Composing from a Model: Part 3

Experimenting with Chords and Melodies

Composing from a model was definitely an interesting experience for me. I found the idea generation through scaffolding to be really helpful, but it was only useful as a starting point. I particularly found that writing chord progressions was something quite personal to the harmony I liked, and that using the methods I had prescribed for students was a little bit limiting. So I continued to experiment with other chord progressions and melodies mainly through improvisation.

Parallel Minor Chords

One quite different way to compose chords that I wrote as a scaffold based on "There There" was the idea of writing a progression with only minor chords. I decided to try and follow that model closely, but for me the straight triads were a little bit too jarring, so I ended up adding 7ths to my progression. I found that moving things around in 4ths (e.g. Cm-Fm-Bbm-Ebm) worked well, as well as other parallel movements like moving things around in minor 3rds.

When I was creating video resources for student scaffolding, I ended up using the first set of parallel minor chords I wrote as my intro and outro music for the videos (you can listen to it here). But I decided later that I didn't really like the progression that much, so I ditched them and started writing minor chord progressions again.

In the end I jumped on the guitar, because I'd decided already that the guitar was going to be the instrument introduced in the bridge, and the bridge was where the minor chord progression would go (based on Radiohead's model). By the end of it all I had:

|| Fm7 | Dbm7 | Abm7 |Bbm7 ||

Starting on the Vocals

I also started experimenting with some vocal melodies for my chorus progression. So here's a link to a little go I had improvising some vocals over the top of the chords.

Using Logic

Now that I had all this material, I decided it was time to begin to work in Logic. Last semester I became quite familiar with Logic after using it to record a song for Popular Music Studies. I'd done some early drafts in Garageband, but I find Logic to be more powerful and so I moved the loops over there and started again with finding the right sounds. Right from the start I knew I wanted some sounds before the drums came in, so I just created a little swell on a single chord (which you can see below) , and then worked out the approximate lengths of each section so that I knew how long to loop the drums for.

I'm a big fan of using Logic, and I decided at the early stages to focus on generating different synth sounds, since I hadn't used them very much before. In choosing the right sounds for different parts, I really just followed my ear. I wasn't building the synth tones off "There There" since that song has almost no synthesiser action in there. But I guess I wanted things to be a little bit edgy, particularly the tones for riffs.