what to name the different sections,
but not how to create a satisfying art.
I've read so many books on harmony that talk about
how to resolve the ninth of a chord,
but not why a C major triad sounds boring in one context
and mesmerizing in another.
I kept thinking that maybe this new book will help me
write an adventure action queue,
or this one will help me when I get stuck
in those first eight bars.
And that's ultimately the biggest mistake of them all.
All of that time I spent searching for the secret
to writing music, when really what I should have been doing
the whole time is just writing music.
If you want to get better at listening to French,
you need to listen to French.
If you want to get better at ice skating,
you need to be out on the ice.
Yes, you can study music theory. You can listen to Bartok.
You can take another orchestration course.
But if you want to get better at composing,
you need to compose.
That's how you become fluent, develop a style,
and become a prolific composer.
If you want to get your music to the level
where you're earning royalties from music libraries,
check out this video here.