Starting from the top down

I may have written a post about this before, but I think it’s worth going over again.

Planning your music from the top down, meaning from the larger form down, can help keep the piece of music organized and sounding well planned. It can keep it focused in a way.

Writing the music as you go is a great way to start out, but after having written music that way for a while it’s useful to start exploring different ways of composition.

Let’s go through a few steps we can take that will help us get used to doing this.

0. Gather your materials

I made a YouTube video about this a while ago that would be useful to check out, but the main idea is figure out what language you want to use in your piece. Musical brainstorming can be a good technique to use at the beginning of this process.

Come up with a few different musical ideas and create different variations of those ideas that you want to use in your piece. Choose your harmonies and your rhythms and try to come up with the raw materials that you’ll be putting together to create your music.

This step can be incredibly useful if you’ve never done this before because it forces you to focus on single ideas, outside of the context of a larger piece of music. It separates them and can help you decide what ideas you want to include in your piece of music.

1. Plan the larger form first

This means that you start by choosing what form you want the piece to be in. You can choose something that’s traditional like a rondo, sonata, theme and variations or rounded binary form or you can assign letters or numbers and write it out yourself. Either will work.

Decide what order the sections will be in and how they will be related. If you choose a form like a rondo or a sonata that’s basically already decided for you, but it’s still useful to choose what form the piece will take.

After deciding what the larger form is you can decide what materials you’ll be using in each section. This is one of the more fun parts of planning out music to me. You get to choose where to put all of your different ideas. Maybe you want to use two different themes in the first two sections and then introduce a third section with the retrograde of the first idea.

It can feel like you’re slotting into place different musical ideas and completing a type of musical puzzle.

2. Plan the lengths of sections (roughly)

The next thing to do after having decided the larger form of the piece is to plan out the lengths of the different sections. I have a video about keeping your sections proportional that might be useful here, but the main idea is to divide up your song into somewhat even sections.

You want to have enough time to fully develop and explore each idea that you introduce. If the sections are evenly spaced that will give you enough time to explore each idea equally. If one section is twice as long as another it can make that section sound lopsided where one idea is explored and developed quite a lot more than other ideas.

This doesn’t need to be final and definitely can change later if the music calls for it (which I’ve found often happens), but try to get a rough idea of how long each section will be and how long the total song length will be.

3. Plan any key, meter, or tempo changes

Next you’ll want to plan out any large changes that might happen in the piece of music. If you want to you can even plan out how the transitions will happen and how long those transitions will last.

This step can be helpful in preparing those transitions. If you know that in four measures the music needs to modulate, slowly, to a different key you can prepare for that and write it into the music from the beginning to avoid any headaches of trying to figure out how to fit that transition in later on.

4. Write your music

Now we’re at the main part. Writing the music. Flesh it out. After having completed the first four steps you’ll have a great idea of what the end piece will sound like, and this part is mostly about finishing and polishing your ideas. This is where the orchestration and the arranging happens. It’s also where you decide how exactly you’re going to play different ideas and how those ideas will flow into the other ideas.

This step will go a lot faster and a lot smoother after having gone through the above steps. Then you’ll have a well planned and prepared piece finishing.

Final thoughts

If you’ve never written music like this it can feel robotic and a little cold. I don’t recommend writing every single piece of music like this, mostly because boxing yourself into only using one method of writing probably won’t give you the best results all of the time. But it’s a useful way of writing to be able to do. And the skills that it teaches you and helps you improve will help improve your compositional skills all around.

The main skills this helps with is developing a sense of musical form. Writing in a way that feels and sounds organized to the listener is what writing like this will develop. It’s a skill that’s quite important in being able to write a wide range of music and being able to express yourself in different ways. Some days you may want to just start writing from the beginning and write it all the way through from the beginning. Some days that might not be the easiest way to write. Take this technique out and it can help you get some music written and planned.

Give it a try next time you write a piece of music and see what comes out. You might just be surprised at how well composed the music ends up being.

ISJ