Do you ever sit in front of your computer and fire up the tracking program, without any idea of what you want to compose? Do you continue to load samples and lay out basic beats in a silent stupour, with no excitement or eargerness at all? Songs that are born out of this sort of conscious usually have a severe lacking of creative impression. Well, obviously if a song is made from a boring state, the tune is doomed to be boring itself. This may sound like a useless, rhetorical statement, but realistically, for any musician there is always a hiatus in successful composition. Sometimes, the instruments are blamed for the wretched contraption of a song, and other times the melody is presumably at fault; Most of the time, it's a combination of these and others, but none of it can be resolved unless the composer summons a 'Messiah' to lead all the elements of a song to success: Inspiration.
Inspiration - By far the most important thing to composing music, is also the mother of your song's soul... and very difficult to find. Personally, I've rarely ever found it in my pocket, or under a rock, or on my dinner plate; all I'd find there was lint or bugs or a cracker. However, I did find it in the sky once... right in front of me as though I was meant to find it. And when I looked at it, it didn't hit me as sounds or notes or anything audible, but as pure feeling and intuition that this was going to take me somewhere amazing. The sky was blue, stretching so immense and limitless, and I could see nothing else but flight through the clouds and in between incredible airships and floating castles and angels and storms... but I never thought of music once during that journey. It was only later when I sat down at my computer that I remembered my daydream and wrote it into my tracker not as a song, nor as a sound, but as my trip into the sky. Fortunately, the end result of my work was indeed a song, a form that everyone could relive my flight by. Inspiration is the only thing in my world that can take a chunk of memory or emotion and bake a tune out of it; other entities, like boredom or necessity, never manage to bake a song right - they consistently forget a vital ingredient or drop it on the floor by accident. My tracking program is merely the oven I use, and it usually satisfies my needs except for the occasional case where my song requires a larger oven.
For me, and for everyone I'm sure, there's always a journey to take in everything significant we experience... be it sleeping on a hammock or driving to Mexico, your imagination will always enhance a feeling to a unique independent level. Remember fishing at your cottage and staring at the rippling water and the reflections of colourful trees in them? Remember when you first got dumped by your girlfriend or boyfriend? I'm sure you can already picture the general mood of a tune reflecting those different experiences. Music is a transcendental - It's made of nothing but pieces of energized emotion so there's no use in composing with anything else. So, in the end, creating a song is not about program tricks or even musical techniques, but about being able to remember your previous daydreams and immersing yourself in them, seeing every part of it and playing out every decision or aspect that the vision can stretch... and finding where inspiration is hiding inside.
Gee, how nice and flowery all this sounds, you think. As if
remembering a past memory is going to improve my tracking by tenfold, you
think. There's no way I can guarantee a spiritual fulfillment in
composition by saying all of this, without a doubt. But what is music?
True music is sonic poetry, and poetry is expression of a feeling, a
state, an event or a person. When you read a poem, you're given several
images and elements of a memory or a daydream, and you construct a vision
of your own with them. Hence, a tune without the poem is not even worth
listening to... it's like reading a blank sheet of paper. Some types of
melodies evoke certain feelings, and experimentation with combinations of
these will eventually lead to more and more specific emotions and memories
even. In the end, when you string these together, you'll have sonic
poetry.
LakEEE / Craw Productions