Life Tips from the World of Music
By Richard Bruner
Here are some tips I’ve gleaned from a lifetime of musical practice and over a decade in the world of professional and semi-professional music. Some of these are about music, and some are just about life. A lot of these come from the orchestra world, but most apply to all kinds of music.
I have practical tips for life as a performing musician, and quite a few for musicianship and composition as my primary professional training has been in various forms of composition (film scoring at Berklee College of Music for my undergraduate college training, and I’m currently working on my Master’s degree in music composition at California State University, Northridge [CSUN]). Some of the composition tips are practical, and some are more philosophical - those have now been broken into a separate section on “Philosophy of Music Theory”. This is not primarily a music theory guide - there are already enough of those out there, and I link to a few below when applicable (if you want a general guide to music theory, another good (free!) one I’ve used in my harmony and form tutoring at CSUN is Music Theory for the 21st Century Classroom). These composition tips are designed more to get you to think about what it means to make music rather than to teach you how to do it. In the Philosophy of Theory section, I have talked about specific elements of music theory, but again, mostly in a way to encourage you to think about music theory, not so much to give you even a crash-course in music theory.
I have made a couple of quick little guides that explore a particular theory topic in some detail, but they are not systematic. I just made a couple of guides for topics that came up as I was writing these tips that I wanted to explore in more detail than I could below (those pages have notation and audio, which I’m trying to avoid on this page). I’ve linked them in the tips they relate to, and also in the Teaching tab at the top of the page you’ll find a landing page for those guides so they can be found more easily by people who might be interested in them for their own sake.
This is a companion piece to my musical philosophy: [Capital-M] Music. Please CLICK HERE to find my full paper on the philosophy.
I also have a Studio Guide with some information on how to think about building a music studio in terms of equipment. It also features some additional guides about Synthesis techniques and MIDI. I describe what I use, and offer thoughts on other things to consider since you may have very different musical goals than I do. There’s something out there for everyone!
Update April 2024: As I’ve continued reflecting on my past, present and future in music, this guide has developed in a different direction than I really intended for it to go, and has arguably at this point become the centerpiece of my Capital-M Music project. It was originally intended to be a shorter, succinct and practical guide to how to be a Musician, to go with the more theoretical / philosophical discussion in the “main” paper. But my points in this guide have been getting longer and longer (they were written out of order, so the longer points were generally written later even if they are in the middle of short points). As of the past few days, I now even have some “mini-essays” in their own right in this guide (some of them are as long as undergraduate college papers might be themselves, though perhaps with fewer quotes and sourcing than those should have!) - one is even about why we write college papers - see General Tips No. 10. Most of the “Philosophy of Theory” tips are pretty detailed now. I might see if If I can break some of these tips out separately later, but for now they’ll stay here. I think all the points are interesting and useful ideas to consider - you don’t have to agree with everything I say, but I hope at least if you don’t agree with me that I inspire you to think and come to your own conclusions, as that’s as much a part of this project as anything else. As I mention in the acknowledgements of the main paper, I arrived at some of my ideas as a reaction against something someone else said! If you do have any feedback for me (either in favor or against what I say), please do get in touch and share your experience or thoughts - I like thinking too, as you can probably tell!
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General Musicianship - Key Takeaways
General Musicianship: 3 Key Takeaways
If I could impart three key ideas to my students that they take away from everything else we do, here is what they’d be - two about music and one that also applies to life in general:
Music is made of patterns, not notes. The patterns are often made of notes, but the music is in the patterns, not in the notes, and if you can learn to hear and see (and play) the patterns rather than individual notes, you'll find your musicianship improves dramatically across the board. Patterns often include scales, arpeggios, intervals, chords, and chord progressions, but they can be found in other ways as well. Rhythm also makes heavy use of patterns. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a “secret” that unlocked music for me. It’s not a five minute fix, but if you can internalize this, it really will help you greatly.
Just a few benefits of this approach to music: You’ll lose your fear of key signatures with lots of sharps or flats and “odd” time signatures; you’ll get much better at sight-reading; dictation/transcription will become much easier; memorizing pieces will become much easier; improvisation starts to click in a more effective way; and you’ll have a much better understanding of the music you play, sing, or write. See Philosophy of Theory Tip No. 1 for more on this.
If this seems like a lot of claims to make for a simple-sounding point, that’s because it’s really an over-arching concept that pervades everything else and will really re-structure how you think about and approach music once you take it to heart and start attempting to think this way and explore the implications. You can learn the basics of music without this concept, but I don’t think that you can really be a fully competent semi-pro or professional musician without coming to some version of this idea. I’ve run across this idea as a practical concept I could develop and use mostly in a college setting, and it’s why I think I really learned to be a musician through my college training, even while I had a great deal of fun with music through high school.
Some other ways I’ve heard people put this idea: “Music is in the relationships between the notes, not the notes themselves” (from my professor Dr. Liviu Marinescu at CSUN); “Learn to think in groups of notes, not individual notes” (several people over the years); and “If I see a scale, I should play a scale” (one of the other students in my Berklee Sight-Reading lab my first semester).
Music is sound, and any other representation of the music is just that, a representation, but the music doesn't exist until someone realizes the representation in sound. This can be through either an audio recording or a live performance. Sheet music is not music, it is a set of instructions for making music.
In music theory classes, we teach you to analyze music by looking at music notation and sheet music and assigning names to some of the patterns in music. This is part of learning to see some of these patterns referred to above. However, I think sometimes we don’t spend enough time making sure people can hear the patterns as well, especially in an analytical context. You should be able to hear scale degrees, and eventually (for example) the I chord and the V chord, and know what various cadences sound like, among other things. You will get some of that in musicianship / ear-training classes, or even in an applied music context (private instrumental or vocal lessons and ensemble work). In my opinion it wouldn’t hurt to do more of that in harmony and theory classes as well (and some teachers do, of course). If you don’t get enough of that in class, or if you aren’t a music student in a college or similar environment, then you should do enough of that on your own to be able eventually to both hear and see the patterns (both are important!).
My music theory tutoring students at CSUN will tell you that pretty much every time they bring me something that either they are writing or from their textbook / examples, the first thing I do is take it to the piano and try playing through it. I can understand what’s happening much better (and usually much faster) if I hear it than just by looking at it on the page, though given enough time, I can work it out on the page as well. When I’m working with them on improving the assignments they bring me, I usually sit at the piano and improvise between what they provided and then try some other ideas I might have, and eventually we come up with a direction that they like. My composition professor does the same thing to me when I bring him a piece I’m working on, though in that case we usually start by listening to my notation playback or mockup, and then he improvises on the piano to show me some ideas. But it all gets back to hearing the music and not just seeing the sheet music or the analysis on the page.
Never stop learning. A large part of my entire philosophy is all about exploring new areas in music and expanding your awareness of what (M)usic is and can be. I learn something new with every piece I write and every gig that I play, and even with every practice session on any of my instruments or singing.
In his 70s, Derek Bell, the harper for the Irish music band The Chieftains and one of the most famous Irish harp players in the world, was taking private lessons in fugue composition and playing the oboe just because he found them interesting [from an interview with him on The Chieftains DVD Water from the Well]. Also see General Tips No. 8.
Hopefully people take more than this away from our lessons, but these are three concepts I keep coming back to over and over again.
Gigs
In the long run, it’s not always the best player that gets the gig - it’s the person who’s good enough and who shows up consistently, on time, and with a smile.
This doesn’t mean to settle for less than your best - always try to be the best that you can, people can tell when you aren’t trying enough (and it feels better to play your best!).
Reputations take a lifetime to build and five minutes to destroy. Believe it or not, I’ve seen people just ditch gigs before, and that is a pretty good way to get fired and never get called again by the person running that gig. And word gets around quickly. Emergencies happen, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to avoid significant damage to your reputation.
On time doesn’t mean at the start time of rehearsal or show - that’s usually the downbeat time, and you must be ready to play at that point. Standards vary, but generally at least 15 minutes and often 30 or more before the downbeat is preferred. If you have a lot of set up to do, you might even need to be there an hour or more before the start time, though hopefully you already know that if it applies to you. Err on the side of too early rather than too late. “If you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late; if you’re late, you’re fired”.
I prefer to have some sort of soundcheck / short rehearsal the day of the concert when possible. I don’t like it when the first note we play as a group is the first note of the show that day, as it sometimes takes a little while to work into playing well together, and it’s better if that can be before the show. I also dislike having a full rehearsal the day of the show. If we haven’t learned our music by the day of the concert, an extra full rehearsal that day won’t fix that and I often find that it makes me more tired for the show itself than I want to be. A short, 15-30 minute soundcheck where we run through starting each piece and hit a couple of spots where we need to remember to be extra careful is ideal. We usually get a passage right the second time we play it if we miss it the first time, leading one of my conductors to joke that we’ll start with the second time in the concert, but doing a soundcheck and hitting that spot is one way to actually do that, and it usually works!
Be ready to roll with the punches. Gigs don’t always go smoothly, and complaining about it usually will not fix the problem. Patience and flexibility are virtues!
Knowing how to improvise is a very handy skill for many reasons, and not just in a musical sense!
Play with people who are better than you. It’s fun to be one of the best in the room, but most of my musical growth has come from playing with better players and with ensembles where the average ability is higher. When I get to sit with players who are better than me, I can feel my own abilities getting better automatically (it’s not magic, but it is a very cool feeling!) I find that this is because I have greater confidence in the rest of the players, which boosts my own confidence and I think that is where this increase in ability comes from.
Talk to everyone, and treat them all with respect - I’ve gotten gigs from people I would never have expected to get them from, so don’t blow people off because they don’t seem like they’ll be useful to you. Also, people don’t have to be “useful” to be worth getting to know - they’re people, not tools, and they all have their own story just like you do.
Advice from Richard Hannemann (from a friend he identifies as “Louie”): “You are getting the music to the people. That's the Job. It doesn't matter what the venue is, or the size of [the] audience, or the pay, or anything else. The Job is to get the music to the people.”
Rehearsals
Know your part as much as possible before you get to rehearsal - rehearsal should be for working out the ensemble, not learning your notes. The CSUN Symphony says “Rehearsal is not the time to practice. Rehearsal is the time to learn other people’s parts” (CSUN Symphony Orchestra Syllabus Spring 2024).
Within reason, any mistake is OK once (that’s one thing rehearsal is for), but then mark it and don’t do it again. One of the most aggravating things is when we have to stop at the same place in multiple rehearsals because of the same errors. Consider marking things if other people make errors too, so that you aren’t the one doing that next rehearsal!
On a related note, always have a pencil (just get a bunch and leave them in every case). My Jr. High orchestra conductor would call them our “handy-dandy ever-present pencils” - and note that it’s pencil, not pen. [If you use an iPad or other tablet for sheet music, make sure you know how to mark your parts - either with a stylus, or if necessary with your finger].
Learn how to pick up without stopping the music when you make a mistake - I had this point hammered home in 5th grade, when I got into the top string orchestra at school because I messed up but kept going and didn’t make the conductor stop (we were playing a duet for the audition). I wrote up that incident for my “narrative essay” assignment for the next four years in writing class!
The flashiest technique means little if your fundamentals aren’t solid. Learn to count your part correctly, and rhythm trumps pitch in most circumstances.
Once you’ve counted your part correctly, come in with confidence, which doesn’t have to mean loudly. It means in an appropriate manner relative to the part you have. (If that is loud, then play out and don’t hide behind someone else!)
Listen to the ensemble. Don’t get so buried in your part that you can’t fit into the overall texture correctly. Learn to recognize when you have the melody, counter-melody, or background texture. Which leads to:
You are not always the soloist!
Stop when the conductor (or group leader) stops, and don't immediately start talking to your neighbor.
No talking or other playing during tuning - tune and stop playing. My high school conductor would tell us to “meditate on the Great ‘A’ of Life”!
In a professional orchestral rehearsal setting, the hierarchy is as follows: section players talk to the section leader, section leaders talk to the concertmaster, concertmaster talks to the conductor. In community / semi-pro settings things are often looser, but it doesn’t hurt to keep that in mind. Also, the conductor always has the final say (don’t talk back to them during rehearsal if you want to stay friends with everyone!) Questions for clarification are fine, but I’ve seen people actually scoff at a suggestion from the conductor in front of everyone and it didn’t go well for them…
Pay attention in rehearsal even when you're not the one being talked to. You might have that part elsewhere in the piece, and either way you'll learn something about the piece and maybe about writing music too!
Recording Sessions
A recording session is a worksite - you are either an observer, in which case make sure you stay out of the way, or a worker, in which case you need to focus on the work at hand (whatever role you have). Either way, idle chatter is discouraged. There may be time after the session for that, not during the session (and usually not before).
On film score projects in particular, they never book enough time for the sessions, so anything that disrupts the session can cost a lot of money.
If you want to play on (especially film) recording sessions, really practice your sight-reading skills. You will usually not have a rehearsal, and having more than two takes in a film environment is a luxury (three if you’re really lucky!).
Composition (mostly based on orchestral writing, but can apply to others too)
Your sample libraries will lie to you (especially in notation software - even Note Performer is not perfect). Sample libraries / notation playback are very helpful tools once you have a reasonable idea of what things should sound like, but it’s difficult to learn to write for acoustic instruments from them alone.
Examples:
a. Harp is almost always massively too loud by default, particularly in sample libraries in your sequencer
b. Rhythms in general will be too clean (especially fast, complex rhythms with several players together)
c. High notes are harder to get in tune in the string section in real life
d. Dynamics are rarely played back correctly in notation software (especially changing dynamics like crescendos - I really hate the playback of fp<f, which doesn’t really work at all)
e. Woodwind dynamics by range are wrong (in real life, low flute is practically inaudible with anything more than harp and maybe very soft strings, oboe doesn’t honk in the sample libraries in the bottom of its range like it really does, etc.)
Some of these will work better with high end players in top professional orchestras (especially b and c), but you are unlikely to be starting there with your performances.
A more effective way to learn how to write for orchestra (probably true for all ensembles) is to attend live concerts, especially after you’ve done score study on a piece being performed. Better yet, attend a rehearsal or two as well.
If you are decent at playing an orchestral instrument, go join a decent community or semi-pro orchestra if possible for at least a little while. It’s a lot of fun and you’ll learn a lot more from that than just from score study (do that too, especially with the pieces you are playing). Pay close attention in rehearsal, especially when you are not the one being talked to. Even better, they’ll be more likely to play your piece if they know you! This applies to other genres too, by the way - playing in a group in the genre you are writing in will give you valuable experience for writing in addition to being a lot of fun itself.
Getting your pieces read by live players will be eye-opening, especially the first few times you get to do that. It’s an amazing experience, and you’ll learn more from a few reading sessions or performances of your work than you will from countless hours of score study, though that’s also essential. Both for chamber and orchestral pieces.
If you know who you are writing for, be sure to write for them and not for who you wish they were (challenge them, but don’t go beyond their abilities).
Keyboard skills are essential for composers, regardless of what your principal instrument is. If you have a computer-based composition studio, it probably uses a keyboard, and even if you don’t you might have a piano. (Also, if your principal instrument is piano / keyboard, I’d recommend learning at least one sustaining non-keyboard instrument too, as that will open up a whole new world for you.) See the “Multi-Instrumentalism” section of the main paper for a much more thorough discussion of these points.
(Synths) Constantly play with everything - messing around with synthesizer patches (either purely electronic or even in synths designed to sound like acoustic instruments) can lead to some really neat effects. You usually won’t hurt anyone if your experiments don’t work, so try them and see what happens! Be sure to save anything interesting before moving on to something else. Try things the way they are “supposed” to work, then try and see if you can break them - you might get some interesting results that way.
Learn the “rules” of music theory - these principles often developed for good psychoacoustic reasons, so they are useful guides. Then start messing with things and breaking the rules - sometimes that will be effective and sometimes it won’t, but you’ll learn a lot along the way.
Have reasons for why you do things. I got this one from a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where I was taking a high school composers workshop one summer through the organization Accessible Contemporary Music. The professor gave us a guest session, and she looked at my piece and said (paraphrasing) “You have a good idea of what you are doing, and you clearly know some music theory, but I keep asking you why you did something and you keep not having an answer - so I want you to start thinking about why you do what you do”. I will add that “Because I can” shouldn’t really be your answer - it’s all you technically need, but I’d like a more substantive reason than that.
Don't make a piece more difficult than it needs to be. Hopefully you don't need to dumb things down, but I rarely find music written specifically to be challenging to be musically worthwhile. Never notate anything in a harder manner than necessary - if you could simplify the notation and have it sound the same, do it. This means scales should look like scales, triads like triads, etc. Particularly in classical music, Cb and Fb (and B# and E#) might be harmonically correct, and you should use them. Enharmonic respellings do not make it easier to read if people are sight-reading effectively (patterns, not notes).
Pedal harp is the exception here, write for harp with as many flats as possible. 5 sharps for the orchestra is 7 flats for the harp. Sharps are usable for harp, but flats sound better due to the double-action pedal system harps use - also, no double sharps or flats for harp, they will roll their eyes if they see that! Notes and accidentals are used differently on harp than other instruments. They tell the harpist which string to play with which pedal setting, so double-sharps and flats mechanically do not exist on a harp and writing them reveals that you don’t really know how the harp works or that you don’t care enough to notate “correctly” for them. To be clear, they can read music written “normally”, but if you can write for them in the “harp” manner, they will like you that much better!
On the topic of (not) using enharmonic spelling for other players, this is especially true if your players have had college level training (whether or not they were performance majors - I wasn’t, but I still got much better at playing and reading on my instruments through my college instrumental training). If they haven’t had college training, then there might be a stronger case to be made for enharmonic respelling, but even then, I don’t think I would. In my opinion if you think your players are ready to play in keys that would use those notes (Cb/Fb, B#/E#, or double-sharps or flats), then you should treat them as if they are ready to read those notes. They really aren’t that hard! If you really think they aren’t ready for those notes then maybe you should rethink the key you are writing in.
The only reason I even bring this up is because if someone hasn’t had college training they are less likely either to have been taught how to sight-read effectively or to have had an opportunity to come to their own epiphany regarding the “patterns, not notes” approach to music. I went to a high school with a very strong music program, and even there I was only necessarily expected to learn scales through 4 sharps and 4 flats to audition into the top orchestras there. We did play music that went beyond that, but that was back in my period where I was annoyed by lots of flats and sharps, because I was reading notes. These days, by reading patterns more than notes and drilling all the scales at Berklee extensively, I can handle any key without too much trouble and I get a little tired of other people grumbling about 5 or 6 flats, even if I can understand where they are coming from!
Another notation tip - don’t assume that if you would have trouble reading something, your players would too. They might, but if you don’t really play that instrument and you are writing something idiomatic, then the players of that instrument can probably read it better than you can. I’m specifically thinking in this case about ledger lines vs. octave (8va) lines. Pianists make extensive use of 8va lines when things get just a little above the staff, but violins and flutes really don’t. As a violinist, I am comfortable sight-reading up to the space above the fourth ledger line above the treble staff, and even if you go to five lines I’d still usually rather see the ledger lines, not 8va lines (note that the textbook high note for 1st violin is the C the space above the 5th ledger line, so in principle you may never actually need 8va for orchestral violins - that note is a good place to stop even today, especially if you are writing for anyone other than high-level professionals).
The difference is that for piano all you do is move your hands over one octave and play the same thing, but on most non-keyboard-type instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass), we have to physically change the way we play, and even the way we mentally think about a passage based on the octave it’s written in. I don’t finger the lower octave the same way I do the upper octave, and while I can read 8va lines, it adds an extra layer of translation that isn’t normally necessary. This is another point where if you really think you need an 8va line, you might consider if you are writing too high! And it really is poor notation technique to use an 8va line for a note that would either be within the treble staff without it, or would be only a couple of ledger lines up if you didn’t have it. I’ve seen people do both of those, and it is annoying every time. Basically, if the written note under the 8va line is in the treble staff, you probably didn’t need it. The resulting written note itself should be above the staff to render that necessary, and even then, it may not be.
The viola version of this, by the way, is to switch from alto clef to treble clef. Again, I can sight-read alto clef up to 3 ledger lines with no problem, and four lines is fine, so you only need to consider treble clef if you are reaching at least the A above the open A string, and even then you might not need it. French publishers in particular are fond of treble clef viola, and I’ve seen treble clef in parts that don’t go higher than the low D (first position) on the A string (2 ledger lines in alto clef), and down to the open G string, which really is an indication to me that you don’t really know what you are doing for viola. The alto clef is our clef, treble is a special case. Again, the main problem is it throws off our mental fingering scheme, so it just adds another layer of possible confusion. Also - no 8va lines in the viola part ever. If you actually need an 8va line in the treble clef for the viola, you are simply writing too high for the viola, and treble clef is the answer if you think you need 8va for alto clef.
Note that there might be cases where you need to use 8va lines, treble clef viola, etc for reasons of space in the score (to not interfere with a line above that instrument), and that’s totally fine but notation software should allow you to change that for the parts, and you should do that. Don’t leave 8va lines or extra treble clefs in the parts because you needed them for score reasons. This also applies to bass clef in horn parts, especially in a C score (non-transposed). Remember that the horn part will always be transposed to F today (notes will sound a fifth lower than written), so in many cases where you need bass clef in a C score, the horn part will be fine, and you need to be sure to remove the bass clef from the part before you give it to the player.
XY Grid of Difficulty: Another version of not writing music that is harder than it needs to be - Picture an XY grid with one axis being “Looks Hard” and “Looks Easy” and the other being “Is Hard” and “Is Easy”. Looks Hard / Looks Easy here refers to how the audience perceives it, not how it looks on the page. You want to avoid as much as possible writing music that “Is Hard” but “Looks Easy”, because if the player screws it up it will seem like they don’t know what they are doing. Any of the other boxes are ok - “Looks Hard” and “Is Hard” is fine, and this is where you can write challenging music for virtuosos (in a concerto, for example). You might also try “Looks Hard” but “Is Easy”, like for example arpeggiando multi-stops on orchestral string instruments where the player sets up a triple- or quadruple-stop and then bounces the bow back and forth rapidly. This is showy and looks hard but is actually not that hard to play depending on the particular chords you ask for and how fast you want to change between them. It is better for soloists than sections though as it’s hard to do it together, but you will sometimes see it for sections anyway. “Looks Easy” and “Is Easy” is fine too, but this might get boring if you use it all the time, especially in a virtuoso showpiece or concerto. Most “pretty” music falls in this category, and there’s nothing wrong with that!
Write articulation, phrasing and dynamics in your music, and think about additional sound-options / techniques. I had a professor at Berklee who said that music wasn’t “real” music until you had specified those details in the sheet music. That might be going a bit far, but it will greatly help your players if you do specify some of that information. I think some composers over-notate their music today, specifying every detail to such an extent that it becomes difficult to read the music and is maybe too controlling of your players (see Composition Tip Nos. 21 + 22 below), but giving a starting dynamic and some idea of the character you want is very helpful, and certainly any substantial changes you want during the phrase should be written (crescendos, etc). What drives me nuts is when composers write out “natural” expression, as I’m not sure if they just want the natural version or they want an exaggerated version of that. I like Tim Davies’ approach in his blog DeBreved - especially his idea of the “orchestral default”.
I had an interesting experience in my first semester in the CSUN Symphony Orchestra. We did a reading session for a few student pieces, and none of them had written articulation in their parts, mostly just notes and some dynamics, so our conductor had us demonstrate several different ways we could play certain parts, all of which followed the notation but added additional elements (mutes, or “sul tasto” / “sul ponticello”, even just different bow strokes or note lengths / levels of connectedness) to get wildly different results. It was an eye-opening experience even for me at that time.
Dynamics: A follow up to the previous tip - dynamics are sometimes confusing for composers who are primarily computer-trained. In acoustic music, dynamics are a relative element, not an absolute element. Computers obscure this because they are mathematical machines, so in notation software they translate dynamic symbols into midi volume, expression or velocity numeric values (ranging from 0 to 127, where f becomes perhaps 100, p might be 30, etc. - see my MIDI guide in my studio guide for more on that). This is not how acoustic musicians think about dynamics. F and p (forte and piano) are as much about character as they are about volume. We frequently modify the dynamics in the piece to get the desired balance, but the initial written dynamics will inform the manner in which we play a passage or the way in which we modify them. Also, with most acoustic instruments, the “volume” is actually as much about harmonic energy as it is about decibel level. '“Louder” sounds are brighter (more energy in the high harmonics), not just louder.
The overall symbolic range should basically be from ppp to fff, anything beyond that isn’t really going to make much difference. I’m already playing as softly as I can at ppp or as loud as I can at fff, so all adding more letters does is change the levels of shading between those, it doesn’t extend the range outside of those bounds, and there’s only so many degrees of shading we can reliably make as an ensemble before it devolves into the ludicrous.
Also, in most ensembles players don’t see each other’s parts, so it’s not obvious when one part is one level higher than another. Conductors help with this having the score, but in a good ensemble players learn to “self-balance”, listening to the overall sound and knowing that if they have the melody they should bring it out, and if they have a sustained background line (for example) they should hold back. This takes years of practice, rehearsal, and general training to learn to do effectively, and it can actually result in some counter-intuitive scenarios.
I once played the Mendelssohn Trumpet Overture on viola, and there’s a passage where we had a sustained background in a “f” tutti section (the whole orchestra played there), then we got the melody in a “p” section and it was just the violas with the melody and a couple of other instruments behind us. I got louder in the “p” part because of that than I had been in the “f” section previously - the dynamic effect was orchestrated by most of the ensemble stopping, and I had the featured line so that had to be brought out.
Composition ear training - in addition to the standard intervals / chords / sight-singing and dictation (see Musicianship in the main paper), ear training for composers also revolves around timbre - learning what instruments sound like in different ranges, dynamics, and then combinations (orchestration). You won’t necessarily get this in class, at least not enough, so do a lot of listening on your own, with a score, and do your best to store up all the sounds in your head. It can be tough at first, but you’ll need to get to the point where you can differentiate by ear between viola and cello (and unison viola / cello), or horn and trombone (for example), which can be subtle distinctions, but you can do it! Sometimes these distinctions are more audible in person than they are on some recordings.
Write music for any groups you are involved with. You will get much more benefit from having your music read or performed by anyone than just by writing for “the pros” and then waiting until one of those groups accepts your music. A composer is someone who composes music and gets it out in the world, it doesn’t matter the nature of the group. This is a similar point to Gigs Tip No. 10, but for composers.
On a similar note, we had a guest lecture with LA composer Jordan Nelson from the Colburn Conservatory in our CSUN composition seminar, and one thing he emphasized in his lecture was that much of his music is written in collaboration with specific performers. He gave us the advice to write for specific people rather than generically, and he was able to write things in a certain way, or at a certain level because he knew who it was who would play it, at least in the first performance, and what they were capable of. Then he would workshop it with them to make sure it would work, and tweak it as necessary - he said that he tended to tweak things more than do full rewrites at that stage, but this way the piece would really fit the player and the player felt more connected to the music themselves.
He did mention that it’s also good to have some musical ideas that maybe you don’t know where they are going, but he says he tends to hold on to those and only start them like that, then he will finish them once he knows what he wants to do with them.
But writing for specific players (or at least specific ensembles) is actually how I write most of my acoustic music today. This leads me to write with their level in mind, so I can write music that amateur players can handle, or sometimes when I know I am writing for more advanced players, I can factor that into the writing. All of the music I’ve written so far at CSUN has been written with specific individuals in mind for the parts. I often write music that I want to play with my friends, so I take extra care to make sure the parts will be interesting, so that my friends will want to play them. You should do this anyway, but when you can put a face to the part, it will both inspire you in a particular way, and also remind you that music is made by humans (at least this kind is), and you want your players (your friends) to enjoy the material. Of course, the first person that needs to like it is you!
“Instrument” vs. “Civic Body” - We are often taught in theory and composition classes (usually implicitly) to think of music ensembles as large instruments to be “played” by composers (both in orchestra / large ensemble and in chamber ensembles) - thinking about what “the flute” does, or how “timpani” work, for example, or differences in sound of the various strings of a cello. But another way to think of any ensemble is as a civic body made of people, many of whom have spent a significant chunk or even the vast majority of their lives learning to play their instruments to a high level, and it is a good idea to keep this firmly in mind when writing for instruments (even think of it as “writing for people”, rather than “writing for instruments”). This is not helped by the fact that we frequently use computers with virtual instrument playback while we write, but it will ultimately be human musicians who play your music, which to me is one of the great things about both writing and playing music.
To the degree that books and classes acknowledge that we’re dealing with people, it will usually be to mention that wind players need to breath, or string players can’t play loud tremolo for 20 minutes without stopping (Robert Schumann Symphonies notwithstanding!), but it’s actually as much a psychological shift. People want to play interesting music and even if the part is playable, if it’s just boring whole notes the whole time, they will not like it as much, which will affect their sound and concentration. Alan Belkin quotes Richard Strauss about “obtaining the spiritual participation of the players” in his essay Artistic Orchestration, and this is a worthy goal to strive for, keeping in mind the needs of the music itself of course. If the piece overall is interesting, players won’t mind parts that are less than exciting, but if you can give everyone something interesting now and then they will play everything better. Also don’t forget that rests exist for a reason!
Related to the above, if you get to conduct sometime (your own or other people’s music), when rehearsing, try to use people’s names rather than just instrument names as much as possible - asking for “the flutes and oboes” to play is fine much of the time, but especially when giving instructions, using names will actually make the players more responsive to you.
Limitations (constraints) are necessary for effective composition. These days with sample libraries and synthesizers, we have access to basically any conceivable instrument and sound, including whole worlds of sound that could not have been generated before the advent of electronic synthesis. Additive synthesis in particular can in principle make any possible sound, especially if you combine that concept with spectral synthesis and you can simply generate any conceivable set of frequencies (see the Synthesis guide in my Studio guide for more about additive synthesis). But with all this power must come some limits, and this is true as a matter of musical principle as much as it is a knowledge issue. You can learn how any instrument(s) work, and something about the styles of music they are typically used in, but even if you knew everything there was to know about music as it exists, limitations would still be necessary.
Making a coherent piece of music requires establishing some patterns that people can pick up on so that they can make sense of the piece you have written. There are a wide variety of ways to do this, some more effective than others in my opinion, though we can disagree about what those are. But one obvious way to set limits for your piece is to set a specific collection of instruments. This can be chosen from existing models such as string quartet, orchestra, or big band (etc), or they can be for an eclectic collection that you might have access to (a piece for alto sax, clarinet, cello, and piano, for example, or my “small band” ensemble at Berklee my first semester, which had a fairly typical rhythm section of keyboard, 2 guitars, bass guitar, and drums, but then had violin (me) and flute for the “horn” section (melody instruments)). This bit actually goes with Tip Nos. 19 and 20 above - if you write for people you know, that will give you some limits right there, in terms of instruments, ability level, and probably genre categories as well. I’m not going to write spectral music for the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles, and it would be hard to write a saxophone concerto for a string quartet I might be playing with!
For electronic music, you can set up your own presets that work well together, but again, you’ll need to make sure not to go overboard with that. Most of the time you’ll want maybe up to around 20 distinct sounds at most (though I picked that number arbitrarily) - note that when I say distinct sounds, I’m not talking about layered sounds. You can make a distinct sound with several layers of specific sounds, and if you do that you might have many more than 20 total sounds. But when you hear about big film composers using 500 track templates, they don’t use all those tracks in every project! They do that so they don’t have to manually load sounds while they are writing, killing the creative impulse when they might be hot on an idea. They just have all their sounds loaded all the time. This applies across a larger project too, by the way - in a given film score, the sound world chosen should be related across cues. You don’t need to use all the instruments in every cue, but if every cue is in an unrelated genre with a different set of instruments, then the score will lack cohesion. Source cues (where the music is seen on the screen - a band playing on screen, or a string quartet in a scene at a fancy event, or the radio playing in the car, etc.) can be different from the underscore, but the underscore should mostly be related to itself across the project.
Another way to set limits is to decide which pitch system and which harmonic system you are going to use for any given project. There was a time when that question would have seemed somewhat nonsensical, as everyone in a given genre would work within the same system, pushing at the boundaries, but still working in a “common practice” - this applies to classical music in roughly the Baroque through Romantic periods (see Philosophy of Theory tip no. 6 for more on this). But these days there are a variety of systems possible, everything from straight classical tonal harmony, to jazz and pop harmony, to full-blown atonal music up to 12-tone serialism. Pitch systems can involve standard tonal major and minor scales, church modes, pentatonic or hexatonic (whole tone) scales, or hybrid scales like the octatonic / diminished scale, or multiple modes mixed together. Modal interchange (also known as mode mixture or modal borrowing) is also available (that is, using chord types found in one mode in another - minor iv in a major key rather than major IV for example, or bVI major in a major key rather than minor vi - most common in classical music borrowing from minor key harmony in a context that is otherwise major, where the I chord is major. The most common minor key mode mixture is the Picardy third, ending a minor key piece with major I, which is a very Baroque thing to do). Modulation to different keys in a tonal or tonal-adjacent context is also possible, and encouraged in many styles such as classical.
Choosing a style itself is a form of limitation - if you are writing in a Celtic style, then 12-tone serialism is unlikely to be useful. Here again, we can push boundaries a little bit. I’m writing this particular tip just after finals in the Spring 2024 semester at CSUN, and this week I wrote and recorded two Celtic-style jigs to celebrate the end of the semester (The School Set, available on the Tunebook page on the site and on my Music page for the recording). The first jig is called Final Exam jig, and it’s a somewhat unusual fully classical tonal minor-key jig, all the way to using (French) augmented 6th and Neapolitan 6th chords, which are common in common practice tonal harmony but not in Celtic music. Nonetheless, the jig itself still sounds pretty Celtic in character. But I keep to common practice harmonies and Celtic tunewriting in that recording, and don’t pull from impressionistic soundworlds or textural, sound-effects based sounds, for example. In the case of this particular tune, I’ve been tutoring Harmony 2 classes extensively this past semester at CSUN, and just came off a few weeks of working on final projects with students where they had to write pieces that used those chords, so it’s something of an homage to my students and their project! In fact, the only aspect of their assignment I didn’t use here was modulation, which isn’t really an aspect of Celtic music except maybe between tunes. In this case I changed modes while keeping the same tonal center, A (minor to major). I had 2 secondary dominants between the two tunes (V/V, and V/vi in the second tune), and in a stretch I used modal borrowing near the end of the second tune, throwing a bVI chord in as a passing chord before the final V chord (vi - bVI - V — I: F#m - (F) - E — A). I didn’t list that in the chord chart because it’s a passing chord and conflicts with the melody at that spot, but it’s there in the recording. Even if you are trying to make experimental, new-music types of music where you are trying not to base off of existing genres, you will need to find some musical limits to keep a given piece coherent.
You can set up expectations in a piece, then intentionally subvert them by doing something unexpected to add interest to a piece of music. In fact, you should do this to some extent - if a piece could be predicted completely from the beginning, it tends to be boring. But you do need to set expectations to do that. If you never let people build expectations then they can’t be artfully surprised when you break them, they’ll just be confused and have a hard time understanding the piece. I wish I could find a copy of a Form series from composer Terry Dwyer called “Structure your Music”. I’ve wanted to reference it a couple of times in this set of tips, but it appears to be offline now. Terry Dwyer wrote a series of articles for the Garritan forum back in the days when it was hosted by NorthernSounds (back in the mid-late 2000s), which I used to learn about how form in music works before I took classes in that topic. One of the points he made from the beginning is that form is a balancing act between predictability and novelty. If everything is predictable, a piece is boring; if everything is novel all the time, a piece is incomprehensible. Making a piece predictable requires some level of repetition, and then you can start to repeat something but not follow through all the way. Sonata form shows this in many ways. One example is that in the exposition (the beginning of the main part of the piece), you modulate to a related key for the 2nd theme, and then in the recapitulation (where the first part comes back near the end), you appear to start modulating but then it comes back around to the first key again and the 2nd theme is in the main key. This is a surprise itself in the form, though of course these days sonata form is so widely known and used that doing that is itself predictable.
All this is to say that in our world now where anyone can make use of anything in music, setting limits on yourself for a piece is necessary to make a coherent, understandable piece of music. It can also help you overcome “blank page” syndrome, where the possibility of doing anything is paralyzing because you don’t know where to start. Make some basic choices, and that will help narrow down your options so that you eventually go from “anything’s possible” to an actual piece of music.
Limits as an Improvisation Tool: I recently spoke with fiddler / fiddle teacher (and Berklee alum) Andy Reiner for a paper I was writing at CSUN this past semester about teaching improvisation in college, and he had a comment about this “Limitations” idea. He told me that when he teaches improv to people who have never tried it before, he often starts them off with a “single-note improv” exercise, where they keep the pitch the same but vary other parameters of their improvisation to see how flexible music can be even when you take away pitch as a dimension. Some other parameters that come to my mind immediately in this regard are rhythm, accent (dynamics), vibrato, articulation (both at the beginning of a note and at the end of a note, something people often overlook), and even playing technique - change to pizzicato rather than bowing a note on a violin, or slap tongue on a saxophone, etc. Then you can add pitch in again after that, but you’ll have a better appreciation of everything else that goes into playing a piece of music, which sometimes get overshadowed by the dominance of pitch in many traditional ways of teaching music today, and it will expand how you perceive music.
Change over time: The human perception system, including hearing, tracks change over time, developed as a survival mechanism. If an element of your environment stays constant, it is unlikely to become life-threatening randomly unless something changes. This relates to music in that our attention is captured by change even in non-life-threatening conditions. Music is interesting when it changes, if a note stays constant it will fade into the background and some other element will come up instead. When writing, you can control the listener’s attention by holding certain elements constant and picking the right time to make a more or less severe change. See Alan Belkin’s writings for more on gradations of change - he mentions this concept several times in his essays and particularly his textbook Musical Composition: Craft and Art (which is probably the single best book about composition as opposed to music theory I’ve ever read - highly recommended!).
For a really extreme example of this change over time phenomenon, check out John Cage’s piece "Organ2 - ASLSP”, which is currently being performed in a performance scheduled to take place over 639 years. This organ plays the same notes for sometimes years at a time, during which you won’t hear much about it, and then when a note changes, there will be a “big” media splash around the event, followed by more periods where most people even in the classical music world forget about it for months or years at a time.
Acoustic instruments have generally developed in such a way that there is always at least a little change - vibrato, fluctuations in volume or pitch, etc. This is one giveaway when you are using computer virtual instruments and not live players - that the music is too static. Even when you are using electronic synthesizers in non-acoustic music, it is best to try to develop patches that change over time, either with envelopes and LFOs or with performance controls (and make sure you use them if you do it with performance controls - these would be things like mod wheel, pitch bend, velocity, Midi CCs through sliders or knobs, foot pedals, breath control if you have a wind or breath controller etc.). You will have to intentionally build movement into synth patches (or use presets that do) - synthesizers by default are generally very static sound generators.
By the way, acoustic musicians do have to be taught to properly control the changes that our instruments can make. Most people play too statically anyway and have to be encouraged to make more movement in their sound, and then they also need to learn how to direct the movement in a way that enhances the music rather than being random or even detracting from it. The instruments are not static, but they can be used more or less effectively. This is where the idea of “natural” phrasing comes in, and even though we call it natural, we still talk about it explicitly all the time in orchestra rehearsals I’ve been part of. Another way we talk about it is “shaping the music”. The two second version is to grow into tension and relax out of it, which in much of the music we play means growing for two bars and relaxing for two bars (in four bar phrases), though that’s not the only way to do it.
Music as a sonic experience: One thing to keep in mind is that music is sound (see General Musicianship tip no. 2). Music first and foremost should sound interesting. Some composers fall too much under the spell of music theory, and start writing from a theory-first approach, which can lead to pieces where you have to know the theoretical background to get anything out of the piece. I think this is highly problematic, and honestly is probably one reason why “modern classical” music is disdained by so many people today. This is not to say that you can’t write music that you appreciate more if you know the theory than if you don’t, but if you can’t appreciate it at all without knowing the theory, then I think the piece has failed. I think that you get a lot more out of earlier classical music when you have an understanding of what the composers were doing, but the pieces also sound good without that knowledge (note that “sound good” isn’t the same as “sound pretty”, and doesn’t even have to mean “tonal”, though I haven’t been a huge fan of most serial music that I’ve heard to date - the one I did like was an action cue in a film score where the chaos was part of the point!). My favorite pieces tend to be the ones I like the best even without the score in front of me.
On Originality in Music: This tip deserves a post of its own, and is probably the tip I would get the most pushback on, but I think some people make too much of originality in music. I think you should strive to bring something of your own to your music, but the idea I get from some people that “writing music that sounds a bit like anything else that already exists is bad” is over the top. I’ve had some people say to me that they don’t want to listen to any other music or study music theory in any way because they’re afraid that they’ll become “cookie-cutter composers”, and while you can let that happen, it doesn’t have to be that way. I have some news for you - if you are in a position to read this tip, you’ve already been influenced by other people’s music. Learning the theory will help you understand it so you can write in that style if you’d like, but it will also help you figure out how you’ve been influenced and what you might want to take from any style and what you might not want to take from it.
I think a better approach is rather than hiding from other people’s music, listen to everything (or as much as you can - there’s a lot of music in the world!). And I mean music well outside of any one tradition - Capital-M Music is about expanding your awareness of music so you can draw on more styles and think of music more broadly by playing a variety of instruments. Composer Ryan Leach has a nice video where he talks about the idea of personal voice in music, and I like his take that your original music should be the music you want to write, not the music you think other people want you to write or what they say they want you to write [disclosure - Ryan was my first internship supervisor when I came out to LA after Berklee and is a fellow Berklee film scoring alum from a few years before me]. I should note of course that if you are in a class then you need to write the assignment the teacher gave you if you want a good grade(!) but when writing your music for yourself, don’t feel pressured to write something just because you think it’s what you’re “supposed” to write (or perharps more to the point, don’t feel pressured not to write something just because it sounds a bit like something else if that’s what you want to write). It’s very hard to force a personal sound, but if you listen to a lot of music and write or otherwise make a lot of your own music, you will naturally start to develop your own sound from the parts of your pieces you like the best. It can’t happen overnight, but if you stay active in the world of Music, it will come eventually and you might not even notice it.
I think the fiddle group that I’m aware of that has been most successful at forging an original voice while still recognizably being in a tradition is the late Pete Sutherland’s group Pete’s Posse. They released several albums, and I think their final album “Ya Know, Ya Never Know” from 2020 was their best synthesis of their sound and tradition. They did this in large part by mixing elements of several sub-genres of roots / folk / fiddle music (whatever you want to call the overarching style). They were most obviously influenced by a mix of American Appalachian Old-Time and New England Old-Time fiddle music, but they had elements of Quebecois / French Canadian fiddle music (particularly the intricate foot-tapping from that tradition, which is used as a percussion instrument and not just to keep time), as well as traditional Irish and Scottish fiddling. They even had a not insignificant pop music influence, particularly in some of the piano chord progressions they used, and their use of synthesizers / electric pianos, in particular the (in)famous “E. Piano 1” patch from the Yamaha DX7 that graced so many 80s Ballads (see my Synthesis Guide (FM Synthesis section) for more about the DX7). They also played a wide variety of instruments between the three regular members of the group, including (twin) fiddles, old-time clawhammer banjo, guitar, mandolin, piano, foot-tapping, multi-part harmony vocals (sometimes a capella with foot tapping), and even jaw harp. They really embraced something like my “Capital-M Music” philosophy (though they did that before I wrote this set of papers!), and it shows in the quality and the qualities of their music!
Philosophy of Music Theory
On Abstraction: Music theory is all about abstraction. My very first tip at the top of this guide (General Musicianship Tip No. 1) is about abstraction, and there’s a reason it’s at the top of this guide. It is very easy in music, especially at first, to get lost in the notes and miss the larger points that give notes meaning. Learning to be a strong musician means getting good at abstraction and seeing the patterns in music over the notes themselves. I was recently showing one of my students that I can play an E on the piano, but that will be the third scale degree in C Major (Mi in our moveable Do solfege) and the 5th scale degree in A Major (Sol in our moveable Do solfege). The note is the same, but the meaning is different. Therefore the meaning is in the pattern, not the note. In this case the pattern in question is a scale, but there are lots of other possible ways to abstract music too. Here’s an interesting little example I came up with. This is a chord progression [another type of pattern] with a constant E upper pedal but the chords changing and making the E mean something different against each chord, both in theory terms as intervals and in mood.
When I hear music today, I’m usually hearing the patterns and not so much the individual notes. I know that I’m in the key of A or the key of D (in much of my fiddle music, for example), but I’m not thinking so much about F#s or G#s, I’m thinking about the 6th or 7th scale degrees (in A) instead (really I’m thinking of both of those things simultaneously - I am very aware that I’m playing an F#). I wish more teachers of classes like Harmony and Musicianship said this point out loud, because this is what you should be getting from those classes, and really from every general music class you take in a college music school.
I’m taking a class this semester (Spring 2024) at CSUN called Seminar in [Graduate] Music Analysis, and in this class our professor Dr. Liviu Marinescu made some of the points I made above, that the meaning in music is in the relationships between the notes, not the notes themselves. He proved this to us by asking how much we’d pay to listen to a piece that was just a single short Eb. The answer: nothing. If we added another note, a D, then it gets just a little more interesting, and if we add another D with a pause, it starts to mean something more specific. If you repeat that figure again, it starts to do something, and then we do it a third time and jump up to Bb at the end of the third time and now we have the opening motive of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, which needs to go somewhere. We can develop that idea and the piece actually has meaning. But any one of those notes alone would be meaningless, it’s only in the pattern that meaning develops. If you take that phrase out of context and raise it by a step, the meaning doesn’t really change because the intervalic pattern is the same. Note that if you do that in a context with the first version of the phrase, then the act of repeating it up a step does have meaning in relation to the first version (a sequence), and in fact Mozart does that in this piece - note that it’s “in relation to” - another abstraction, or pattern. But this is both how we can recognize the same piece in different transpositions, and also how we can make so many millions of pieces of music with only 12 pitches to work with (in our standard Western tradition). Note also in particular that rhythm plays a huge role in all of this, and also uses its own patterns. A large part of the meaning of the Mozart example is in the rhythm, not just the specific notes (you’ll notice I mentioned a pause after the third note, and that’s very important!). See below (next section) for a rather detailed exploration of rhythm.
Applied Counterpoint - I was given the opportunity to write a duet part for one of our tunes at the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles for our 2024 show. Around that same time I was tutoring the counterpoint class at CSUN, and it occurred to me that my duet part writing was an example of straightforward applied counterpoint. I sometimes get the sense that counterpoint is the least relatable of the standard music theory classes for students (harmony, form, counterpoint, instrumentation/orchestration), particularly given the way that we often teach it. You have to learn a lot of esoteric rules and apply them in a rather rigid structure, often in a style of music that seems remote from many people’s musical experience today (more or less Renaissance through Baroque period examples, up through about J.S. Bach). So it can be hard to see how it relates to the music you will write. It’s nice when I can show students that I actually make use of the techniques in my real life projects today. You can relax some of the more rigid rules once you get out of the class, but knowing what they are can help you figure out why something sounds off in your writing sometimes.
I also sometimes wonder if the teachers ever tell the students what the big picture is - in this case, that the point is to make your parts sound independent and not just like transpositions of each other, and also to learn to write smoother lines for the different parts that are both easier and more interesting to play / sing and easier for the listeners to follow. This goes with voice leading in harmony class, and voice leading actually comes out of counterpoint originally. Parallel octaves and fifths are frowned on because those are the intervals of the second and third harmonics in the harmonic series, so the upper voice gets swallowed by the lower voice’s upper harmonics and they lose their independence (they are often described as “hollow” sounding intervals in part for this reason). Parallel dissonances are awkward because they obscure the harmonic progression. Sometimes just hearing some of these ideas helps students get past their confusion, and seeing examples of real-world use of the techniques helps students see why we still teach these topics. I also use these techniques in every chamber and orchestral piece I write, for counterlines to add interest to the music. The other overarching reason to study counterpoint is that it’s the closest we get in the standard music theory regime to teaching melody writing.
How to Read a Score (or lots of other things): I can’t teach you to be a good score reader in a short tip, but I can give a couple of pointers. I’ve mentioned several times in this tips list that music is patterns and if you can learn to see and hear the patterns it will be helpful (see particularly General Musicianship Tip No. 1). Many people when they first see an orchestral score wonder how you are supposed to read all those lines and keep track of anything. The answer is that there aren’t really 15 lines of music simultaneously. Usually there are maybe three or four things happening at any given point in time: a melody, a bass line, some kind of background texture which could be sustained chords or pulsing chords among other options, and then maybe some kind of counterline. There are lots of other ways to arrange things, but most of them will follow a similar arrangement in that there are not as many things happening as there are lines of music in the score. Players will double these elements at the unison or octave, or perhaps other intervals (the chords mentioned above, or maybe playing a harmony line to the melody a third above or below the actual melody, etc).
Eventually you will get to the point where you can glance at a score page and see the various elements in that way rather than as 15 different lines. To get there just takes practice, and reading / listening to lots of scores to get used to the way this music works. You can also try starting with something simpler than full orchestra - try a string quartet, for example. Then try a smaller orchestral score like a Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven Symphony. Mendelssohn is often recommended early on as well, because his orchestration tends to be clean and pretty clear (a tip I got from Alan Belkin’s guides - see “Learning Orchestration from the Repertoire” here).
How this relates to other things is that there are many times where you can either see lots of individual elements or larger groupings of elements. One of my other favorite examples in music is when people come up to a mix or live sound engineer and ask “how do you know what all those knobs do [on the mixing board]”? The answer is that while you see 500 knobs and sliders, I see 48 channel strips, each of which is the same as the other 47. So I only have to know one channel strip, which has maybe 15-20 knobs etc, and I know “what all those knobs do”. Even then it’s easier than that, as several of those knobs will be EQ parameters, and others will be compressor parameters, then we’ll have send level knobs for send effects, etc, so we really only have maybe 5 categories of things to know. Of course, you’ll also have to learn how to use an equalizer or compressor, and what send and insert effects do, but that’s a separate process from learning to read the board.
Another example I remember from my electronics class at Berklee is electronic schematic diagrams. These can be incomprehensible to the untrained eye, with potentially hundreds or thousands of components on them, but my professor would glance at one and say, “over here I see the power supply, and that’s a distortion unit, etc.” He was seeing the larger groups (the patterns), not the individual components.
Some Difficulties with Music Theory: Music theory isn’t actually that difficult for the most part. This may not be that helpful if you are struggling with it right now, but there are two primary ways that people get tripped up by music theory: It has a lot of vocabulary, and it’s cumulative. The vocabulary can be intimidating for the student. Like many fields, the terms we use are not always self-explanatory (and even when they are you often have to know the underlying terminology).
My favorite example of this is the Neapolitan 6th (N6) chord in classical chromatic tonal harmony (and even those last 4 words are words you’d have to know too). This chord is usually covered in a Harmony 2 class most of the time, which is where they introduce chromatic alterations to diatonic tonal harmony (harmony where we stay inside a particular scale with no accidentals). The Neapolitan chord is a fancy and non-self-explanatory word for what you could otherwise call the bII chord (“flat-two [major] chord”). That’s more self-explanatory, and that’s what they call it in the version of jazz harmony we got at Berklee (though I should note that the two uses of the bII chord in jazz harmony (bIImaj7 and SubV7) are different from classical Neapolitan chords). It just means that we lower the 2nd scale degree by a half step from its normal position, then build a major triad on top of it. The 2nd scale degree in both major and minor scales is a whole-step above the first scale degree, so the bII scale degree is a half-step above the first scale degree. Even with this explanation, you need to know what I mean by scale degrees, and half-steps and whole-steps. You can see how the terminology can get in the way of someone who has never studied music before in this manner. To finish the N6 explanation, we need to know what we mean by 6th. This is actually also interesting, because there are at least three ways that musicians use specifically the (arabic) number 6 (figured bass, as an interval, and in pop/jazz chord symbols to make a four note chord adding the sixth scale degree to a major or minor triad). In this case, it refers to the figured bass / roman numeral harmonic analysis use of the number 6 to mean “first-inversion” (and now you need to know what first-inversion means!). First inversion refers to a chord voicing where the third of our chord is the lowest note (the “bass voice”) of our harmony. So the N6 chord is a bII chord with the third in the bass. A few of other things to know about the N6 chord are that it is most common in minor-key harmony, has a subdominant (or predominant) function, resolves with a particular voice leading pattern to a V or V7 chord, which then goes to a i chord (or a I chord with mode mixture).
You can also see from this explanation how music theory can be cumulative. Even as we started to peel away some of the words above, I needed to define the words I used in those explanations too (and there were further words I didn’t bother defining in that explanation, but it can keep going from there…). If you can build up your theory knowledge one step at a time, and learn what the various words mean, the underlying concepts are usually not terribly difficult. If you get too far ahead of yourself, or start to fall behind in your class, it can quickly start to seem overwhelming.
(A quick story - I applied to several colleges and universities when I was looking for my undergraduate college, and we went and did tours and classes at most of them as part of the college search process. One that I went to was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and for whatever reason, the class they had me as a high school student sit in on was Harmony 4. I don’t know whose idea it was to do this or what they knew about me in advance, but from my perspective today that was a really dangerous move. Another kid could have been turned off entirely from the concept of studying music in college by doing that. As it happens, I had already studied enough music theory to not be completely lost or overwhelmed by being thrown in the deep end of a harmony 4 class, but many people would not have handled that well. They were discussing pitch classes and set theory that day, and I was able to follow it a little bit but not that much. I still remember that today (in a negative way), and I didn’t go to UIUC, but I also wasn’t turned off from music (though I’ve never fallen in love with many twentieth-century harmony techniques or concepts either). Berklee, on the other hand, decided to have me sit in on the Introduction to Film Scoring class when we visited, which was just about the perfect class for a prospective film scoring major to sit in on, and I did go to Berklee and I took that class with the same professor I had sat in with a couple years prior (Joe Smith), and even chose him for my final capstone portfolio class as a graduating senior (Directed Studies in Film Scoring / Film Scoring Seminar as they called it). That’s how they should do it!]
In an actual class, they should play you the basic chords, and then they will show you musical examples that use these concepts to help cement them in your mind, and hopefully they will play them too so you can begin to connect the notation to the sound and start to both see and hear the patterns we’re talking about. See several of my other tips for more on that concept - General Musicianship Tip No. 1+2, Philosophy of Theory Tip No. 1 above this one, and probably more - this really is a concept I come back to over and over again! To demonstrate the Neapolitan 6th chord, go look at (and listen to or play) Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata (Op. 27 No. 2) - in the introduction to that piece, he famously uses an N6 chord (beat 3+4 of m. 3 - 0:15 in this video, which includes the score.)
Another way in which vocabulary can get in the way is when different groups of musicians use the same word to mean different kinds of things. The word “Voicing” is the example that jumps out to me here - I first learned it in a composition music theory context, where it means “the specific notes that you choose to use for a chord”. A C major triad is the pitches C, E, and G, but you can use any C, E, or G for that chord. If you are interested in (a lot) more detail about this topic, I’ve prepared a separate guide to the basics of chord voicing here. Jazz piano players often also talk about this, as they often get to choose how to “voice” their chords in this sense from the lead sheet.
But classical piano players are more likely to talk about voicing a chord for dynamics. They use it to mean which note gets emphasized relative to the others - bringing out a particular “voice” in the chord. Usually it’s the melody note that gets voiced, but that can be on top, or in the middle, or on the bottom. I was very confused when I got back into piano more seriously a few years ago, because suddenly words I thought I knew didn’t seem to mean what I thought they did anymore. In string playing in orchestra or chamber music, we have the same concept but we call it “balancing” the chord.
Finally, piano technicians also use the word “Voicing”, but here they mean checking the piano to be sure that the hammers are the right hardness so that if you use the same force on a key, you get a similar sound on all the keys, and also setting the hardness so the overall brightness of the instrument is set as desired (within a range - you can’t make a very dark piano super bright, or vice versa, but you can adjust that a little bit).
Music Theory Across Genres: One more issue with theory is that different types of music can use different versions of theory, some of which are related but not the same. Even within a genre this can be an issue. I was trained in among other things standard college music theory, which is most heavily based on the keyboard music of the “Common Practice” period - a fancy phrase that refers to the musical practices of European art music between the end of the 17th century and the 19th century, maybe the first decade or two of the twentieth - composers pushed the boundaries all along but mostly stayed in a recognizably related system of practice until about 1920 or so. Orchestral music can also be described with a basically similar approach, though it isn’t identical. [Sidenote for a second, but this is another way in which college music school often shows a classical bias. This time period was the “common practice” period for European art music, but other genres had a similar concept at other times. American jazz had a similar common practice concept from around 1920 to 1950 or so (maybe a little later), and this period and the songs that come out of it are sometimes referred to as “The Great American Songbook”.]
But if you are primarily a string performance major, then the theory that applies to you is almost the same but again, subtly different - mainly because you will have to think about how your part fits into the overall ensemble texture in a way that solo keyboard doesn’t have to. They have to think about how to create a complete and properly balanced piece with one person rather than how to be one element of a larger piece. The basic theory is the same for all of that, but you need a slightly different emphasis depending on how you are going to use it. Composers need a version of both of those, but are closer to keyboard theory, because in both cases one person (the pianist and the composer) has to figure out how to use different planes of tone, to use another Alan Belkin phrase, to play or create an overall piece of music. I think of composition theory as being more or less all-encompassing because composers need to decide how to use all the instruments at their disposal in any particular context, and therefore to know how the different instruments are often used. But the fact that keyboard theory and composition theory are so closely connected is one reason why many composers are primarily pianists for their instruments (or perhaps why so many pianists become composers relative to the number of violinists or flautists who become composers). It doesn’t hurt that the keyboard is such a good way to learn theory, so that all composers really ought to have at least some keyboard skills (I mention this in other tips, like composition tip no. 7, and in the Multi-Instrumentalism section of the main paper).
When you get to other genres of “popular” music (a term usually used to contrast with “art” music, which most people call “classical” music), the theory is again often related to classical tonal harmony, but modes sometimes become more important, and again, there will be more substantial differences in other ways. In classical tonal harmony, the base unit of harmony is the triad or three note chord, and we add the seventh to make more interesting chords sometimes - mostly for the dominant 7th chord and diminished / half diminished seventh chords, and only rarely for other kinds. In jazz and the many other styles related to that side of popular music (which we also had at Berklee), the base unit of harmony is the seventh chord, and major seventh or minor seventh chords are as common as others (and we rename the half-diminished seventh chord to the “minor seven flat 5” chord - Gm7(b5), for example). The notes we then add for interest are tensions, continuing up in thirds - the 9th, the 11th (sometimes), and the 13th, and the 9th and 13th can both also be “flatted” (and the 9th and 11th can be “sharped” as well). This just means that we lower (for flatted) or raise (for sharped) the note in question by a half step compared to its diatonic pitch. You can find 9ths and 13ths in Romantic era tonal harmony as well, but there they usually resolve in a particular way that they don’t have to in jazz and pop contexts. Similar notes in classical twentieth century harmony are sometimes called color tones, not tensions, and they are used in slightly different ways.
It is complicated in a different way in other genres outside of classical because you can often use classical terminology, but the players who are steeped primarily in those traditions will talk about it with different words. I found this to be the case when I started studying Appalachian Old-Time banjo music. I could talk about what I was doing with my primarily classical terminology, but if I wanted to read books or watch videos from other primarily banjo players, I had to learn how they talked about it. Most of the original players of this music didn’t have formal training in European art music, so they invented their own words for some of the same concepts and came up with concepts that didn’t exist in art music, which other people then also relabeled in a European manner when they went to the old-time artists and tried to learn from them. This is one thing I mean when I say in the "Multi-Genreism” section of the main paper that you should take new genres on their own terms and not try to force them into what you already know. It’s too easy to look down on other genres as being “less” than your existing genre when actually they are just different. You know what’s best at sounding like classical music? Classical music. Old-Time music isn’t really “less” than that, it’s just not as good as classical music at sounding like classical music. But classical music isn’t as good at sounding like old-time music as old-time music is!
(Multi-Genreism continued).: This sometimes comes up in other contexts too. I often hear classical musicians look down on a lot of modern pop music specifically because the harmony is less complex - some genres of electronic dance music sit on one chord the whole time. One way to look at that is to say that this is a clear sign of the superiority of classical music and the much greater knowledge of music that classical composers “must” have. But the other option is that harmonic progression isn’t the point of those genres of dance music, and maybe they do something else interesting instead. Many of those genres have more complex timbral shifts within certain sounds than most classical instruments do. I could look at solo piano music and scoff at how narrow the range of timbral possibility is compared to many electronic synthesizers, and show how “obviously superior” the sonic knowledge of the people who use synthesizers is compared to the impoverished sense of timbre that those poor piano composers had. If you just bristled at that assessment of solo piano music, then I think I just proved my point 🙂.
There is no doubt a lot of poorly conceived music in the world - but that applies to classical music as much as anything else. Several times I’ve seen people moan about how pathetic modern music is. I once even saw someone say that “all” music used to be good (in historical classical musical periods), and now there’s so much (usually popular music) trash that we’ve clearly fallen dramatically. The difference is that it has been at least many decades, and potentially several centuries since those times, and the “trash” has been forgotten (along with a lot of good music that for many varied reasons also got left by the wayside). You can find historical examples in every period of people complaining about the degeneracy of modern music, and classical music specifically has been “dying” for at least 400 years (for context, that’s well before the rise of the modern conception of the orchestra, which arguably dates back to the time of late Haydn and Mozart - call it ~250 years ago). It’s still here today, and some version of it will no doubt survive into the future as well.
(Previous point continued, re: multi-instrumentalism): I find that when I’m playing different instruments they tend to direct me down different routes when improvising or composing. I tend to do more with harmonic progression when I’m improvising at the piano, whereas I tend to do more with melody or groove when I’m doing free improv on the violin or viola, and messing with synthesizers tends to direct me to explore timbre in more substantive ways, often though by no means exclusively in a drone context. I can do all of those with any of my instruments, sometimes more successfully than other times, but they have niches that they tend to fill by default. Of course, one of the best ways to learn something new and grow as a musician is to try something against the “natural grain” of any given instrument’s approach to music, and if you always do the same thing every time it gets old for both the player and the listeners quickly, so keeping an open mind and going down new paths of exploration should be encouraged.
Is AI Art Really Art? Here’s another potentially controversial point! Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI or Gen AI) has come a long way in the past few years. It can now create passable “original” art in many different fields of art. But it isn’t clear to me that this is really art, or at least it isn’t clear to me that any human can lay claim to being an artist by using Generative AI tools.
I saw something on Facebook recently from someone who said they hoped that in the future it would be seen as a kind of “ableism” to say that someone using a Generative AI tool to create something wasn’t an artist. I strongly disagree with this idea. I think there needs to be some nuance here, but to put it in extreme terms to start with:
Someone typing a text prompt into a music Gen AI tool and saying “Make me a 3:22 hip-hop track with a high-energy beat in the style of ___ (Drake, etc.)” is literally doing the same job that music supervisor clients for my production music library company do. They send us briefs with some text, and even some examples of tracks they like, and then we look in our library and see if we have something to match that and send them several possible tracks. Hopefully they then pick one and license it from us, but at no point does anyone seriously think that they are composers because they prompted us to send them some (pre-composed) tracks.
This is no different from typing in a text prompt into a Gen AI music system, and having the system create you 15 possible tracks matching your prompt (your brief), and then you pick one and go with it (or you send it back and say “I liked this one the best but it’s still not quite right, and here’s why…” We’ve had clients do similar things too). It may be true that no one else in the world has quite the same track that you do, but you no more composed it than our library clients did. Maybe a better way to think about this is that you were a client commissioning a track from a composer (the AI system) - you get a unique track but some(thing) else composed it.
So where should the nuance come in? I’ve established to my satisfaction that full Gen AI that makes tracks of music from text prompts doesn’t make the prompter an artist (or at least doesn’t make them a composer), but I don’t think that rules out entirely using AI tools to assist in composing. To look at a version of this that isn’t AI to start with, I have issues with people using pre-existing loops and stringing them together and calling it composing, but I have less of a problem with doing that with percussive elements of a bigger track, for example. In many styles of popular music, the drum grooves are pretty similar, and you can either make your own loops for them, or use pre-existing loops. In many cases the result will be pretty much the same. You might put together two loops, or add a little element here or there to make it a little different, but I don’t think you should say you are not a composer for doing that as long as you don’t take someone’s pre-existing loop, use only that, and then say you composed it (doing that, by the way, would be considered copyright infringement, similar to plagiarism in writing prose). If you add other elements on top of that, then you can still say you composed something. Even if you only added several pre-existing loops together in a way that they weren’t before, you might still call that composing of a sort. The more melodic you get, the harder it is for me to accept you as a composer if you are using pre-existing melodies. At best you might be able to call that arranging depending on how you do it.
This might also apply to newer systems such as “AI” chord generators. I still think it’s worth studying harmony and other music theory courses yourself and becoming familiar with how chord progressions work and what some of the common progressions are in whatever genre you are learning, but if you do something interesting with the chord progression yourself then you can probably still call yourself a composer. I don’t think that using the “Lament Bass” chord progression should necessarily mark you as “not a composer” just because you didn’t come up with the progression from scratch. It might be a cliché, but it can still be effective. Using AI to generate progressions that you then work with similarly could still be viable. Somewhere between there and full blown Gen AI prompt systems is where I draw the line. If you don’t need to have any formal training (whether from a teacher, or books, videos, etc), or even any time spent messing with making music yourself using an instrument or recording yourself in some form, then I’m not convinced that you can call yourself a composer, or say that you are exhibiting your own musical self-expression.
One other thing that irks me on a purely commercial basis is that it’s not clear to me how to stop people from using Gen AI systems like this, taking the tracks as output, registering them with BMI or ASCAP and collecting writers royalties for those tracks without ever putting in any work towards actually becoming a composer. Of course, some people try to do that already - I’ve heard of production companies insisting on taking part of the royalties as a condition for licensing a track from a library or artist (which isn’t supposed to be allowed, but again, it’s hard to stop it if people are willing to give it to them). You will often see pop songs in particular that have 5+ writers listed, including people who probably didn’t have any actual writing role in the project. People used to talk about someone “adding the tambourine part” to get writer credit, but nowadays there’s often not even the real pretense that someone wrote something. But AI allows this at scale, and while you still have to get usage to generate royalties, the mere fact that there might not be anyone actually involved in really writing a track that gets paid for it rubs me the wrong way even more than all of those other versions of this. Someone at the production company can use these systems, and not only not have to pay a composer or library for the track, but actually pocket our royalties instead, which doesn’t seem very fair to me!
(AI Continued): Dr. John Mortensen has a video out recently where he says:
“Music is not really a commodity that we want to create through labor-saving devices. Now, some people do just want to generate garbage through AI and put it in the background of a video and not lift a finger, but most people who are really interested in music don’t want too much labor-saving technology. They want to do the work themselves. They want to understand and do the work by hand rather than having it taken away from them…
What does it mean to be a human, and to be alive in the world and working? How do we find meaning in this? It’s not by surrendering the learning and the work of music to labor saving technology, it’s by engaging in it ourselves and getting dirt under our fingernails and breaking a sweat. It’s actually really fun and it gives meaning…It’s a way of being human, and a way of being in the world.” (5:48 in the video)
I agree with everything he says in this quote, but I’m not sure it was the musicians who were asking for the labor-saving technology. He gives a hint himself here - it might be the people who paid us previously who might want to not pay us anymore, especially if they could take some of the money that we were collecting before… I hope that music remains viable, and I certainly think it will continue in some form as a human pursuit, but it might just get ever more difficult to make a living with it. It’s never been easy, but they certainly aren’t trying to make it easier! I actually don’t think that money is the main reason to do music, and as I mentioned in the introduction to [Capital-M] Music, I will continue to make music no matter what happens because it’s simply who I am. But in our hyper-capitalist society, it’s easier to convince many people that they should continue to support the arts if it seems like you could make money with it, and it’s certainly nicer to get paid for the hours of work that you do than to not get paid for that! You can’t put as many hours in if they are unpaid, because you still need money from somewhere to keep a roof over your head and keep food on the table, which are also nice things for human survival :-).
I just recently saw an ad on Facebook for a synthesizer in Reason Studio that generates bass lines, and the ad copy said “Reason Studios analyzed hundreds of real-world basslines to reverse engineer how they work so well and how they can work for your next track - so you don’t have to” (emphasis mine). They must have missed the point that I actually want to - that wasn’t a problem to be solved! I think there probably are people who think that sounds great, but that’s actually an immediate reason for me not to get such a product, as I mostly want to make my own music, at least when I’m using computer synthesizers. I don’t need it to sound like something no one’s ever heard before, but I don’t want to use tools specifically designed to make me sound like everyone else, or tools designed to do the “work” of composing for me. This is part of what I like about composing, but that’s literally the way that these Gen AI tools work - they analyze existing material, statistically average it, then generate output based on that, possibly tweaked based on some additional parameters you give them. But when I make music, I want it to be the music I wanted to make, not the music that a system thought might be a useful average of everything else.
Some people in the commercial music world do have a very mercenary attitude about it, doing whatever they need to do to maximize profits at whatever cost to their artistic (and sometimes personal) integrity. Other people are “artists” to such an extent that the idea that someone even could make money with music seems foreign to them, and they do want their music to sound as unique as possible. I’m in the middle between those - I am fine with doing creative work for profit (I do that myself), but I want anything I do in that regard to be my own work, even if it’s based in some cases on my own internal version of averaging some things that already exist. I would actually think of this as becoming familiar with the style of music in question and learning what makes it work, so you can use characteristic elements of the style in your own projects, and push the boundaries a bit in various ways to make it your own. That can be subtle or dramatic depending on the project you are doing and your personal taste, but you have to know the norms for the style yourself before you can do that. I’d like to think that I bring enough of myself to any projects I do and they don’t just sound like everything else, but at least I feel like I came up with it in any particular project and I didn’t have a computer generate output that I then tweaked lightly and passed off as my own “original” work. There is too little artistic integrity in such an approach for me, which is something of the point of this “tip”. See also General Tips Tip No. 10 for more on this idea in the world of writing papers for school, something I’m doing again, where some similar ideas apply.
Some people go so far as to talk about AI auto-generating content for you as a consumer based on either what you tell it you want now, or what it thinks you want (for example from a service like Spotify), but I don’t know that I want that experience as a consumer of media, let alone as a creator of it. I think it would seem cool for a minute, maybe even a week, but once the novelty wears off there’s nothing of interest in music that is tailored precisely to what you like or want all the time. The interest in music comes from the way that an artist subverts your expectations. That can go too far, and music that doesn’t satisfy your expectations sufficiently doesn’t establish any patterns which they can then “artfully” break, but if you could always predict with certainty what the next thing would be, the music would be boring. There is a potential commercial use for music like that, sometimes referred to (often derisively) as “sonic wallpaper”, but it’s fairly limited and is not really that interesting either to make or to listen to in most contexts. It takes the concept of “functional music” to the extreme, and while you might be able to make some money with it in the short term, you are probably going to drive yourself nuts after writing it for just a short time and want to go back to something more satisfying. This is one difference between the commercial and art music worlds, but even in the commercial space it’s nice to have something more intellectually and artistically satisfying. This also is an area that AI probably will take over in the near-ish future, and I’m not sure that we should be too sorry to see that go, unless you were making a living writing music in that manner.
By the way, the fact that it takes thousands of hours of hard, focused practice to become a good performing musician, or dozens to hundreds of pieces (again, thousands of hours of work) to get to be a good composer isn’t a problem or some inefficiency to “solve”. It’s part of the point. Many musicians like the process most of the time - if we didn’t, we’d quit! (And I also know many who have…). Even when it’s frustrating and you’re beating your head against a wall because you just can’t get this one passage to flow smoothly, or you can’t find the right way to modulate between sections and you’ve just deleted the third attempt at your transition section in a piece (or your 43rd attempt!) you are aware enough of the overall picture to persevere and the reward at the end makes all the toil worth it. That reward is at least as much “soul-satisfaction” as it is financial - you don’t need to be a paid professional to experience it, and if money is really primarily what you’re after, you probably won’t survive in this field long enough to get there. Music can’t just be about a job to pay the bills, it needs to be something burning inside you to put up with all the other nonsense that goes with it to make it worth it (although I will point out that “all the other nonsense” goes with every other job too, and I’ve never met anyone who’s done any job who didn’t have stories to tell…). I like to joke that you have to be at least a little crazy or weird to even try to make it in a field like music, but I wouldn’t have it any other way! I know I’m at least a little weird sometimes, and so are all my other friends in the industry, but they’re “my people” and I love that about us! I like nothing better than to spend hours making music with people and talking shop with other composers or performers. To be clear, I don’t mean any of this in a bad way - I think the world would be a far more boring and much less interesting place if we were all the same “normal” people. And frankly, I’m not sure there actually is such a thing as a “normal person” in real life anyway.
Also, If it really were easy to make it in music then we wouldn’t value these skills the way we do (culturally if not always economically!). It’s not elitist to say that someone who puts in the necessary time and energy should be recognized as being better at something than someone who doesn’t (or if it is, then that kind of elitism is good). That shouldn’t devalue the other person, but if you can’t or won’t put in the work, then you shouldn’t get the reward, either social or economic. I’ve spent decades getting where I am today, and so have the other people I know who are proficient at music. I’ve had a lot of fun along the way, and I deeply love making music in a variety of forms, for myself and especially with other people, hence some of the ideas of Capital-M Music! This is a process that never ends, and the journey really is the point. You never actually “win” at music, even if you do win some competitions. My Berklee String Improv professor Eugene Friesen says in his book Improvising for Classical Musicians, “This is not about ‘accomplishing’. This is about internalizing. It takes time, curiosity, and of course, love for music!” (Friesen 32). He was specifically speaking about learning to hear and feel scale degrees by using drone practice (see Ex. 1 in the Musicianship part of my main paper for a similar exercise), but I think this concept applies to many aspects of learning music. But it does take a lot of work to get to a high degree of proficiency.
Holding on the idea of human music for a minute, I remember reading Jeff Rona’s book The Reel World (now in its 3rd edition, though I’ve only read the first two) when I first got interested in film music as a field when I was in high school. That was my favorite of the film scoring books I read back then, and in the section about studio technology there was a chapter called “Sounds Just Like The Real Thing, Until You Listen to the Real Thing”. This was about how to make mockups that you’d present to a director to get approval for a cue before the recording session with the live orchestra, so that if there were any issues, the director or producer could address them before the session so that you weren’t on the podium trying to rewrite the cue with a $10,000 overtime bill hanging over your head. There are always issues - no one expects you to get the cue completely right the first time. But one point of this section was that however realistic you could make your mockup, it always paled in comparison to hearing a cue with live players (or hearing any kind of piece with live players). This was just talking about going from midi mockup to live recording, but it’s even a big difference to go from a recording of human players to hearing a live performance in person, in the same room as the players.
Every time I go to a live concert, I’m reminded that however good our systems are now (and they’ve improved substantially even since I read that section of Rona’s book about 15 years ago in the late 2000s), live performances are still better, and maybe always will be. There’s just something about being in a room with people doing this that makes it more exciting and visceral. Some of it also just can’t be reproduced on a recording very well, especially with a normal playback system. Super deep sub-bass pipe organs (32’ pipes) or even big bass drums make the air throb when you’re in the room with them in a way that your playback system is unlikely to replicate. Just recently I was in the organ practice room at CSUN with a small pipe organ that had a 16’ bass, and even that pipe made the air shake in the small room we were in in a way I don’t get to experience that often. Bass drums and other big bass instruments also generate sound that you feel in your body as much as you hear with your ears. Earbuds simply cannot reproduce that experience physically (they don’t vibrate the air around your body, only in your ear canal), and even big mid- or far-field speakers couldn’t do that quite the same way. If you want to try this, listen to the initial Dies Irae movement of Verdi’s Requiem - I’ve never really found a recording that reproduces those epic bass drum hits correctly, as it’s supposed to punch you in the gut as much as be a big low thud. They can sound pretty cool, but it’s not really the intended effect (the linked recording does sound good, and is actually one of the best I’ve heard on youtube or off, but depending on your playback system it will sound better or worse, and it still won’t sound (or feel) like it would in a hall). Remember that Dies Irae is latin for “Day of Wrath” (Judgment Day) - there’s nothing subtle about this piece of music!
Even in situations that could in theory be reproduced, playing or listening live is still a better experience. At our most recent Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles show in April 2024, we got to play to a full house with Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, one of the most well-known acts in Scottish music in the past couple of decades, and it was one of the best performance experiences of my life to date. I think we played better than we usually do, but the energy and groove that Alasdair and Natalie brought were just intense, and both we and the audience loved it! I’ve been a fan of theirs for several years now, and getting to sit 10 feet away from two of my fiddle-world heroes and watch and listen to them play, let alone to play with them myself, was an experience I am not likely to forget any time soon. I was getting concerned that I was overhyping this concert to myself, being super-excited about it for about six months before it happened, but it lived up to (my) hype! I can’t really have this experience with their recordings, as much as I like them, and computer-based music will never be able to rise to that level or give me an experience even of the same type, let alone the same quality.
Audience feedback is also a crucial aspect of this - one reason that playing in a live concert is such a different experience than producing a studio recording is that the audience can give you real-time feedback and the players will play off of that to a large degree. There’s perhaps less direct feedback in orchestral concerts - usually the audience is supposed to sit there quietly and only make noise at certain (pre-determined) times, clapping at the end of a piece (and not even the end of a movement, though even the “best” audiences sometimes get caught by that - I’ve never played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and not had the audience clap after the first movement, and given the nature of the piece I think that’s appropriate and it would be weird for them not to clap there). Even in a classical context though, the audience does give subtle feedback, and playing in a concert feels different from a run-through at a rehearsal with no audience. One other aspect of this phenomenon is the awareness that you have when you are playing that you can’t “redo” anything - in a rehearsal, even if you are attempting a run-through you can always stop and regroup if necessary, but in a concert setting that’s not a realistic option. Technically you can stop and start again, but the audience will be aware of it and we do our absolute best to not stop in the middle of a concert, so the adrenalin of being “live” itself fuels you as a player in any live performance, classical or otherwise. In other contexts with more direct audience feedback and even participation, you can really feed off the energy from the audience and take your playing to new heights because of that. Recording sessions usually don’t elicit the same feedback as there’s usually not much of an audience present and it’s a more technical setting, and computer midi production is most often done by yourself with no one else present and there’s no feedback from an audience other than what you yourself feel from moment to moment. That’s not nothing, but it’s not at all the same kind of experience, and that’s one of many reasons why I love playing with other people and for other people so much!
Musicianship: Rhythm (under initial construction 3/16/2024 - check back soon for more!)
Note: This guide is deprecated - This guide has gotten so big that I’ve decided to pull it out separately on its own. I’m working on building it out now with notation examples and audio / video of music examples, but until it’s ready I will leave this version here for now. At this point the new version is basically a short, interactive book, and I’m excited to share it once it’s ready! When it’s done (probably over summer 2024), you’ll find it under the Teaching Tab with the other Capital-M Music guides and cross-linked with them too.
I’m writing this tip guide out of order, and I’ve realized after writing many tips for this guide that I really should have a whole section about Musicianship, and in particular about Rhythm. The first section at the top of this guide is called General Musicianship, and has three key takeaways that should sound familiar to my students because I come back to those concepts all the time in our lessons about pretty much any topic we cover in my tutoring sessions. I’ve come back to them several times in this guide! Musicianship cuts across everything else in music, and applies equally to composing, to analysis and to performance and improvisation. You need to have very strong musicianship skills to be a good improviser, because that is basically real-time composing as performance (see Multi-Rolism in my Capital-M Music paper for more on that).
I was emailing with Richard Hannemann about an early version of the main paper, and he mentioned that he considers Musicianship “an over-arching term for all aspects of music knowledge and application thereof -- so playing, performance, theory, composition etc.” (email dated Jan 14, 2024). I use the term in my paper mostly in the sense of Ear Training, as the class I’m tutoring at CSUN corresponds most closely to a class at Berklee called Ear Training. I had what I consider to be my Musicianship Suite my first semester at Berklee - Ear Training 4, String Sight Reading, and String Improvisation.
I consider rhythm to be an absolutely crucial skill for any musician. The tips below will probably be the most technical skill tips in this guide. I’ve been trying to keep it primarily practical life experience, or philosophical ideas about some of the technical side of music (see for instance the last several tips in the Composition section above). But I think it’s worth stopping and examining rhythm with some care, because without strong rhythm you cannot be a good musician, even more than intonation and everything else that goes into making music. Those are all important too, and you can’t be a professional with poor intonation or bad tone, but try making it through a full gig with poor rhythm and see how it goes…
On to the tips!
Let’s start with a foundational aspect of music. There are quite a few “definitions” of music, and all of them get at important ideas and usually leave something out. But my favorite basic definition is “Music is sound organized in time”. I think this is sufficiently broad to incorporate most of what most people would call music, while also getting at the most important aspects: sound, organization, and time. The sounds of a city are not really musical because they aren’t organized, they are fairly random. To really be music and not just ambient noise, some entity (usually a human artist of some sort so far) has to decide how to group sounds, and then have that unfold in time.
This gets at another point raised by my composition / music analysis professor at CSUN, Dr. Liviu Marinescu, which is that music is a time-based art form. He points out in our graduate analysis class that events in music exist in time, and therefore reading a score is not really a musical act, because you can look ahead and look back, but the music itself exists only now (see also General Musicianship Tip No. 2). You have to remember what happened before, and you don’t know what will happen next until it happens. Of course, you can listen to a piece over and over again, and then you know what happens next before it happens, and composers can set up foreshadowing you only notice on your second listening just like authors of short stories or novels can. This is also covered in an interesting paper I read in Musicology / Research Techniques my first semester at CSUN: “Three Ways to Read a Detective Story - or a Brahms Intermezzo” by Edward T. Cone. Just like with everything else I’ve said in this guide, Alan Belkin covers this topic as well in several of his essays and his textbook (I wasn’t aware of quite how much I had learned from him until I started writing up my Capital-M Music project!).
There are two basic concepts for rhythm: pulse and meter. They are related, but not the same thing. All music other than ambient soundscapes or pure drones will have pulse of some sort (and even some soundscapes can have pulse); while most music has meter, not all music does. Pulse is a steady beat that you feel. The pulse can change over time, but at pretty much every point it will be noticeable, at least subtly. Meter is a regular, recurring grouping of pulses, in such a way that it sets up recurring cycles of beats, called measures (or sometimes called bars - I use these terms interchangeably below). These can be organized hierarchically, so you can have subdivisions of a beat (pulse) at the lowest level, the beat or pulse itself, and then measures (or bars), phrases, periods, sections, and then a full piece of music, which might be complete by itself, or might be a single movement in a larger multi-movement work. This sort of analysis is the topic of study of form in music, which in music theory classes is called “formal analysis”. Meter can also change over time. Tempo is the speed of the pulse, measured in BPM, or “beats per minute”, and can be tracked with a metronome, which will tick at a steady speed. This tool is the bane of many performers as they practice, as it reveals when you are not keeping a steady tempo yourself(!), but it can be useful to try to get better at that. You can fall into a trap of relying too much on the metronome, and in fact in classical music (really in most music) we don’t want to feel too metronomic, but you want your variations to be intentional and artistic, and not sloppy because you can’t do better. See Tip No. 14 below for more on that.
Time Signatures: There are several common meters in use in most Western music. The most common is probably 4/4. This is called a time signature, in this case pronounced “four four”, and means that “there are four beats to a bar (the top number) and the quarter note gets the beat (the bottom number)”. One way to remember the bottom number is to think of putting a one in the top number, or 1/4, which is one quarter [note]. This works for all time signatures. Anything with /8 will be an 8th note to the beat, /2 is a half note to the beat, etc. Any of our standard note types can get the beat, but the most common are /2, /4, /8, and occasionally /16 (half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note respectively). Of those, /4 and /8 are by far the most common. You can have any number of beats per measure, but again, some are more common than others. 2, 3, and 4 are the most common top numbers in general. 6 is common especially with an eighth note (6/8), but also appears not infrequently with a quarter note (6/4). I don’t think I’ve ever seen 6/2, and only now and then 6/16. Overall, 4/4 is the most common, followed by 3/4, 2/4, and 6/8.
Meter sets up a recurring beat pattern. You generally count them by counting up the numbers up to the top number in the time signature. So for 4/4, you’d say “1, 2, 3, 4 | 1, 2, 3, 4” etc. until you reached the end of the piece or the next time signature change. You can have subdivisions within this. In 4/4, we usually divide the quarter notes into 8th notes, and we count this by saying “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, etc.” The “and” is the “offbeat”, or the 8th notes between the main beats, the quarter notes. You will sometimes see it written with a + to make it easier to read: “1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +” etc. You will say it the same way. We can break the 8th notes into two 16th notes each, and then we get “1e+a, 2e+a, 3e+a, 4e+a” for our count. There are four 16th notes for every quarter note. Below that I don’t have a good phrase to say, but it’s relatively rare that we encounter notes less than a 16th note (see tip no. 15 below for some help with that). We can also have “triplets” or more generally “tuplets”, which pack other numbers of subdivisions in a beat. A triplet puts three in a beat, so we have “1+a, 2+a, 3+a, 4+a” (spaced evenly throughout the beat). Other tuplets include “quintuplets” or 5 divisions per beat, and any number is in theory possible.
Hierarchy of Beats: The next point about Meter is that the beats themselves are hierarchical, so in 4/4, we usually describe it in one of two ways. The most common method you learn initially is to say “the first beat is the strongest, the second beat is weaker, the third beat is between them (stronger than two but not one), and the last beat is the weakest beat”. Another way to think about this version is that there are two sets of “STRONG weak [STRONG weak]”, and the second set is overall weaker than the first set. I actually don’t really know how often I use that approach in practice. The other approach which it feels like is more often the way I play is to say “the first beat is the strongest, then we drop off for beat two and build up to the next downbeat (beat one)”. Either way, this is a subtle effect and you don’t usually have a noticeable accent like this. If you did the piece would feel far too “notey”. This is more of a concept to keep in mind rather than a way to really play music. In some ways it’s almost more useful for composing when you are thinking about structuring music than it is for performing that music in sound.
Once you have a few bars of music, then we can start to add phrasing across bars, and this is usually more noticeable in sound. In this context, we will start applying a few different ideas, one of which is to grow into tension and relax out of it (see Composition Tip No. 23). You can also try growing as pitch rises (if you have an ascending scale, get louder, for example), and relaxing as pitch falls (as the scale descends). There are many other ways to phrase a passage, but one thing to keep in mind is that if the notation does not call for dynamic change, then all of this should be subtle “natural phrasing”, not really obvious dynamic change. It should only be obvious if the notation explicitly calls for it. I will have another page with a couple of examples to illustrate phrasing soon (forthcoming).
Duple vs. Triple, Simple vs. Compound: You will hear about “duple” meters and “triple” meters, as well as “simple” vs. “compound” meters. Duple vs. triple refers to whether there are two or three beats per measure (I don’t usually hear about quadruple meters in this context). Simple vs. Compound is whether the beats are divided into two subdivisions or three subdivisions. “Simple Duple” is 2/4, “One + Two + | One + Two +”. Compound Duple is 6/8, “One+a Two+a | One+a Two+a” (1,2,3,4,5,6 1,2,3,4,5,6 with accents on 1 and 4). Simple Triple is 3/4, “One + Two + Three + | One + Two + Three +”. And Compound Triple is the most common version of 9/8, “One+a Two+a Three+a | One+a Two+a Three+a”.
Counting Subdivisions: When counting any meter, you need to be counting in subdivisions. You want to count everything in at least the smallest subdivision you actually have in the sheet music, and it doesn’t hurt to go one more level deep. If you mostly have quarter and eighth notes, you can count in eighth notes, but it wouldn’t hurt to be thinking of 16th notes. I try to encourage my musicianship students at CSUN to count subdivisions when we’re working on rhythm for dictation. And at first, when you are reading music or counting something you are listening to, you should say the words out loud. Later you can say them “out loud” in your head, and eventually you will internalize them in such a way that you don’t have to say the words in any form, but you will “feel” the beat (subdivision) internally. If you get more complex rhythms, you may need to go back to counting out loud to figure out what it is you are dealing with, and that’s completely fine! I still sometimes count out loud when I’m looking at something and am struggling to get it right. However you consciously do it, you need to be aware of subdivisions, not just the main beat.
Odd Meters: “Odd” meters exist as well. 3 is very common, and not considered one of the “odd” meters, but 5, 7, and 9 are all found sometimes in the top number (even 11 and 13 can be, and so can others but they aren’t as common). These tend to throw people when they come up, particularly if they haven’t been taught to count them properly. They will usually be divided into “shorter beats” and “longer beats”. 5 is generally either 2+3 or 3+2 (“One+ Two+a” or “One+a Two+”), 7 is usually 2+2+3 or 3+2+2 (“One+ Two+ Three+a” or “One+a Two+ Three+”). Nine is most often 3+3+3 as mentioned above in Tip 7 (Compound Triple meter), but one of the more interesting options in certain kinds of dance music is 2+2+2+3 - “One+ Two+ Three+ Four+a”. This is found in certain Eastern European dance types, and is also the pattern in the Dave Brubeck song “Blue Rondo A La Turk” from his Jazz album “Time Out”. I also learned that pattern in a tune we learned at the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles one time, the “Kerry Polska”. In both of these pieces, the pattern is three bars 2+2+2+3, then one bar of 3+3+3. The rhythm on Kerry Polska really threw me until I figured out that the rhythm was the same as the Brubeck tune, and then it clicked and I got it immediately. It’s really interesting that these two tunes have the same groove, because I wouldn’t say that they otherwise have a similar feel at all. Rhythm is extremely important, but it isn’t everything!
A couple of things really helped me cement my feel for “odd” meters. I got to play a piece called “Sensemaya” by Silvestre Revueltas in orchestra two years in a row - my last year at New Trier High School in Symphony Orchestra, and my first year at Berklee in the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra. If you get a chance to play the piece, it will do wonders for you, and if you can even just listen to it a few times it might help as it has such an infectious groove. Just listening with no score may not be as useful though, as the meter changes frequently (the video linked above has the score embedded in it). The most interesting thing in Sensemaya is a spot at the climax near the end (4:45 in this video) where he uses “5.5/8” which throws everyone completely when they first see that! Today he’d probably use a “compound time signature” and call it “1/4+7/16” or “2/8+7/16” as that’s what he’s actually doing there. Or he could call it “11/16”, but the compound time signature would be more effective there.
The other thing I got to do in my first semester at Berklee was String Improv class with Eugene Friesen, which was all about cross rhythm and really helped me learn those cold (see Tip No. 19 below), and we explored odd meter there too to some degree.
Choosing a value for your beat: How do you decide which note value to use for your beat? With different tempos, you can make any note value for the beat sound the same, so it’s not necessarily clear which to pick. In general, the way you decide which to use is the overall feel you want. All else being equal, smaller note values will feel like lighter music and larger note values will be heavier. So 3/8 is pretty light and good for a light dance feel, 3/4 is pretty “normal” feeling (and is used for many triple meter dances), and 3/2 will be somewhat heavier and more ponderous. It’s not a hard and fast rule, and ultimately it’s pretty subjective, but that’s the general guidance given.
Rhythm Cells: Once we start looking at actual notes, we get into a concept called “Rhythm Cells”. These are little sets of rhythms that are commonly found in a lot of music, which can then be combined to make more complex rhythms. In reverse, you can break more complex rhythms into simpler rhythms and ultimately into cells to help you count your rhythms better. This would be the primary way that rhythms become “patterns”, which I keep mentioning throughout this guide (see General Musicianship Tip No. 1). If you can begin to see and hear and feel these rhythm cell patterns, then you can get away from thinking about notes in this context and start to see the larger picture, which will make everything you read and play feel more coherent, and ultimately be easier to manage. I will prepare (forthcoming) a more detailed guide to this concept with notation and audio to start building up your awareness of these things. Phil Best has material about this in his system at playpianofluently.com. I started with this concept well before I was aware of it as a concept through Suzuki violin as a three year old. The first piece they have you work on in Suzuki Book 1 is the “Twinkle Variations”, which are rhythmic variations on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” teaching you some common rhythm cells.
Groove and Dance Music: One major concept in rhythm is the idea of Groove, which is a basic template of subdivisions of a beat that repeat - basically what you will “feel” as you are playing a piece of music. All of the musical “events” you will play (notes) will fall somewhere on this grid of time. I’ve learned this the best through learning my various fiddle traditions along with some of the other instruments that go with them (guitar, piano, bodhran, even whistle, dulcimer and harp work into this). In Irish and Scottish fiddle music, many of the tunes we play were written for dancing, or at least in that tradition. There are a variety of dance forms, such as the reel, jig, and hornpipe (and others) in Irish music, and also the march and strathspey in Scottish fiddle, and each one has a characteristic groove, which includes the meter that they fall in, the accent pattern employed in each (based on meter but not always played quite the same way), and the tempo - how fast the pulses happen. In order for people to be able to dance to the tunes, you need to play them rhythmically very precisely, and with enough physical accent that the dancers can feel the meter and know where to place the dance steps, so playing for dancers is one of the best ways to develop solid rhythm. Playing the tunes with no dancers is useful too, but be careful because it’s possible to be sloppier and get away with it if there are no dancers present. As with any style of music, listening to great players either live or on recordings is essential to really get the feel down, as there are subtle differences in the way people play these tunes that cannot really be notated precisely (see Multi-Genreism in the main paper for more on that).
Motor Rhythm and Hocketing: This is a concept from the Baroque era of classical music. Motor rhythm is a continuous stream of notes at the same subdivision that is present either all the time or almost all the time. 16th notes are commonly used, but it doesn’t have to be 16th notes. Hocketing is a concept that goes with this - any given voice or instrument may not be playing continuously in the motor rhythm, and in fact the piece is much more interesting if not every instrument is playing the same continuous rhythm the entire time. But between all the voices, the motor rhythm will be present, and this is what gives that characteristic drive to so much Baroque music when it is played well (or makes it so boring when it isn’t), and if you are playing music like this, you need to be aware of what the motor rhythm is and how your part fits into it. The rhythm should sound constant and consistent, and you don’t want to break the groove when you enter (or when you fail to enter correctly). My high school orchestra conductor used the analogy of a train - to get on or off the moving train, you need to find a way to match its speed before you get on it (or after you get off), otherwise you will be in for a nasty surprise!
If you are writing a piece, this idea of hocketing is a useful one, as it will let you take a single line and make it more interesting for the players, and it’s especially useful for background figures as well as for the melody. It will also allow you to give relief to the audience from constantly hearing everyone play, while still making use of (up to) everyone for a given passage. It is also necessary for wind players to sustain a long passage without noticeable breathing places - having the players trade off on repeating passages so that one can breath while the other plays. Overlap them by a note if you do this, and it can feel like a continuous stream without killing your players (generally not the desired outcome!). See the opening of Smetana’s Die Moldau for an example of this in the flutes. Once the main theme comes in (1:03 in this video), the strings take over both the main theme and a hocketed background line - in both the case of the flutes and the strings, the hocketing is supposed to create a swirling sound that represents the flowing of the River Moldau of the title of the piece (known as Vlatava in the original Czech). This is from a larger piece by Smetana called Ma Vlast (My Fatherland).
Tempo fluctuations in classical music: a lot of popular music styles make use of a constant groove (which may not be precisely metronomic, but is nonetheless constant). Classical music treats groove with more flexibility than most of those styles. You still want to have a groove in a lot of classical music - even in slow pieces you should still have a noticeable groove when things change (they need to change at the right point in time and not arbitrarily). But the tempo will often push and pull somewhat (that is get faster and slower), either within a measure or across several measures. Subtle (or even not so subtle) fluctuations within a measure are called “rubato” (Italian for robbed), and means that you move faster in certain places, and then slow down in others (or vice versa), so that on average the tempo doesn’t change much. This is most common in soloistic contexts like unaccompanied solo playing (solo piano uses it a lot), and in concertos with a soloist and an orchestra. But even orchestral or chamber pieces with no soloist will usually not be played completely in a steady time, and players who are primarily classically trained may have a harder time with pop and jazz and other styles where the tempo tends to be less flexible. This leads to classical players often being accused by rhythm players of having sloppy rhythm, but it’s really a different conception of what rhythm is (of course you can just be sloppy too!). I think playing both fiddle dance music and classical music has given me an advantage in this regard, so I can play with either technique, but it is something to be aware of on both fronts. Classical music is also more likely to have sudden substantial tempo changes, but that shows up in some pop contexts from time to time. A lot of popular music styles mostly keep a steady tempo though.
Beat slashes for ease of reading: This is a helpful tip for both practicing and in performance in certain contexts. Sometimes for various reasons it can be difficult to read certain rhythms. In this context, usually the reason is one of two things - either the music is very slow, which will often result in very small note values (32nd notes and even 64th notes, and triplets of those notes); or sometimes composers don’t take proper care with their notation accidentally obscure the beat either through syncopation (see tip no. 16), or just by being sloppy (see tip no. 17 for some help with general rhythm notation). With slow music, the amount of black ink on the page from the resulting mess of beams can be daunting to say the least, and since we are generally not used to reading note values that small, it can be easy to mix up where the beat notes fall.
In both of these cases, marking in “beat slashes” can help (you do have a pencil, right? See Rehearsals Tip No. 3!). These are tick marks you make above the staff over the notes or rests where the pulse beats happen. Note that this may or may not reflect the time signature - if you have very slow music, it might say 4/4 for the time signature but marking in 8th note beat slashes may be more useful. Probably 16th notes will be overkill - we’re not looking for the smallest subdivisions, but the beats you are going to feel as the main beats. Try to make them consistent for a passage, otherwise this will be less helpful to indicate when our subdivisions change. If it goes from generally 32nd note divisions to 64th note divisions, you might get tripped up if you switch the value of the beat slash - you want to be sure you know that you suddenly have more divisions per beat than you did before, that’s really the point of this tool.
For syncopation beat slashes, you’ll put them on each beat just like before, which might fall between two notes - that will be the thing that helps you follow it the most. You can also use this kind of beat slash any time you make a rhythm mistake. If you miss a rest, circle it or mark some slashes. If you simply miscount, put some slashes in. I use this all the time in the music I play, especially if I find myself missing the same thing twice. It just draws your attention to the fact that there’s something weird here, or that you think there’s something weird here, and hopefully next time you’ll remember and be more careful. I also sometimes use this as a way to indicate when the conductor’s beat pattern changes - if they go from subdivided beat to normal beat or vice versa. I usually just write “in 8” for subdivided 4 and “in 4” for normal beat, but there have been times when slashes were more useful.
This is another topic where seeing some examples would be useful, so I’ve prepared another page to demonstrate this (forthcoming).
Syncopation: This is one of the things that starts to add additional interest to rhythm. This is where we hold a note across a beat in such a way that we almost start to feel that the offbeat is the beat temporarily. This will often be in a context with a straight groove such that you can clearly feel the tension between the two. If everyone starts playing on the offbeats for a lengthy stretch then you might just want to rewrite it so those become the actual beats. You need something to compare against for syncopation to make sense. It’s often very short - sometimes just a beat or two, but it can also go on for several measures. Jazz uses syncopation a lot - notes either come in half a beat before you think they should (anticipation) or half a beat later than you think they should (delayed attack).
In classical music, syncopation hasn’t historically been used all that much for melody, but it is used all the time for background lines to give some movement to otherwise static lines. As a violist, I play syncopated background lines all day long - it’s kind of our bread and butter! You can find examples of violas (and 2nd violins) doing that in almost any orchestral or chamber piece you look at, but one example that jumps out to me immediately is a particularly tense section in the exposition of Brahms’ 2nd symphony, where several instruments including the violas play a pulsing figure offset from the beat by one 16th note (so we are tied across the beat the whole time). The violins and cellos have a melody on the beat we are playing against. Even with that melody, it can be quite challenging to hold this syncopation accurately for that long and come out at the right spot at the end, particularly since there are several points where we have to change pitch together in the middle of that!
Notation tip - The Invisible Barline: I learned this idea in the first few weeks of my first semester at Berklee (I think it was in Arranging 1 class). When writing music notation, there are different ways you can write many rhythms, and some will be easier to read than others. You should generally try to avoid obscuring certain beats by writing notes across those beats - you should instead break them into smaller notes and tie them so that players can see where the beats fall more easily. This is the Invisible Barline - you always tie notes across a barline, so if you pretend there is one you can’t see at particular beats within a bar, you can tie notes across that too and it will be much easier for the players to count. This is much easier to see in notation than to try to imagine from my words, so I’ve prepared another page that shows this (forthcoming).
Swing: In a lot of the music I play (mostly classical and various offshoots of Celtic folk), the subdivisions of a beat are played more or less straight, which is to say that they are roughly evenly spaced over the course of the beat. In a lot of other music, there is an overt swing, where the offbeat is pushed to be closer to the next beat note rather than the beat note before it. Swing can have all sorts of subtlety and nuance. Some people would smack me for saying that Celtic folk music is straight, as it really isn’t completely even. Reels are generally more or less even, but you will still feel a subtle distinction between the onbeat and offbeat notes - the offbeat notes will be delayed ever so slightly, and also played at a lower volume than the onbeat notes, which gives a very light swing to those tunes. Jigs are much more noticeably swung - Jan Tappan, the leader of the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles, says that if you say “hippity hoppity” that will get you close to the right feel of a Scottish jig, which is somewhat more uneven than an Irish jig. Even Irish jigs are not really straight though. Irish hornpipes, however, are much more overtly swung, and actually begin to approach a dotted feel. I need to be careful again here though, as traditionally they are not really dotted (or even triplet swing). You need to listen to recordings of good players for hornpipes, because the real feel of a hornpipe cannot be accurately notated with our notation system. Because they are often written with triplet swing today as the closest you can get, many newer players play them more like that, but that isn’t traditionally how they were played.
Jazz and other styles growing out of it uses swing much more overtly than that though, and the default setting for jazz is to swing things. The faster a tune is, the straighter it will become, but songs at a moderate pace are almost universally played swung unless marked otherwise.
Cross-Rhythm: This is a complex topic in its totality (or at least there are a lot of possibilities and you need to spend a decent amount of time practicing them to get good at them), but the basic concept is pretty simple. We have standard accent patterns in each time signature, but we can change the accent pattern to something else, and that creates cross-rhythm. The new accents go “across” the original accent pattern and add interest to a piece or passage of a piece that might otherwise be pretty boring (in music we usually call it “square” when something is just following the standard pattern all the time). Each meter will have its own set of common cross-rhythms, and it’s useful to learn to play them very well because they come up a lot! This is another part of rhythm where seeing it in notation (and hearing it) will make more sense than trying to read it in words, so I’ve prepared another page for that (forthcoming).
Metric Modulation: This is a scary-sounding phrase for a pretty normal, and even pretty cool phenomenon (see Philosophy of Theory Tip No. 4 for more on “scary sounding phrases” in music theory!). This just indicates a tempo change where the new tempo is related rhythmically to the old tempo. You can change tempo with metronome marks such that a quarter note goes from 120 bpm to 60 bpm, and that’s fine and players and conductors will know exactly what to do with that. But in this particular instance, you can also use a metric modulation and just say the old half note equals the new quarter note. You will see this frequently in music as well, and the players and conductor will also know exactly what to do with that. The benefit of this is that players can relate the groove they should be feeling between the two sections, so they can determine the tempo by feel instead of cerebrally with math. With either way of indicating this, you’d still call it a metric modulation, because the new tempo is related in some direct rhythmic way to the old tempo, but if you can write it that way it will help the players. You will also see this frequently when you change from a simple to a compound meter - players need to know whether the beat or the subdivision is constant across the change, so going from 2/4 to 6/8 (simple duple to compound duple), you need to indicate whether the 8th note is constant, in which case the beat slows down, or whether the beat stays constant but now simply has three subdivisions instead of two (or four if there were 16th notes before). I say this can be cool, because you can also have more complicated metric modulations involving triplets on one side or the other, which allows you to make tempo changes that are related but not just half-time or double-time, and this can actually feel pretty cool when you experience it (at least I think it can in certain contexts!).
General Tips
Know your tools - when you get the gig is not the time to realize you don’t know how to do something, especially if it’s a common requirement. This applies to both computers / studio technology and your instruments.
Have (at least) two of everything whenever practical. Murphy’s law applies to music gigs too! Requirements will vary, but if you are a string player make sure you have extra strings, wind players should have extra reeds, etc. If you can afford it, having multiple instruments (of the same type) is not a bad idea - they don’t all have to be high end, but your instrument could break the day before (or of) the gig, and it helps if you have a backup (I’ve seen this happen to people).
This applies in the studio too - more than one microphone, multiple cables, etc. It may not be practical to have multiple high-end computer systems, but do what you can. And always (always!) have a backup hard drive (and these days a cloud backup too if possible)!!!
It’s the player who makes the music, the instrument is just the mode of expression. A good player can make a bad instrument sound decent, a bad player will not sound good even with a Stradivarius. Of course, a good player with a good instrument is best!
Pay attention to the details - I can’t tell you how many times people have ignored “minor details” that turned out to have major consequences.
Learning something about business and office operations is a good idea. Know how to use basic computer software (like Microsoft Office or equivalent software) and functions like printing and scanning (which can even be done from your phone, but use a scanner app and not just the included camera app). Knowing how to “google things” for tech support is very helpful too, and is the “secret weapon” of many millennial tech geniuses!
Learn proper spelling and grammar and how to write coherently - this is not about being pedantic or being part of the “grammar police”. This is about looking professional and like you care. Whenever I see someone online use the “you know what I meant” line, I think “Yeah, and you also said perhaps unintentionally that I shouldn’t take you seriously and that you don’t care about what you do”. There are even times when I have to wonder if I did know what they meant, and those are actually the good times because other times I might have misinterpreted them without even realizing I did that. You want to present yourself in the best light possible, and this is part of that, especially these days when so much is done in writing on the internet and not in person.
Don’t leave it in the classroom - constant study and learning from everything you do is essential. You will not learn to be a professional or even a semi-professional or competent amateur musician just from doing your classwork and calling it a day (though the school work is important too!). Being a Musician (or even a musician) is not a 9-5 job, it is a lifestyle!
Study something of music history for any genres you are involved in. Being connected to a historical tradition will give more meaning to the music you make, either as a performer or as a composer, and certain aspects of the music you play will frequently make more sense in context.
On Writing Papers: Sometime between my undergraduate degree at Berklee and my graduate work at CSUN, I figured out why we write papers for school, and it has made the process of writing for grad school more enjoyable for me than it ever was before. I really thought about this in detail with the rise of ChatGPT and similar Generative AI systems, and why we should or shouldn’t allow them to write papers for us. I would never use one of those systems to write a rough draft of a paper for me today, and there are at least two reasons why that is (you know, besides the whole “cheating” thing, and if you get caught you’ll fail the assignment, possibly the class, and get written up for “academic dishonesty”). The first is that they make things up as a matter of course (“hallucination” is the word that AI researchers have adopted for that phenomenon), so that you can’t trust anything they say at this point in time. In the time that you take to fact-check it you could have written a better paper yourself anyway.
But the real reason why I wouldn’t want to use one to write my papers, a reason that advancements in AI technology can’t solve, is that the rough draft is where you actually do the thinking and learning. Especially at the undergrad level, the point of a paper should be to think through what you’ve learned and integrate it with everything else you know in a tighter way, so that hopefully some of it sticks with you later. The rough draft is where you do that part of the work, so that you miss both the benefit and the entire point of writing a paper if you allow ChatGPT to write the rough draft for you, even if you then edit it and do all the fact-checking.
Ezra Klein from the New York Times recently did an episode of his podcast The Ezra Klein Show with Nilay Patel from The Verge where they were talking about this point from the perspective of writing articles, which is a similar process to writing research papers in many ways. On the show, Klein said:
“…[O]ne way I think that A.I. could actually not make us more productive, more innovative, is that a lot of the innovation, a lot of the big insights happen when we’re doing the hard thing, when we’re sitting there trying to figure out the first draft, or learn about a thing, or figure out what we’re doing.
One of the messages of the medium of A.I. is ‘Be efficient. Don’t waste your time on all this. Just tell the system what to do and do it’. But there’s a reason I don’t have interns write my first draft for me…
They could do it. But you don’t get great ideas, or at least not as many of them, editing a piece of work as you do reporting it out, doing the research, writing the first draft. That’s where you do the thinking. And I do think A.I. is built to kind of devalue that whole area of thinking.” [1:02:30 in the episode]
This is why you should take writing papers seriously in school, even when it’s frustrating and you’re spending 30 minutes finding the page number for the quote that you know word for word, but you have to cite it (this particular issue may be less of a problem today than when I was in school earlier as search functions for pdfs and ebooks work better - we didn’t have as much of that back when I was at Berklee and before, but I’m still using print books for some of my sources today in my grad program). Integrating ideas from different people is another skill that paper-writing is developing. One of the things I’ve been working on in my graduate writing is trying to integrate ideas from different people in defense of my argument, rather than just verbatim repeating people from their own arguments. I do it all the time when I think to myself, but for some reason I have a harder time with it in a formal paper context. Building research skills is a useful part of paper-writing, and this applies to many jobs outside of academia as well as in school. I’ve even done research in my day jobs with music library operations, so just being able to think holistically is an important ability.
I sent a version of this “mini-essay” tip to a friend of mine who teaches creative writing at Glendale Community College in Glendale, CA, and in her email back to me she also pointed out:
“Writing is absolutely part of the “thinking” process, and drafting (contrary to what some students may think) is not just the creation of a finished product but the process of working through ideas on the page. You know, I often have students say their biggest issue with writing is just taking their thoughts and writing them down. I imagine it’s because they haven’t had much practice or instruction on writing as a process rather than a product.”
The idea of using a system like ChatGPT to do your papers shows that you have a “writing as a product” mindset, and if that’s the case you may find it makes papers easier to tolerate and more interesting to research and write to change to a “writing as a process” mindset, or a “writing as thinking” mindset. You can have an AI system churn out a paper for you, at least in rough form, and get a product that you could in theory turn in (though again, if they catch you doing that there could be academic consequences and they could be severe depending on your institution’s policies, so it could be dangerous), but as I mentioned earlier, you miss all the benefit and learning that would theoretically be the reason why you are taking a class to begin with. And even if the actual reason you are taking a class is because it’s required for your degree, one would hope that such required classes would have a point that will help you down the road, whether you can see how in the present moment or not. I can look back on my educational experience now several years and the early part of a career later and see why they had me do certain things the way they did, even if at the time they seemed pointless or counterproductive. Not everything is perfect (most things aren’t!) but there really is a reason for most of it.
This idea of “writing as a process” or “writing as thinking” is actually a significant part of why I’m writing my Capital-M Music project (and I promise you that AI did not write a single word of any of this to date, and I’m not planning on using AI for any of it going forward either!). I hope that anyone who reads all this gets some new ideas from it or considers things from a different perspective than they did before. But I’m actually writing it all as much for myself as for anyone else. It is helping me to think through the way I see music and even life in a much more detailed and focused manner than I have previously, and I have already been able to use some of these ideas to help the students I’m tutoring at CSUN this year. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been thinking about some of these concepts for several years now under the name “(Capital-M) Music”, but writing it down has forced me to make it a bit more coherent than it was in my mind, even after spending hundreds of hours thinking about all of this on walks by myself, or in conversation with other people at random times when these ideas would come up.
On Confidence: I once saw a video interview with film composer Hans Zimmer on a film scoring website (it might have been Film Scoring Magazine?), and it was interesting what a contrast that video was with his video documentaries for the films he scored. He came off as quite confident on those, but on the film scoring website video he was somewhat less secure and even said something to the effect of “Every time I get a new project in, I spend nights tossing and turning and wondering how I’m going to pull it off this time”. I found this simultaneously reassuring and disconcerting. This would have been around my last year at Berklee in about 2011 or so, when Hans Zimmer was already at the top of his craft and field and I was looking at starting my career shortly. It was nice to know that even people who are extremely successful still have doubts and anxieties, and that I was not unusual in experiencing that for my projects, but I had also hoped that feeling would eventually go away.
I have since learned from thinking about this over the years, and now from several years of my own experience, that these feelings are both normal and they don’t go away, but you do gain something from experience. You get the confidence that somehow you will pull it off, and that you know what you are doing well enough and who you can talk to so that you can pull it off. You also know from firsthand experience that things will go wrong and that problems will occur but that they can be surmounted. I’ve played enough gigs now and worked on enough writing projects both professionally and personally that I’ve seen many ways things can go sideways, and we’ve always managed to recover somehow. Confidence is not the lack of anxiety, but the knowledge that you will be able to get through anything that comes your way.
I asked my CSUN private composition teacher Dr. Patrick O’Malley about the above point at one of my lessons, and one tip that he gave me was when possible to build in a week at the beginning of a project where you say to yourself “I’m going into the studio today and I probably won’t get anything usable done, but I’m going to start playing with ideas and just see what happens”. Taking off the pressure to produce finished work every day can help with early project anxiety. He also mentioned that the beginning of any project simply will be the most anxiety inducing part of the project most of the time. I’ve phrased a similar idea as “The hardest part of any project is starting it.”
I’m an Eagle Scout, and there are some codes we are supposed to follow as scouts, one of which is the Scout Law. This consists of 12 points, in an arbitrary order except for the first two: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal…” Honor your commitments, and loyalty is something you give others, never something you demand from others - you show them you are worthy of theirs. (You can choose to withhold yours though…). [The full Scout Law: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent”.]
The golden rule really is a useful guide to life - “Treat others how you would like to be treated”. It cuts both ways! Reframe it as “People will treat you how you treat them…”
Have fun! Music is supposed to be fun, and while it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, if you never enjoy it you might be in the wrong field 🙂 They call it “playing” music for a reason!