Music composition techniques of inspiration and expression

Off-Topic
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So there’s a lot on production techniques around on the web. But what about composition techniques? How do you work when trying to create a vision of sound and put it into reality with music software?

I believe there can be fundamental techniques worth developing when going for this. When going for composition, it is like any skill - you can train and develop it due to practicing and exercising it.

Some people have strong vision of sound from the beginning on, and just lack the tools to put into practice. I’m a bit like that, and have to say you have to reinvent your fantasy to make it real, but in the end you can come to the point where you started maybe…just now you can make the sounds all real.

Others make up the composition during creation, and this is the way to learn to connect to intuition I believe. This way my skills also developed…I couldn’t make the sounds in my head at first. But when I started trying, I’ve learnt to build pieces up from how they happen, step by step.

Instead of trying to make up the whole piece at once, you start with building up from simple ideas, loops or elements. Then I wait for an inspiration how it could progress, or what kind of other elements might fit for it. Going on, listening and processing over and over again…it is like sculpting, from a raw rock, slowly an intricate piece can develop.

You can also separate sounds and composition idea. I liked first playing around with sounds, making them fit in aesthetics and sound. Then, wiping all my loops and automation note data, making a completely different composition from it step by step. Even from a techno setup, making a composition like a classical piece with layers and facets and tempo and mood changes - the sounds already fit together well, and this can free the head to gain and realize a fantasy of what they might be able to express.

This is like divide and conquer. Making a frame, a set of inspirations and limitations that still leaves anything open, but pre-defines common grounds for the language of sound to develop. Then painting it bit by bit with colors previously matched to each other. Painting it layer by layer, consecutively adding details and drawing over bad parts so everything fits together.

Might seem like a tedious process to do at first, but it is the way. First the intuition, the inspiration is in the moment and the simple decisions on how to sequence things. Follow it, building up on the ideas, then you may see that you start anticipating more and more moves and planning more and more ahead - just with steps that you DO understand on how they will sound and build up on each other, not just dreaming. In the end you can know ahead what steps lead to a final result without building up on the steps, then you can learn to plan everything ahead in fantasy and then working to nail the idea down. This is probably a master’s craft, after years of practice.

Curious to hear your ideas and techniques to build up original style pieces and constructing the layers of composition from inspiration to actual sounds!

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Sometimes…

I like to make a pattern, with most of the instruments playing a part, like the ‘fullest’ pattern of the song.
Then make a second version of that pattern, slightly altered.
Finally, mute tracks / create mixdowns, moving back/forwards towards a quiet part/break.

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I get a surprising amount of mileage from this, and in reality it’s quite simple. Making my canvas 32 lines first, doubling that to 64 with some variations, then again to 128 with more stuff added in here and there, can get you quite far into the composition of a song where the variations are baked into a “longer” repetition of musical ideas. So instead of listening to the same 4 “instances” of 32 lines, you create two instances of 128 lines, thus making the listener feel like there is less repetition, and that what is being listened to is a flowing, slowly changing piece of music.

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I’m that type of guy who mostly has a “strong vision” from the beginning, but who always composes actively while creating the sound. And in 9 out of 10 cases the result differs from the “strong vision” a lot. The reason for that is simple. Whether I’m browsing presets or creating sounds from scratch, every single sound brings new ideas. As soon as I hear a sound, melodies and stuff are floating my mind. If it fits in my current project I compose something out of it and keep it, and if it doesn’t fit I either save it under another name or simply drop it and move on to the next sounds. It’s impossible having a “strong vision” and compose exactly the same, because one would need the exact same sounds from your vision right at the beginning of your composition. That will never happen. So in the end the “strong vision” is only a guide in terms of the overall desired sound, but the actual composition is always taking place WHILE creating. In fact it’s live composing, no predefined melodies or whatever. In case I’m stuck while doing the buildup, this is my method to progress when it comes to electronic dance music.

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It appears that it can be summed up in these thoughts:

“Composition for me is a series of improvisational tasks.”

I have always been a very poor planner and improvisational type of person, so working with that style in mind seems very helpful to me. Thanks.

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Yeah, that’s what I view it like, too. Each step of imagining the next outcome - is like an improvisation, and you either do it with your instrument or just with your mind. My approach of learning it then tries to divide and conquer, splitting the whole task of imagining a composition up to single, simple tasks.

Then you improvise only a slight improvement of the current status, and keep this going until the result is finished. With time, the power may grow so that you can improvise greater steps, creating music faster, with less intermediary steps.

This is like rinse and repeat, when I have a tune and want to work on it, I just keep going over the file from a single simple idea/loop, adding single elements or improving or rearranging, until I feel there’s no more to add or the deadline is close. It’s interesting - it’s still music, but you can compare it’s depth with a sculpture, that starts as coarse and then get’s rough and maybe round, but it could be made even better if you just keep adding details that give more life to it.

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Exactly! It’s like crafting a sonic tapestry where each thread contributes to the bigger picture.