Composing From a Model: Part 2
So in my last post, I talked about the stocktake I took of what I'd already composed. But there were a number of other elements of my composition that still needed to take shape. So I did some planning.
Planning the Structure
In one of my previous posts, I did an analysis of the structure of "There There", and found it to be fairly typical of a popular style in terms of its macro-structure. I decided to follow Radiohead's structure verbatim, to see what this would do to the piece, but I wanted to have the flexibility to change section lengths, so I ignored how long each of their sections went for. So the structure of the piece, I decided, would be:
// Introduction // Verse 1 // Chorus // Verse 2 // Chorus // Bridge (x5) // Outro
This would of course assume that I had three different chord progressions, lyrics, and a second drum groove, to follow Radiohead's macro-tension concept. But I decided to save the lyrics and other drum groove for later in the process, so that it would be more organic.
Continuing with Riff-Writing and Chord-Conjuring
So even though my own compositional scaffolding for students only involved writing one riff, on later listening I didn't really like the riff I created, and so I decided to try my hand at composing another riff. I ended up using the same notes, as C minor had become something of a home bass, but just changed the sounds up a little. Here's a rather out-of-tune piano version of my new riff.
I also wrote another chord progression, which was a closer representation of my usual compositional process. I played the piano riff (above) quite a lot, and it got stuck in my head. Eventually one day I was hearing it in a different key (F minor), so I sat down and tried to play chords that would work with it. I ended up with a slightly unusual time factor, in that one of the bars was 2/4, but it just fit more naturally with the chords.
|| Abmaj7 Bb6 | Eb6 (2/4 bar) | Dm9 |Dbmaj7 ||
More to come.