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Composing with Chopsticks
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0:00
we all know Chopsticks it's the first piano piece most of us play picking it up from our friends producing a strangely satisfying and impressive Sound by simply bashing two fingers in a simple little pattern on the keyboard what this video is going to attempt something similar but for composing a no experience required guide to picking up your quill pen or your Apple Mac and filling that blank page or screen with beautiful notes that you've composed
0:31
composing can be a bit of a mystery to people and what I often hear them say is I had a little idea but I wasn't sure what to do with it I I got a bit stuck looking out of the window and hearing the musical idea in your head is the Romantic idea of what a composer is but that's only really a tiny part of the process so we're going to use chopsticks itself as our starting point and pretend that's the little idea we don't know what to do with and I'll show you 50
0:57
quick tricks that you can use split into six main categories to get you started on turning it into a full piece of music and then we'll end with a bonus seventh section where I discuss a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the composing thought process it won't be quite as romantic as looking out of the window except perhaps in this one way your job here is simply to follow your heart if any of these approaches excite you make you feel like something magical is
1:25
mysteriously coming to life grab hold of that you might be on to something tuning into that feeling what turns you on musically speaking is a big part of what composing is all about and by the way I got the idea for using Chopsticks from my friend David Bennett who's just done a video all about the history of the piece itself so do check that out afterwards the Link's in the description so here's the melody line of our little idea we'll call him [Music] lonus so in this first section we're
1:58
going to look at ways to extend and develop the melody to give us more ideas to use later in the piece lonus is going to have a bunch of children who will all look a little bit like him but who can all potentially go on to make their own way in our little finished piece the first child has half the same DNA as its dad but the other half is completely different you can see here the first half is now a downwards and upwards scale whereas the second half Remains the [Music]
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Same the second child as is often the case is a bit more active it wriggles around and I did that just by moving some notes down and some notes
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[Music] up the third child has a bit of a growth spurt so things that were just small bumps in lonus become much larger [Music] leaps and the fourth stretches out a a bit more horizontally so the body is the same as Dad but it's a bit wider in a few places and to accommodate that I changed the time signature to 44 so there's an extra 2 e notes in each [Music]
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bar we'll talk a lot more about rhythmic ideas a bit later on the next two children are slightly more unusual one is just the same as Dad but upside down
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and the other is the same but back to [Music]
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front but of course we don't have to keep the kids the same size as their parents we could chop them into little parts and don't worry they enjoy being chopped up so we now have three unique little mini kids that we can play with separately
4:00
now I suppose wriggling worms and their weird kids might all seem a bit silly but believe it or not you've just covered the basics of melodic transformation techniques that countless composers use by taking just one small idea and stretching shrinking flipping and rearranging it you can create a whole family of musical themes each one related to the original but with their own unique character now we need to find ways to string these ideas together into a longer Melody for example a sequence
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takes one shape or one child and moves it up or down to repeat the pattern a bit higher
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up or interpolation Blends melodic lines together a bit like shuffling a pack of cards this Melody comes from interpolating all three of those mini kids into one new
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line all these different approaches can be lumped together in what we might call melodic development try to use these different techniques to create something think that has a shape and a sense of [Music] [Applause] breath in this example I've taken the stretched version of the melody turned the third bar of that into a little sequence then added one of those mini children which then runs down and repeats an octave lower I gave the whole phrase a shape rising up to the top see
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here before falling back downwards so from our Little Chopsticks line we've now got this whole flowing melodic line which could be the start of a whole new piece The Melody of Chopsticks is kind of strange it doesn't really sound right without the harmony so here it is with both the original notes
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together Harmony acts a bit like the environment through which our friend Linus moves so by changing the harmony we can give him adventures in all sorts of different environments but also all sorts of different atmospheres some joyful or peaceful some tense or dramatic some downright scary It Only Takes Two notes to create a Harmony so just by changing the lower note here we can radically change the feel of the piece it could be quite dark and sad
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or it could be much more
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nostalgic you can do a lot with two notes but the fact is you're only actually implying the harmony now to show you what I mean let's use both of the two notes of the original Chopsticks and put them in a completely different harmonic context
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it's quite a fun trick I think because the right hand here is exactly the same as the original Chopsticks and yet with the addition of those extra notes below the sense of the harmony the sense of the peace completely changes so it's good to bear in mind there's a difference between the implied Harmony and the actual Harmony and you can have a lot of fun undermining the listener's Expectations by being aware of that so let's go back to our Topline Melody now and try adding some full chords
7:27
underneath it one way you can try to find find new chords is to isolate out individual notes from the melody and simply think of some chord that would have that note in it don't even worry for now whether those chords make sense or not just try things out so if we separate out the three main notes of the melody and look at the G we're going to see how many different chords we can find with a g in it so there's three major chords C major E flat major and G major and the same with minor chords or
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you could have a diminished or an augmented chord suspended second and fourth chords or chords like the major 7th or even more advanced than that when you think about it there's so many chords even that major 7th chord for example there are four different major 7even chords with a g in it so there really is a lot to choose from here so I've used two different chords on the G's and two other chords on the B and the C and let's see how that
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sounds and if you like a particular chord you might even alter the the melody itself like I did here at the end Don't force yourself to stick to the original Melody if it needs adapting to fit a chord that you found go ahead and adapt it but if choosing chords in a slightly random way like this feels a bit too scary for you you can make life easier for yourself by limiting yourself to a particular group of notes by using a mode or a scale for example if we take
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the aolian mode on E that gives us these notes to choose from and this is how Chopsticks would sound in this mode
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you could also try stranger scales like the whole tone scale which is built out of a series of whole steps although again you will have to change the melody line if you are keeping strictly to the notes of the
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mode and of course there's nothing Stopping You inventing your own scale most commonly used scales have between five and seven notes spread out fairly evenly but you could create your own scale with with eight or nine notes or with some larger intervals like say a minor third here's one that I created and attempting to play chopsticks on it led me to [Music] [Laughter]
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this sticking to one scale or mode is one of the safest ways of making sure that everything's going to sound good and coherent and once that can be a good thing it can also be a bad thing you might find that things start getting a bit dull if you only use those notes so let's explore a couple of ways of building different chords that might not necessarily sit within one scale or mode if you want to get jazzier try looking for chords built out of lots of stacked thirds so major 7ths 9ths 11th and
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[Music]
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13th and this is one of those areas where you can use the implication of the harmony rather than playing playing every single note of the chord miss out a few the chord will still have the same effect but the harmony will be implied more than sounded and this also tends to make it a lot easier to [Music] play or for a slightly cooler more distant sound stack chords built out of fourths
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[Music] or you could try making polytonal chords try taking two Triads or perhaps two seventh chords and play them together as one C major and FSH major or a major and D7 the results are often quite scrunchy and cool
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there's another very useful technique which is actually present in the original Chopsticks itself in the second section the middle section the harmony here Moves In Parallel motion so the notes are moving in parallel but within a given mode or scale in this case C major let's change it again to a different scale the mix aidian now so we have a B
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flat and you could do the same adding a larger chord underneath and still move everything down in parallel within this
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scale so far we're keeping everything within one mode Let's try instead to keep the shape of the chord itself the distance between each of the notes the same and move the whole chord shape down some of the notes will now be outside of the scale we've been using this is called harmonic planing and it's used quite a bit in jazz as well as by composers like deusi and Stravinsky
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and yet another harmonic approach is also implied by this section of
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Chopsticks it's one of the things that makes it so much fun to play it's symmetrical the point of the mirror is f and g and the harmony is created by moving symmetrically up and down you can generate mirror cords within a mode by taking any note as the mirror so here the mirror is C all of these chords are symmetrical around C while sticking within the notes of the scale but you can do a strict div verion by making the intervals an exact match on either side
13:05
of the mirror so the notes now will be more chromatic and not confined to one particular scale or rather than making the chords themselves symmetrical you could use a mirror point to create a sort of negative Mirror Image version of the piece so for example the major third from middle C up to e here becomes a major third down to a flat here this is what Jacob Coler uses and its approach he calls negative Harmony so this is our reflected negative Harmony version of [Music]
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Chopsticks it's a really fun technique which as you can hear creates a very different kind of atmosphere so let's try now creating something that's a bit more dissonant we saw those polytonal chords a moment ago with their scrunchy sound well let's try making something even scruncher a cluster cord is more of an effect than a Harmony it's a lot of notes all scrunched up very very close together again useful if you want to write something far more intense and [Music]
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dissonant it's quite interesting how dissonant the music can become whilst still keeping a sense of a home key or a tonic you can see here the chords get very clashy but it still feels okay to resolve at the end
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so then the question is can you write music where there isn't a tonal Center to do away with that sense alt together you'll probably need to avoid many of the familiar tonal chords that's why a tonal music often emphasizes intervals like the second the 9th and the
14:52
trone Okay so we've talked a bit about Harmony but only in terms of the melody line with chords underneath so much of music is thought about in this way that it takes a while to get used to the idea that there are alternatives and I'm going to call this whole topic layering how many different layers is your music going to have and how will they all fit together Chopsticks itself has two layers the upper notes and the lower notes but they kind of feel like one layer because they
15:18
move together in the same Rhythm all the time if you want to give them a real sense of Separation they need to move independently from one another and one of the simplest ways to achieve this is when one part's moving fast the other part moves [Music]
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slower composing two or more lines against each other like this is called Counterpoint and it's one of the hardest forms of composing it's a style of composing which doesn't involve much staring out of the window it's more of an abstract intellectual game of fitting the parts together so I guess if you're really into sodoku and crosswords this might be the style of composing that suits you if you want to give yourself a real Counterpoint challenge try a cannon where the second part is slightly
16:05
delayed from the first and has to somehow fit together when you compose a cannon you have to constantly check back and forth between the two parts to make sure the individual line sounds good but also fits with the other part which might be say a bar behind
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[Music]
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another way to think about musical layering is in terms of texture a texture can consist of multiple layers or it can be just one idea which continues and doesn't necessarily change along with the melody the simplest kind of musical texture is a drone a long held note usually in the base which sits there while the melody floats above
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[Music] here's a drone that has three different notes looping around in a pattern independently of the melody [Music] line and it's that Independence which is crucial it gives it a sense of being a completely separate layer compatible with the line above but not in any way tied to it but a texture can also be something more active here I've made trilling and tremolo cords on the piano you can just about make out the shape of the original tune but it's the texture itself which is the key element
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[Music]
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now and there's one more layering idea which we'll come to in our next main section Rhythm so we saw earlier how changing the notes used for the scale or the mode can affect the piece using a different scale is very much like taking the same idea and viewing it through a different lens the type of rhythmic pattern used in a piece has a similar effect it's easy to see the pattern for the original Chopsticks because there's a note on every grid line so for example by simply
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stretching every other note so that it creates a long and a short pattern we straight away give things an entirely different more bouncy
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feel stretch it a little bit further and it takes on more of a marching military I istic kind of
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feel add in a bit of syncopation it suddenly becomes something much more
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groovy but you can also of course change the grid Itself by changing the time signature there's a whole world of possibility here whether it's continuing that syncopation with a sble like 44 [Music]
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or this quirky 78
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pattern taking your existing idea and mapping it out into a new time signature stretching or squashing it to make it fit always brings out new elements in the music which you might not have considered before so let's return now to musical layers most music naturally has layers that move in different speeds and rhythms just just think of a standard popbeat with the fast moving high hat interacting with slower moving drums beneath this idea that high equals fast
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and low equals slow as a hierarchy isn't a rule but it's certainly pretty common here it is for example in ban gaman music where the upper line moves along incredibly fast the middle lines move at a mid-tempo and the Bas gongs just gong away very
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slowly we could try to recreate a texture a little bit like this using [Music]
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Chopsticks taking inspiration from approaches used in other kinds of music is something we'll come back to in a moment but there is one more thing to say about rhythm both pop drum beats and gaman take a larger Unit A whole note and divide it down into smaller and smaller units a half note a quarter note and so on is the equivalent of dividing a cake into smaller and smaller pieces things do move at different speeds but they're all part of the same cake there is another approach where our
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cake has two layers and each layer is sliced in a different way the most common way this is done is where one layer is in twos and the other is in threes this is called a poly Rhythm so let's try a Chopsticks version in two and [Music]
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three a polyeter slightly confusingly plays two different lengths against each other that use the same underlying pulse it's a technique often found in West African music so here's a 38 note pattern in the right hand against a 48 note pattern in the left and just to confuse you even more I've thrown in some
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syncopation if these kind of poly rythmic games get you going and they certainly do in my case then there's a whole world to explore with pitching different ratios of Rhythm against each other but layers don't even have to be in a precise relationship to each other phasing is a technique where two lines which are the same gradually fall out of syn with each [Music] other what about if we try this on a much larger scale a simple way to do this might be to grab a bunch of
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different performances of Chopsticks off of YouTube and run them all together because they all play at slightly different speeds we get an interesting blurring effect which starts very complicated and then gradually thins out this is sometimes called
22:47
heterophony if we're using music notation the easiest way to create something similar is by coming back to that idea of a musical Cannon but on a much grander scale so here's chopsticks where each entry is staggered by a 16th [Music] note I found this a bit predictable so I chopped a few holes in the texture and I was a lot happier with the [Music] results you can make a somewhat similar effect using a tool known as pole stretch which takes an audio file and flows it right down to create an
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entirely new [Music]
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atmosphere and finally in our Rhythm Section just as we saw the avoidance of a tonal Center in our Harmony section you can also think about the avoidance of pulse altogether if you're interested in drones or that pole stretch idea you could attempt to write a melody that feels like it's floating free of any rhythm you could simply leave this up to the performer for example you could write music that's spatially notated so there's no bar lines and the player just
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plays the Rhythm based roughly on the [Music]
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spacing or you could try the trickier task of notating something very precisely that seems like it's free and flexible this is something those composers do quite a lot and it often ends up writing complicated rhythms that don't coincide with the rhythmic [Music]
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pulse so far we've mentioned a few Styles sber West African gaman and incorporating existing styles of music into your composition is another thing you could play around with just thinking about it will probably give you new ideas for example as soon as I started thinking about a waltz I came up with this little suspended idea on the downbeat and this Rising arpeggio I think because these were things that I just sort of instinctively associated with the sound of a
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waltz why not mix Styles and have a Walt in the right hand and a Blues in the
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left and as well as popular and World music Styles you could also look at different composing techniques minimalism for example is one of the most popular forms of contemporary music minimalism uses small repetitive cells and repeats them I tried separating out the two note chords of the original Chopsticks and made them into a repeating little pattern but instead of playing each chord one after another I added the new notes on to form larger and larger chords another example of
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making Harmony out of a melody
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[Music]
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I mentioned a tonal music earlier well you could try shern BG's Famous 12 tone technique the basic idea is that you build your piece out of a theme of sorts which has all 12 chromatic notes so I took the first four notes of each part of Chopsticks to create the start of the row couldn't use the C at the top so I changed it to a C sharp and then I just filled in the other four notes that were missing this is our tone row and like with our Melody earlier the traditional
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approach here is to take the reverse of it the upside down version and the Reversed upside down the retrograde inversion to give it its proper name how you compose with these tone rows is really up to you and depends on the style of music you want to make if you're trying to avoid tonal centers then you can use them quite strictly and not repeat any notes until you've completed all of the row or you can just use it as a starting point and be very free in the way that you use it and
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adapt it for example several sections of this row have quite a tonal feel to them so you could use those and bring those out in the music that you create more recent schools of compositional thought have often tended to pay less attention to individual notes and harmonies and more attention to things like texture and tambra they'd be unlikely to take something like Chopsticks as a starting point but think of it like taking a single note or phrase and stretching it
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out a bit like that pole stretch idea diving deep into it there are all sorts of unconventional approaches to making sounds which you might add into your piece what's the sound that your nails make when they hit the piano keys use fingernails or rubber mallets to hit the strings add blue tack or other objects to the strings to change the sound and try and construct a whole piece by balancing sections with a lot of activity and sections with a lot of space and
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silence and finally let's think about exploring microtonality that's relatively easy to do these days with the right software here I'm using spectronic keyscape which has a whole range of different tuning options my advice would be just to play around with them and see if you find things you like here I found myself enjoying mean tone half
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tuning so that bring brings us to our final main section which is form most of the ideas we've looked at so far are quite short just playing with that two bars of the opening of Chopsticks how do we build them into something larger firstly let's talk about extending the ideas we have we mentioned in the melody section that you can develop a Melody well the truth is you can develop any aspect for example the original Harmony of Chopstick strongly implies what's called a five1
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Cadence G going to C and you can do a 51 progression in any key so let's try developing our piece by making a series of these 51 cadences moving through a bunch of different [Music] Keys development is really most of the things we've been talking about here thinking about ways that we can manipulate an idea whether as a line as a Harmony as a rhythm or as a texture and as with melodic development the longer term goal here is to give your piece a sense of shape or a sense of
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Journey some composers only really work in this kind of way with a starting point and then gradually developing it taking the idea on a walk and seeing where they end up other composers find a few different ideas and then start playing around with sticking them together and seeing what happens Chop Stick six itself is a bit like two different ideas you've got idea one and then that second parallel motion section and then it goes back to idea one this is known as ABA form or Turner form
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there are all sorts of traditional forms like this which are good to know about Rondo for example is where you have one main idea that keeps coming back and in between you have different non-re repeating sections Arch form as its name suggests starts with idea a b and then C and then returns backwards b and and then a so you can see that a large part of thinking about form tends to be about repetition and where those repetitions happen form is created in your memory so
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repeating something puts a really clear signpost in the map of the piece like a comma in a sentence or a new paragraph it helps you know where you are but there are other ways you can think about form you could think of it as a journey for example a movement from dark to light or a story it might be an abstract story or it might be a literal story following the ups and downs of a particular plot which the audience may or may not be aware of that's up to you
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and indeed ups and downs or ES and flows of emotion can be another guiding principle of organizing the form of your piece for example gradually building tension in a series of ever larger waves before collapsing and fading away in this kind of piece you might not need a recognizable theme that repeats it might all be about the surges of energy and tension so we've now covered 50 musical ideas but I want want to end with three bonus ideas which deal with an important
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aspect of composing which is often overlooked or not directly discussed and that is meaning this comes back to what I was saying at the beginning about the artistic vision and of course as a beginner composer it's a lot to try and take in and figure out but let me give you a few areas that you might not have considered probably the most common starting point for a beginner composer is self-expression back to staring out of the window wanting to express something that comes from within but
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that needn't be just expressing an emotion I'm feeling sad so I'm going to write a sad piece I would say that direct self-expression like that is relatively uncommon amongst composers apart from anything else composing takes a long time so you're unlikely to be in one emotional mood for the entire time more likely you'll want to use composing to express what I would call more of a philosophical position the approach composers have taken over the centuries says a lot about how they viewed the
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world whether or not they intended it for example somebody like Beethoven might have looked at a stream and depicted its bucolic charm simple and peaceful whereas perhaps a 20th Century composer like zarus would be more aware of the turbulent chaotic forces that push the water particles around and they might draw inspiration from that coming back to Chopsticks maybe we could take all of those recordings that we found on YouTube put them all in a door take one
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note from each and use that to create a new piece that Express the fragmented nature of the internet and the modern world
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or maybe we could explore a more political meaning try adding texts and images to your work for example labor conditions in a chopstick manufacturer and find a musical approach that suits your aims whether that's a buildup of anger and frustration or a depiction of repetitive monotony here I found that the pole stretch music from earlier on worked quite [Music] well of course not all meanings need to be vast or Global Chopsticks is tied to childhood memories for so many what if
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your piece leaned into Nostalgia capturing that sense of wonder somehow or perhaps you'd like to explore it through the lens of the piano's role in cultural history looking at how Chopsticks found its way into so many hearts of course all these examples relate to Chopsticks itself but I hope it gives you some idea of the ways that you can take a little musical idea and turn it into something that resonates much more strongly with the wider world but at the end of the day you might just
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want to take pleasure from messing around with sounds if you've come this far in the video you're already a composer at heart and yes it can be like solving a puzzle but it's also about finding what lights you up musically speaking as I said at the start when you're exploring new things as a composer keep your intuition open and listen out for things that really speak to your musical sensibility if you laser focus in on the things that you get excited by you'll be well on your way to
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being a good composer I hope you're feeling inspired and if out of this video you end up writing your first piece do drop a link below I can't wait to see what you're getting up to thanks so much for watching and for sticking around so much time special thanks to my patrons on patreon your support makes this all possible thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]
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brce Bruce
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