# Does anyone else ever write twenty seconds of music that rip your heart out and then really struggle to add anything else to it?



## jacobthestupendous (Sep 3, 2019)

Or is everyone here too much of a grown-up/professional?


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## SimonCharlesHanna (Sep 3, 2019)

my old composition teacher use to say "every doctor and fireman has 4 bars of music in them"


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## Nils Neumann (Sep 3, 2019)

That freaking B-part is always the hardest


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## LudovicVDP (Sep 3, 2019)

I can't count how many "to continue" or "to develop" Cubase projects I have on my drive.


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## marclawsonmusic (Sep 4, 2019)

Yes, I think this is very common.

I used to think I could write well until I started to learn more about 'development'. I have always been able to write nice little motifs and melodies, but struggled to encapsulate them with a nice intro, B section, bridge, outro, etc... And beyond that, once I've played through my idea, how do I keep it interesting the 2nd and 3rd time through?

After studying a bit with Norman Ludwin (he is fantastic, by the way), I learned some techniques for development. All 'the greats' had these tools in their toolbox - where they could take a simple idea / motive and stretch it out literally for hours if needed. It's not really that complicated - it's mostly academic. You apply variation techniques to any little slice of music - inversion, retrograde, fragmentation, embellishment, extension, etc. - and find other little hidden gems in your original idea. Multiply this by some key changes and clever chord substitutions / reharmonization, and all of a sudden you have a LOT of new material to work with.

To me, this is really the key to good music. JW is a master of this - his soundtracks often have an 'anchor' of the main melodies / motifs, but most of the stuff in between (and there is a LOT) is just subtle variation on those ideas... all strung together into a way that makes sense musically. JW's orchestration is marvelous (and what we talk about the most), but his tunes sound _just as amazing _on solo piano (at least to me) - because they are so strong musically.

Great topic!


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## Mornats (Sep 4, 2019)

Yes, this happens to me. I've gotten into the habit of duplicating that 20 seconds of music and adding more instruments or musical elements to it so it fills it out to a full track. I'm sure it suffers as a result. I absolutely need to spend more time developing and moving the music.


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## Guffy (Sep 4, 2019)

It has always been a struggle up until more recently. What marclawson said feels very accurate.
I don't think that just reading that will completely solve your problem though, i think it'll resolve itself naturally after trying and trying and trying. When harmony comes easier, so does your options for development/continuance of the piece.


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## LudovicVDP (Sep 4, 2019)

I used to work in Ableton when the music I made was more electro oriented and more live oriented.
Working with in the session view was the point-> So... loops! 
But to compose orchestral music or melodic music, I had to get out of the loop process. It's sooo easy to get stuck in one great loop and never develop.

Not blaming on Ableton at all. It's just my way of working that changed.


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## mikeh-375 (Sep 4, 2019)

OP, @marclawson has supplied the answer to your dilemna. Technique is there for a reason.


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## Gerbil (Sep 4, 2019)

SimonCharlesHanna said:


> my old composition teacher use to say "every doctor....has 4 bars of music in them"


Hopefully not in the middle of a prostate examination.


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## gh0stwrit3r (Sep 4, 2019)

I’ve been in this situation a lot when I started to compose. In the beginning I felt the urge to stretch it out to at least 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Most of the time this resulted in a ‘mwah’ music track. Lots of repeating and to many instruments which didn’t do any good.

After a while I changed my strategy. I challenged myself to make that little composition of 30 seconds or 1 minute as good as possible. Which has taught me a lot! Better use of instruments, orchestration and telling a story.

And somehow nowadays I have less difficulties with writing a more ‘mature’ and longer composition.

So give it time and cherish your short unfinished compositions


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## mikeh-375 (Sep 4, 2019)

give it time by all means, but study if you want to nail it.


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## redlester (Sep 5, 2019)

LudovicVDP said:


> I used to work in Ableton when the music I made was more electro oriented and more live oriented.
> Working with in the session view was the point-> So... loops!
> But to compose orchestral music or melodic music, I had to get out of the loop process. It's sooo easy to get stuck in one great loop and never develop.
> 
> Not blaming on Ableton at all. It's just my way of working that changed.



This is very common and something I go through too (I use Ableton for electronic "beats" based muisic and Logic for "anything else").

One thing I would say is that the extremely repetitive style of techno and it's sub-genres often involves minimal to no melodic or harmonic variation in a track, and instead relies on variation in sound design and production techniques to keep it interesting. To pull this off well is an art in iteslf.


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## Bluemount Score (Sep 5, 2019)

*Yes.*


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## muk (Sep 5, 2019)

It's very common to write a melody, but then get stuck and not to know what to do with it. The problem is almost always that people don't know about form. Every piece of music needs a structure, and so does yours.

Study musical form. If you know how a Liedform, a rondo, a sonata form etc work you can then use these techniques to structure your own music.
If you have that knowledge you will have the necessary tools to decide what you want to do with your melody. You can then flesh it out to a piece of music with a meaningful and working structure. It will still be hard work, with trial and a lot of error. But it enables you to create a plan for your piece. And that's what you need to do to get unstuck.


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## pawelmorytko (Sep 5, 2019)

God this is my Achilles heel. I'll write something I'm really happy with and then hit a brick wall of "hmm where do I go next with this track". It's that transition to another section or trying to keep the same thing interesting that slows me down and eventually makes me hate the track that I don't want to work on it anymore...


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## mikeh-375 (Sep 5, 2019)

Yes, @muk mentions form, I agree but you should also study motivic development too if you want total control. Doing so helps you to find the continuation in themes that sounds inevitable and that is a valuable thing to be able to do. Motivic development is organic in nature and the answer to your dilemna is almost certainly in the music you already have for a theme - you just have to learn how to find the solution by teasing it out. This can be done by exploring the options and implications hidden just below the surface of the material you already have. Motivic development gives you that option and your ears are the final arbiter to accept or discard what you find.


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## AlvinSWong (Sep 5, 2019)

I personally like experimenting by changing keys first. And then trying some modulations . Instrument swap outs. All for different perspectives and inspiration.

Also, moving away from DAW to acoustic piano is a big one. Or vice versa and force using piano roll midi entries. (Inevitably my fingers keep going to same stale chord patterns and runs.) 😆

Need to get better at this too. Got lots of unfinished orphan riffs and melodies on hard drive. Great post by senior members above. Very helpful.


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## C.R. Rivera (Sep 6, 2019)

Do musicians/composers beat themselves up too much over such things as a "too short" a piece of music. Beauty, it seems to me, can be found in the "diversity" of length. My wife and I frequent museums and see where the size of the canvas does not equate to its beauty but rather the colors used, the emotion or intent displayed. YMMV.


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## pawelmorytko (Sep 6, 2019)

C.R. Rivera said:


> Do musicians/composers beat themselves up too much over such things as a "too short" a piece of music. Beauty, it seems to me, can be found in the "diversity" of length. My wife and I frequent museums and see where the size of the canvas does not equate to its beauty but rather the colors used, the emotion or intent displayed. YMMV.



My poor excuse for not being able to write longer tracks is always "Better to write a short piece of music that makes people wish there was more rather than a piece that goes on too long and makes me skip to the next track"


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## marclawsonmusic (Sep 6, 2019)

C.R. Rivera said:


> Do musicians/composers beat themselves up too much over such things as a "too short" a piece of music. Beauty, it seems to me, can be found in the "diversity" of length. My wife and I frequent museums and see where the size of the canvas does not equate to its beauty but rather the colors used, the emotion or intent displayed. YMMV.



Yes, of course, but OP was asking about the struggle to add more and not being able to do that easily.

If you want to make a short piece of music, by all means do so. But if you want to create something that is more comprehensive, and are struggling to do that, I think 'craft' comes in to play here. 

When I say 'craft', I am not referring to the intrinsic 'art' (or idea / concept) of the piece... just the tools one can use to lengthen / develop / enhance that original idea.


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## shawnsingh (Sep 6, 2019)

Yeah I feel plagued by this issue all the time, too.

I'm not "good" at overcoming this problem, I struggle a lot, but the times where I have managed to overcome this problem, I noticed some things about my mindset. And so I've been trying to take advantage of these ideas more often, and I think it does seem to help.

(1) it's easy to accidentally be too stingy with musical ideas. Creating one cool texture or theme is not really enough for a well-developed song. Even two is not enough. *Leap of faith #1 is that you will not "run out of musical ideas" just by putting 4-5 ideas into one song.*

(2) It's easy to get stuck focusing on the micro structures of the music, which makes it very scary to make a more abrupt transition to a part of the music that might be quite a bit different. But a lot of great music makes such abrupt changes all the time. *Leap of faith #2 is to be more confident that changing between themes will not be as jarring from a bigger perspective, it just may seem like it when the composer gets stuck looking at the micro structures of one phrase.* Listen to many great classical pieces and there are plenty of abrupt transitions between phrases or between A and B sections - as a listener with a macro perspective, those changes are just part of setting up the overall arc and exposition of the piece. It's like different paragraphs. One paragraph can be introspective, the next can be dialogue, and the next can be concrete action. There certainly is an art of making transitions impactful and natural, which comes with more experience - but before being able to learn about that, it's first necessary to take the leap and force yourself to juxtapose things, and trust that the transition is not as awkward as it seems for the composer.

(3) It's easy to be too focused on always building from established main themes for every second of the entire piece. *Leap of faith #3 is that "filler or placeholder music" is actually very meaningful in a composition and deserves a composer's efforts.* But somehow as composers we tend to look down on filler material as something we should only resort to when we have to compromise the artistic part of the craft - and that's where we can get blocked. Actually there's plenty of "filler" material in great musical works too, which may have musical purpose but doesn't necessarily use the main melodies or themes. Best example of this is a rondo form, like A-B-A-C-A . B and C don't necessarily have ideas that get reused in the piece, but they can still serve a developmental purpose for listeners experiencing the work - they can still be used to invoke particular emotions, etc. Personally I find the perspective of "just create some filler crap here and come back to it later" very liberating - usually when I've done that, I've been able to either (a) come back to it and fix it up later with a better perspective, and make it work very nicely in the piece, or (b) often times that filler material turned out to be interesting enough to make new motifs/themes from it, which further helped me be creatively unblocked to keep going.

(4) finally, I've found that trying to compose top-down can work really well. But it's still hard for me to be able to do this regularly. Usually I make 20 seconds, and then ask myself "what would sound good in the next 20 seconds to extend this?". But the top-down approach is to solve all the form and structure of how you want the music to arc in the entire song, before figuring out motific/thematic details. And without worrying about any harmonic gymnastics or how you'll transition between things. Then, progressively filling out the details. *This is the ultimate leap of faith: to trust yourself enough that you'll be able to compose the details under the constraints you're creating by figuring out the form and structure first.* It's quite scary, I usually prefer to prove to myself that I can create a smaller excerpt and then fish for the inspiration of how to bring excerpts together - and that's where I get blocked. But every time I have forced myself to do the top-down approach, it's worked out just fine and I've composed faster, without feeling blocked. I think the reality is that there's much more opportunity to "correct the form and structure decisions" later, even though initially it feels like you'd be locking yourself into impossible constraints. I feel like the pieces I've made with top-down composing approach are some of my stronger compositions overall.

Cheers!


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## Mornats (Sep 7, 2019)

shawnsingh said:


> Leap of faith #1 is that you will not "run out of musical ideas" just by putting 4-5 ideas into one song.



Whilst all of your post is fantastic advice (many thanks for sharing this, it's incredibly helpful to me) this is a genuine fear of mine so thanks for the insight that this is a myth.


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## Parsifal666 (Sep 7, 2019)

Depends on how concerned you really are with conventional structures. When I'm writing my art music (as opposed to commercial music) I never let forms dictate what I'm doing.

Don't be a slave to, say, a sonata form that got pounded into the ground by the time of early Beethoven. Unless you're writing strictly for cash.


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## Parsifal666 (Sep 7, 2019)

Modulate, write the main melody a third above and/or use either partly or entirely different orchestration, invert, use pauses, change the entire genre mid-piece...plenty of resources that can be Google'd besides those. Use a phrase sample and dress it up with the original theme accompanying...

John Zorn helped prove that short pieces are fine. If you have a four bar thing going that's really good, you could just put it in your motifs folder. Make sure you also create a folder for transitions (the latter can be endlessly helpful from my experience).


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## MaxOctane (Sep 10, 2019)

Gerbil said:


> Hopefully not in the middle of a prostate examination.



Now the music is in *you*!


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## visiblenoise (Sep 10, 2019)

Definitely, but incredibly more so with ideas that were really simple music ideas that had more of a focus on sound design or instrumentation. If it's a melody that really inspired me, I can usually sit at a piano and if I spend enough time I can usually come up with a few concepts to play with.

When I first started figuring out how to do it, I felt like a hack because the tricks I tried during exploration felt incredibly dumb (e.g. shove two lines from the concept together and massage one or both to create interesting harmony, quoting earlier points in the song). You'd think that by this point in my life I'd be used to feeling like a lucky idiot, but no!

But the ideas where maybe I happened upon a cool synth patch and just programmed some riff and percussion to go with it, those are usually doomed.


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