Quick start making a song
Recently, in my spare time, I discovered B station up Dongfang Bayu Wang (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Kx4y1j7Z8) and announced his own music creation app—Bang! Music, I am interested in passing the novice tutorial guide, which has benefited Xiaobai a lot, so I record it here.
The process of making a song
A song can be divided into four main parts: rhythm, melody, chords and bass.
bottom-up approach
Melody is the natural expression of emotion, and emotion needs a brewing environment, so for a novice, the simplest process of making a piece of music is the production process of rhythm, chords, bass, melody, and structure. in:
- Rhythm: Determines the tempo of a piece and provides the underlying rhythm, fast and slow, downbeat and syncopation all affect the emotion of the song.
- Chords: Determine the color, major and minor keys of the whole piece, and different chord trends affect the emotion of the song.
- Bass: Add a background color to the whole piece, provide different levels of rhythm to the rhythm, and increase the thickness of the sound field to the chords.
- Melody: improvise with the mood, write in a developmental way on the motive.
- Structure: Simple to complex and complex to simple on time scales
Rhythm
In a song, the rhythm is generally composed of drums, the most basic components of which are bass drum (Bass Drum), hi-hat (Hi-hat), snare drum (SnareDrum), and tom drum (Tom). There are many classic rhythm patterns in history, such as the classic rock rhythm, Bo Diddley, etc., which can be learned from classic works.
melody
Motives develop short sentences, and short sentences are pieced together into phrases and passages. The motivation of the first four notes of Beethoven's Destiny Symphony continues the entire piece. Motivation is the core of the whole piece and contains the emotion of the whole piece.
Motivational Development Skills
When the composer conceives a basic motive, material, and phrase, he will develop it according to a certain creative technique, expanding it into a complete musical work. In the analysis of works, what musical development techniques the composer used is a very important point of analysis.
Repetition and Variation Repetition
To repeat is to reinterpret the motive once again. Repetition is the most basic development method in music works, generally speaking, the exact same repetition is rarely used in Western works. Because the basic aesthetic habits and organizational logic of Western music are often two repeated parts with the same beginning and different ends.
The second phrase begins the same, but ends differently. This is the most common way, unfolding in the way of changing and repeating.
Modular
When a musical work develops, a core material, such as a phrase or a section, is repeated in an overall shifting manner, which we call modular progression, so modular progression is actually a special kind of repetition. The units to be shifted can be motives, sections, phrases, whatever. As long as this unit is shifted and repeated as a whole, we call it modular progression.
The first two bars are a basic music section, and the next two bars move the previous one down three degrees to advance. This song is a downward progression, but of course it can also be upward. The usual mold advance range is within four degrees, and it is relatively rare to exceed four degrees.
variation
Variations still belong to the category of variation and repetition, but the difference from ordinary variation and repetition is that the change that occurs is a unified and holistic change. He is not a partial sound pattern or a change in harmony. It is to change the texture of the harmony as a whole or to decorate, add or subtract flowers to the melody, and add ornamental notes while maintaining the outline of the melody .
Beethoven does an octave on the second phrase here.
cut out
Trimming refers to dividing a part of the previous structural unit during the music process. This unit can be a phrase or a section or even shorter. Select a part of this structural unit, such as two bars within a phrase. After intercepting and then repeating, this is called cutting.
Trim repeats part of the previous phrase.
expansion
There are four words to remember in expansion, that is, internal growth .
The meaning of expansion is: when a music progresses to the position where it should have ended but it does not end, it expands itself and grows internally. This is called expansion. Usually there will be a reference. For example, the first phrase is four bars, and the second phrase does not appear when the cadence appears at the end of the fourth bar, or the cadence appears but does not use the perfect cadence or the hindering cadence (level 6). Produce a sense of the end of the paragraph, which can make him expand. This is called expansion.
Replenish
Supplement is just the opposite of expansion, called external extension . That is to say, the structure of a phrase or statement has been completely completed, and additional music and structure have been added to it. This extra addition is called supplementation. If no additions are added, the music itself is complete, adding a few bars just makes the sense of ending more prominent. The most typical way is supplementary termination. After the cadence appears, it is assisted by the harmony of the subordinate direction. Therefore, when analyzing actual music, we often see fragments that emphasize subordinate chords after the main sustain or cessation chord. This is often a supplement.
chord
You can learn from the classic chord progressions of predecessors. If you want to know more about it, please refer to my other articles.
bass
Basic writing
Write the root note of the chord, the safest choice.
rock bass
dense root note
On the basis of playing the root note, arrange a measure into multiple notes in equal parts to create a strong and powerful feeling.
syncopated root
On the basis of dense root notes, some notes are divided into two halves to increase the dynamics.
change time value
On the basis of dense root notes, increase the duration of some notes (with dots), and decrease the duration of some notes to increase the sense of imbalance.
Jazz Bass / Walking Bass
A jazz bass generally consists of four equally divided tones in one measure, and this type of bass is also called a walking bass. The main usage methods are:
- split chords
- chromatic scale
- octave jump
- add passing tone
Funk bass
Play freely, write your own favorite melody and rhythm, and find your own rhythm.
structure
Things are constantly evolving. The development of music is also a process from small to large, from simple to complex. When the content carried by a music form type can no longer meet the requirements of the composer, it will be expanded and expanded on the original form type.
one piece
Generally speaking, a complete music paragraph of 4-8 measures can be simply regarded as a whole A, which is a musical form. Many folk songs are in this form, and different lyrics are replaced on the same passage to become a song.
Two-part
When a composer is writing a form, he suddenly finds that the content of the form does not meet his expectations, then he will expand the form. The one-part form develops into a two-part form. The two-part form is actually a combination of two one-part forms .
Two AAs. There are many combinations of
AA'AB, the A part of 13 is a repeated relationship, and the A' and B parts are a parallel relationship.
In the case of AA'BA', parts A and B are in a parallel relationship, and A' in two or four is a repeated relationship.
32-bar style/folk style
Generally, we call the music with AABA structure a 32-bar body/folk body, which is common in Jazz and American pop music in the 1950s and 1960s.
Verse-Chorus
The main structure of the verse-chorus body is the progression of verse-chorus-verse-chorus. His most important part is the chorus, which represents the climax of the entire song, while the verse is the foreshadowing part of the song. The verse-chorus is generally repeated twice in the song, and the general structure is:
prelude-verse-introduction-chorus- verse -introduction-chorus- bridge -introduction- chorus -outro
electronic music structure
The structure of electronic music is similar to the structure of verse-chorus, but the name is different. The chorus in electronic music is called Drop , the lead song before the chorus is called Build-up , and the main song becomes Breakdown (interlude)
References:
"Great! Music" novice tutorial
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/274577314