How does a composer get from this:
To this:
in 25 minutes?
Well, the magic is in the little numbers underneath the music.
This is basically figured bass, a highly antiquated method of composition from the Baroque days of Bach, where the composer would write the bassline - Cantus Firmus - and the performers fill in the gaps with the implied instructions the numbers provide.
This was largely improvised in the form of 'basso continuo' which to a modern musician is a mad skill to have, but by following those numbers, and the hardcore ruleset, the outcome of what the musicians play goes from practically infinite, to somewhat predictable.
Musicians often learn this process in school, although from the day you finish learning it, you'll never, ever use it again unless you then become a teacher to the next generation or you're a very niche musician in an old baroque ensemble.
So, needless to say, I'm pretty rusty at it, and thought I'd grease the old bones and attempt the above example.
The above image is everything I had to work with, and I filled in 3 more voices: The main melody on top, and the two harmonies in the middle. Consider it like a choir; Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.
Stick to the rules!
Rules are made to be broken they say, well, not so much in the days of old. But I'm ok with it. I do agree with the old adage;
'Freedom is the enemy of creativity'
or any of its variations.
Parallel NO-tion
The main pain in the arse is famously the 'Parallel 5ths' rule, in which no two notes in a chord can move in the same direction if they are a 5th apart from each other (DO to SO).
I figured for my first attempt I'd just forget these rules and see what my ears could do purely by what I think sounds good. So this is what I made, which took about 7 minutes:
The red notes are just 'cause the instrument can't play that low in the real world, but I'm messing with MIDI so who cares.
So yeah this is all built upon the numbers which basically tell that:
Each chord has 3 notes, and this bass note is this particular one. You can fill the rest of the parts in with the remaining two notes.
Well, then I remembered that the old Musescore program I'm using has a plugin where you can check for parallel 5ths (and octaves), so I exported it into the old program to check because I'm way too lazy to do it myself, and here's the results:
Annoying. That's a whole bunch of errors! Let's see what I can do here, though:
Ok this one is free from that egregious curse of parallel notes.
Generally, like all things in life, the best way to avoid them is by having a healthy balance of different types of motion, whether it's staying in the same spot, or going in opposite directions (contrary motion).
Generally, I find when I follow the rules, it does tend to sound better overall, but there are some other things to consider that are a bit more subjective, such as maintaining an 'interesting' melody line (which has its own ruleset), a 'boring' pair of inner lines, and being careful not to exceed certain intervals and jumps.
There's also a structure you should consider just like any novel: a beginning, a climactic peak, and a resolution. You can generally accomplish this with your ear and personal taste, I reckon.
The last thing I did here was quite literally just copy and paste those four lines separately into a string section (violins etc), a brass section (horns, trumpets) and a choral section (voices), ramped up the volume and voila!
Conclusion
I'm pretty happy with it. I'll definitely have to read up and review the ruleset for the next one, as I'm doing this from memory and I'm sure a professor would be cringing at this if they saw it!
But at the end of the day, I quite like the melody (a tad plain), and it just sounds pretty neat!
The sounds I'm using are all freeware from the Musescore software. If I plonked it into my production software and gave it a proper go at sounding epic, this would make an excellent LONG...LIVE...THE KING.... moment.
I have zero knowledge about music but I know to recognize good and hard-worked tracks and this is definitely one of them! :)
I don't need to know where you travelled to know it was great =D Same thing I guess ^__^
Fair enough. Haha
Oh, bro, you made me remember when I studied harmonic analysis. The thing about numbers under the notes has always seemed crazy to me, especially to identify the degrees of the chord of each cadence. Also, remember those sins of parallel octaves and fifths. Fortunately, the current harmony is not based on those rules and ignores any of them.
Ah a fellow music nerd (willingly or not haha) is here!
I don't really agree that they're 'ignored', they're just acknowledged as suggestions rather than rules. The basic western harmonic system is pretty much unchanged at the foundations, and just evolved beyond it.
It frustrates me when guitarists have this constant philosophical war against music theory. They just end up feeling lost and confused when they can't figure anything out and everything they do sounds bad X(
But yeah this particular area of music education is pretty unnecessary for 99.9999% of musicians
Well, if you wanted to impress, you did! Pretty amazing talent you have. I like that simple rule though. Life tends to have its structure doesn't it?
If there's one person I'd want being impressed on this platform it'd be you!
Which is lucky because apparently nobody else is even slightly interested lol (my music blogs are consistently the least read by far)
But yeah no matter how complex, everything can easily be reduced to its simplest fundamentals. Heinrich Schenker proposed pretty much every musical masterpiece can be reduced right down to the point of 'three blind mice' - hard to disagree, and I bet it applies to other media too!
It's been said that every story has been told. It may be true, but we still write :)
🌈 You've done it before (thank you)
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