Every Good Boy Does Fine ------------------------ by Parashar Krishnamachari Seeing as how ACM actually has a SIGMusic, it only makes sense that there should be a musical article in the Banks. Well, we can start somewhere in the middle because it's usually a safe assumption that people out there know what a "note" is and hopefully, the audible difference between major and minor scales (if not numerical). Well, more often than not, though, I've found that the people who are self-taught in composition often do so by ear. I've done that, too, and I often found that it took me about 2 or 3 months to write one song... icky... It's not made any better by the fact that within a few weeks, I'd likely have a new idea to pick up on which didn't exactly go along with the current work. All the while, I'd simply punch something in my tracks and listen and think to myself -- "No, that's not it... No, not that either... Ah!! That's it... now, on to the next note" That's not a fun way to write anything. To make things easy, I'll outline a few simple points to start from in this article. When you look at Western music, often times, chord progressions take all the precedence. Why? Because it is through the chords that we create some variation. If you look at melodies, they're often very simple and very much boring if they're by themselves. The complexity in Western music is the large scale of layering and varying those layers. One little change or addition in what is layered on what can actually change the feel of any phrase. But to accomplish this with any measure of efficiency, you should know some basic theory. It's possible to compose without it, as many have shown. But things will go a lot faster if you know what to put where. I also don't plan to get into notational details that much, which means you probably won't have to deal with the whole circle of fifths and such. So, with that, let's begin ... Here is the major modal chart: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 C D E F G A B C# D# F F# G# A# C D E F# G A B C# D# F G G# A# C D E F# G# A B C# D# F G A A# C D E F# G# A# B C# D# F G A B C D E F# G# A# C C# D# F G A B C# D E F# G# A# C D D# F G A B C# D# E F# G# A# Major Modes: Minor Modes: Diminished Mode: Ionian: No Change Dorian: 3,7b Locrian: 2,3,5,6,7b Lydian: 5b Phrygian: 2,3,6,7b Mixolydian: 7b Aeolian: 3,6,7b FYI, the notation is such that the entire list is sharped or flatted as marked. So "3,6,7b" actually means that the 3rd, 6th, and 7th are all flatted one half-step from the standard chart. The church mode called Ionian is what you and I often refer to as the Major mode. Likewise, the Aeolian is the standard Minor mode. In general, those are the two that almost everybody uses. In addition, there are two artificial modes that are variations from the minor mode. The so-called Harmonic minor is an Aeolian where the 7th is sharped... Then there is the Melodic minor where both the 6th and 7th are sharped. By the same notation, Harmonic minor : 3,6b Melodic minor : 3b So on to the basic chords... These chords are all taken from the ionian modes listed in the above diagram of the modal chart: Major: 1,3,5 Sus2: 1,2,5 Minor7th: 1,3b,5,7b Minor: 1,3b,5 Sus4: 1,4,5 Major7th: 1,3,5,7 Add2: 1,2,3,5 Fifth: 1,5 Diminished: 1,3b,5b Major9th: 1,3,7,9 (or 1,3,5,7,9) MajorAdd9th: 1,3,5,9 Minor9th: 1,3b,7b,9 (or 1,3b,5,7b,9) Minor11th: 1,3b,7b,11 Tritone: 1,5b or 1,4# So for example, to get a Cminor7th, you take the 1st, flatted 3rd, fifth, and flatted 7th note from C D E F G A B, or C D# G A#. Also, for those who don't know, when the number is greater than 7, it means that we're into the next octave. So just subtract 7, and look up on the chart to see what it corresponds to. e.g. : A 9th would be a 2nd in the next octave. A little side-note : Have you ever noticed that a lot of music theory classes will ask for at least some knowledge of the piano or list a piano course as a pre-requisite? There's a simple reason for that -- Almost every single thing you hear about basic Western music theory holds true on a piano. When someone tells you that a diminished chord will be dissonant, you can be all but certain that it will be on a piano. Some chords that sound ugly on a piano can sound OK on a guitar. A piano moreover, can only hit a note. You can't apply slides like you could on a violin nor can you attain the tiny variations in pitch that come from varying fingering pressure. Thus, again, everything you'd study at a notation level also holds true. Also, because of the piano, tritones are generally considered a no-no. Because they correspond to exactly halfway through an octave, and so you lose information regarding which of the two notes is actually the tonic. Anyway, back to business... You can experiment with each of those in the meantime if you so wish, because from here, we'll get on to things you can do with these chords. Tonal Ambiguity The quality that all of these scales have in common is no starting or ending point, we can use that to our advantage- we can define our own or just leave it up to the listener. If you take a whole tone scale and play around with it, you will find that it has a 'floating' quality because you never know where its going to end. That might be a good thing if you are going for a dreamscape or some similar ambient mood. The other way you can use it is if you want to go note X to note Y in a transition but you have strange harmonies going on to build tension or whatever. If both notes X & Y fall within a common whole tone scale you can use that scale to connect them without influencing the harmonic movement that is going on around it. Tone Clusters A tone cluster, also known as a sound mass, is a group of closely spaced notes used for their effect as a sound rather than a particular harmonic function. For example a melodic progression like C-C#-D, but they are closely spaced together across different channels so that a weird dissonant chord comes up. For a tone cluster to be successful you need to do two things... use dynamics, and use tension resolution. By tension/resolution I mean that these tone clusters create an awful lot of tension because of their inherent dissonance which you can effectively harness if you follow the tone clusters by something more consonant -- a major or minor chord perhaps, or if you want to stay ambiguous, at least an open fifth, like C-G. Inversions This is probably one of those things that I have no idea where to really put it because it's rather simple on the surface, but not so much if you read into it. Inversions are simply another means by which we can be more economical with our writing. We can vary an existing chord progression with its own inversions and make the same phrase sound just a little different. However, don't abuse it or you will come off as being lazy. If I take a basic chord like the C Major triad C-E-G... Now let's try moving things around a bit... make it an E-G-C triad (where C is the C in the next octave). Now you notice that instead of a pattern of a 3rd and a 5th, we have a 3rd and a 6th... and notably from a major 3rd to a minor 3rd. This is the first inversion of a C-Major triad and is usually notated as a I-6 or an I-3-6. The second inversion, as you can probably guess, puts the 5th on the bottom, so we end up with G-C-E. The pattern here is a 4th and a 6th, and so it would be notated as a I-4-6. Obviously, that Roman numeral at the beginning is dependent on the assumption that the C-major triad in this case is based on the tonic (i.e., we're in the key of C-Major). If we were in the key of G, we could still have this same triad and the same inversions, but it would be in the 4th register, and so it would be marked as a IV chord, IV-6, and IV-4-6 for the inversions. Modulation The only real way I can think of illustrating this is via some classic examples, and so I'm going to borrow some that knowledgeable people might well have seen several times before. In order to do a modulation trick, we are going to take advantage of the diminished chord's symmetrical structure. If you will recall from your music theory, in a major scale there is a fully diminished chord built on the seventh degree (in the key of C major this would be B-D-F). Also, in minor scales this is the chord built on scale degree two (in C minor this would be D-F-Ab). Ok now these are the only chords we are going to be dealing with for the sake of simplicity. Now, I apologize to those that are unfamiliar with functional harmony roman numerals, but its the easiest way to describe this next part. Basically the number tells you which degree of the scale the chord is built on. Western tertian functional harmony shows us that in a major scale the (vii)(dim) chord has a STRONG tendency to move to (I) and in a minor scale the (ii) (dim) chord has a tendency to move to (V) (which in turn would move to [i]). So lets look at how this works with chords. Note that I've moved the order (or inversions) of the notes around in some cases to produce better voice leading. Also whenever I have written (dim) this is to mean a fully diminished 7th chord, and should not be confused with half diminished 7th, or just a plain diminished chord. It's the one we've been talking about (4 symmetrical notes). B C B B C Ab G Ab G G F E F F Eb D C D D C C: vii(dim) I cmin: ii(dim) V7 i Ok, now to the fun. Since the two dim. chords we've talked about here are symmetrical, there's no way for the ear to decide what the "root" of the chord is. Sometimes in a chord progression its pretty obvious (like the ones above), but you can usually trick the ear depending upon which note you put in the bass. I don't know if you see it yet, but this can become your harmonic gateway to numerous modulations. This diminished chord you use is going to become a PIVOT chord. For example, look at the C minor progression listed above. Let's say that instead of resolving to (i) as was done up there, I want to modulate to EbMajor. We would just do this: Eb Eb F D Eb C C C B Bb G Ab Ab Ab G C Eb F F Eb cmin: i VI iv ii(dim) Ebmaj: vii(dim) I Ok, if you can follow that modulation where the diminished chord becomes the pivot chord (means it has functions in both of the tonal regions), then you are well on you way to becoming a modulating master. By using this method, you can modulate from the key of Cmajor or Cminor to Ebmaj/min, F#maj/min (not recommended), and Amaj/min. If you really want to get fancy you can mix some half diminished chords in there and be able to get to the other 16 keys without ever having to touch the cycle of fifths, but that's a whole other matter. Melody Well, here is where I start to get a little program-specific. I've lived in trackers forever... Everything new that I might use to compose always gets compared to trackers. And of course, I'm a zealot for the UI of Scream Tracker (and hence Impulse Tracker, as well). I still can't figure out what people like about using a mouse in a tracker, or having a tracker with Nibbles in it. But oh well, who am I to judge. Maybe we want to hear our songs while getting a worm to grab numbers. Anyway, my examples regarding melody from here on will be displayed in a manner to look like a ST3/IT2 window. That way, I don't have to PRETEND that I know what I'm talking about. Also note that I, like a lot of people, probably couldn't write a song that is even halfway decent without actually hearing it. Writing a song is not really very likely if I want to finish this article in a reasonable length of time. Especially if I'm trying to illustrate a theoretical construction. So once again, I have to borrow a well-known example (well-known among trackers, anyway)... This is in a so-called "Oriental Pentatonic" scale -- C,D,E,G,A,C 00|C-5 01 .. ...| 01|A-4 01 .. ...| 02|G-4 01 .. ...| 03|E-4 01 .. ...| 04|D-4 01 .. ...| 05|C-4 01 .. ...| 06|A-3 01 .. ...| 07|G-3 01 .. ...| 08|C-4 01 .. ...| So, that's our make-believe melody, and now we want to put a base harmony on top of this. Now the simplest thing we can do is use the "two steps" rule. We just use tones that are two steps ahead or behind from the tone. For our pentatonic scale of CDEGAC... a good harmony on a 'G' would be either a 'D' or a 'C' because either tone is two steps away on the scale. So let's just try playing the same melody over again in another channel, only using the two-step rule and making a harmony out of it. 00|C-5 01 64 ...|E-5 01 54 ...| <-- note the volume of the melody (64) is 01|A-4 01 64 ...|D-5 01 54 ...| louder than the harmony (54); just enough 02|G-4 01 64 ...|C-5 01 54 ...| to "keep the spotlight" on the melody. 03|E-4 01 64 ...|A-4 01 54 ...| 04|D-4 01 64 ...|G-4 01 54 ...| 05|C-4 01 64 ...|E-4 01 54 ...| 06|A-3 01 64 ...|D-4 01 54 ...| 07|G-3 01 64 ...|C-4 01 54 ...| 08|C-4 01 64 ...|E-4 01 54 ...| Anyhow, there's more stuff you can do to make a good melody besides just taking scales and throwing down the notes in various patterns. The most common tactic is taking the chord you're currently playing, and finding its root... Find the major/minor/natural scale starting on its root. What you do for the melody is make the melody based on the notes of the chord, with the little addition of notes from the scale. For example: Lets say the progression is |Gmaj7|Em7|Am7|D7|, key of G. Here are the notes of the chords: The notes of Gmaj7 are: G , B , D, F# The notes of Em7 are: E , G , B, D The notes of Am7 are: A , C , E, G The notes of D7 are: D , F#, A, C Here are the notes of the scales of the chords' tonics: The scale of Gmaj7's is: G, A, B, C, D, E, F# The scale of Em7's is: E, F#, G, A, B, C, D The scale of Am7's is: A, B, C, D, E, F#, G The scale of D7's is: D, E, F#, G, A, B, C Note some things are changed because we ARE staying in the key of G here. So even though an A-Minor scale has a natural F, we have to work in Harmonic Minor for the key of A and use a sharped F because the F is sharped in the key of G. Then you mix the two together, putting a lot of emphasis on the chords' notes by putting them on stronger beats. As well, most jumps should be to and from notes of the chords as opposed to notes of the scales. Here's a quick example. Instrument 01 represents a "magical chord instrument" which can change from a maj7 to a m7 to a 7 magically... In practice, you can't do that with one sample, but I'd rather make things look simple for now, rather than show you several channels. So just assume that when I hit E-4 with instrument 01, you'll hear an Em7 chord and the chord progression follows what was mentioned above. In real life, you'd either use multiple samples for those chords, or you'd explicitly voice the chord over several channels. Instrument 02 will be a melodic instrument. 00|G-4 01 .. ...|G-5 02 .. A06| ST3 EFFECT, speed to 6 ticks per row 01|... .. .. ...|... .. .. ...| 02|... .. .. ...|G-5 02 .. ...| 03|... .. .. ...|A-5 02 .. ...| 04|E-4 01 .. ...|B-5 02 .. ...| 05|... .. .. ...|G-5 02 .. ...| 06|... .. .. ...|E-5 02 .. ...| 07|... .. .. ...|D-5 02 .. ...| 08|A-4 01 .. ...|C-5 02 .. ...| 09|... .. .. ...|D-5 02 .. ...| 0A|... .. .. ...|E-5 02 .. ...| 0B|... .. .. ...|G-5 02 .. ...| 0C|D-4 01 .. ...|F#5 02 .. ...| 0D|... .. .. ...|F#5 02 .. SD3| ST3 EFFECT, note delay by 3 ticks (half a row) 0E|... .. .. ...|E-5 02 .. ...| for adding a little swing 0F|... .. .. ...|F#5 02 .. ...| 10|G-4 01 .. ...|G-5 02 .. ...| You'll have to take my word for it that it sounds pretty good if done properly... In other words, nothing like what you see above. ;) Another useful idea, which I do religiously, but takes some getting used to is to "play around a melody". Do this by starting a basically monorhythmic melody: This is a separate example from the one above, so we're not in an Oriental Pentatonic scale anymore. Instrument 01 is not a magic chord, it's melodic. 00|G-5 01 .. ...| <-- Note that the distance between these lines is 04|G-5 01 .. ...| actually 4 rows (look at the numbers on the side) 08|A-5 01 .. ...| I'm just showing it this way to save some space. 0C|B-5 01 .. ...| 10|G-5 01 .. ...| 14|B-5 01 .. ...| 18|A-5 01 .. ...| 1C|D-5 01 .. ...| Let's say that's your basic melody. What you do is change the rhythms around from there... Give it more of a swinging feel: 00|G-5 01 .. ...| <-- Note this time, the distance between lines is 2, 02|... .. .. ...| instead of the previous 4. The rhythm is getting 04|... .. .. ...| a little more complex because of these fillers and 06|G-5 01 .. ...| passing tones. 08|A-5 01 .. ...| 0A|B-5 01 .. ...| 0C|... .. .. ...| 0E|... .. .. ...| 10|G-5 01 .. ...| 12|G-5 01 .. ...| 14|B-5 01 .. ...| 16|... .. .. ...| 18|A-5 01 .. ...| 1A|... .. .. ...| 1C|D-5 01 .. ...| 1E|D-5 01 .. ...| Then from there, you start adding notes in between, while adding some complex rhythms and stuff in that general direction. Note the use of note delays in a few spots. Note delay commands not only add a swung feel to a song, but also a human feel. In general, human beings can't play music with mechanically perfect rhythm, and adding a few note delays here and there can make something sound as if it's off-time a tiny bit. 00|G-5 01 .. A06| <-- The effects are ST3 style, tempo changes and delays. 01|A-5 01 .. SD2| <-- Also note the rhythm variation. It's gone as far 02|G-5 01 .. SD4| as every line plus note delays. 03|... .. .. ...| 04|F#5 01 .. ...| 05|... .. .. ...| 06|G-5 01 .. ...| 07|... .. .. ...| 08|A-5 01 .. ...| 09|... .. .. ...| 0A|B-5 01 .. ...| 0B|... .. .. ...| 0C|... .. .. ...| 0D|... .. .. ...| 0E|... .. .. ...| 0F|... .. .. ...| 10|G-5 01 .. ...| 11|... .. .. ...| 12|B-5 01 .. ...| 13|... .. .. ...| 14|A#5 01 .. SD2| 15|... .. .. ...| 16|B-5 01 .. ...| 17|... .. .. ...| 18|A-5 01 .. ...| 19|... .. .. ...| 1A|F#5 01 .. ...| 1B|... .. .. ...| 1C|E-5 01 .. SD3| 1D|... .. .. ...| 1E|D-5 01 .. ...| 1F|... .. .. ...| If you listen to this vs. the original, it'll still ring with plenty of similarities, but you can plainly tell which is more interesting than which... Since we're still in the realm of trackers, I might as well mention another simple trick to make a rhythm feel swung. You can alternate between two different speeds at every row or so. So instead of having Speed 7 at 128 bpm, you can alternate between speeds 3 and 4 at 64 bpm. Your average tempo is still the same, but now it swings a bit. The only disadvantage to this is that you're occupying a whole effect column that could otherwise be used for other effects. Another reason that I think trackers should have global effect channels. Time to Go Bye-Bye! Anyway, this is just a basic outlining of some simple music theory to work from. What it is NOT is a how-to of composition. Part of composing through theory is having some knowledge of "what sounds good" and "what sounds bad." Theory, however, gets into "WHY this sounds good," which enables you to carry on a composition and build on it while maintaining equivalent levels of quality and quickly eliminate anything that serves only as trash. There is a value to talent, but it is more than possible to make up for lack of talent (as I often show ;) with knowledge. Out here, most musicians believe greatly in the power of talent while musicologists tend to think of talent as bunk. If it were up to me, I'd point out that you can't solve everything with only one aspect. If you have lots of talent, a little bit of theory can make you lightning quick. If you have little or no talent, a whole lot of theory can make up for it... you won't be fast as lightning... maybe Mach 1... but that's decent. Don't try to set a goal of "I'm going to be the next Mick Rippon" or anything of the sort. If you try that, you'll get halfway there and never any farther. Set a goal of being god. Halfway to the hand of god is pretty far. No one is there yet... Have fun chasing it.