Today I visited a music teacher at a high school for my master’s program and I played flute and guitar there with his students. I haven’t practiced guitar in a about a month and I haven’t practiced flute in over a month. But I could pick them back up quickly because a lot of the musical knowledge I have transfers.
For guitar I’ve reached a high enough level where it’s hard for me to lose a whole lot of progress. I will lose a slight level of comfort with the instrument, but that comes back within a few minutes.
For flute I’m at a fairly low level, but it’s enough where it comes back within 15 minutes of warming up.
The main thing I noticed was that I was more comfortable soloing on guitar even though I haven’t practiced soloing a whole lot recently. I’ve mostly been focusing on improving my improvisation skills on piano. And I’ve played a number of jazz standards on piano.
But all of that knowledge of scales, arpeggios, changes, and standards transferred to guitar fairly easily because it was so ingrained. I could think of the changes and follow them on guitar because I’d practiced over the exact same changes on piano enough.
All of this is to say that many things in music transfer from one instrument or medium to another. Even if you haven’t been practicing one specific thing, many other things help you improve that skill.
One fantastic thing the composition major at Berklee College of Music did for me was force me to write for different ensembles. Before going to Berklee I’d only thought about writing for orchestra. At Berklee I wrote for solo piano, solo marimba, solo flute, a bunch of different duos, orchestra, different trio groups, string quartet, Pierrot ensemble, and many other ensembles.
It’s a great way to practice making music and learning about different instruments and how those instruments make music.
It also forces you to think about writing music that fits on the instrument, rather than just thinking about notes abstractly. For some ensembles you have to think about balancing all of the instruments because some may more easily over power others. So you need to take that into account when composing for those ensembles.
All of these apply to orchestra, but there’s a lot of padding in orchestra. The instruments can sometimes hide behind others and the writing isn’t as exposed. In a piece for solo violin everything is exposed.
And it can be incredibly helpful for your writing to be able to write for different ensembles and groups.
Here are some ideas for ensembles to write for:
solo any instrument – violin, cello, viola, flute, clarinet, marimba, piano etc.
piano + other instrument
duos – flute + clarinet, violin + cello, violin + flute, etc.
piano trio – violin, cello, piano
piano quartet – violin, viola, cello, piano
string quartet – violin, violin, viola, cello
Pierrot ensemble – flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano
I was chatting with a composer friend of mine the other day and we both are writing pieces with a similar approach right now.
We’re just writing.
Not much planning other than some mental things.
Thinking of a few ideas ahead of time, but that’s the extent of the planning.
And so far for me it’s going great. I started writing a string orchestra piece and writing it this way is perfect right now.
I think it’s important to experiment with different writing styles and see which ones work best for you. And maybe those will change. But experiment with different ways of writing. Write the melody first. For something else start with the chords or the harmony. Another piece might start with the texture.
Some you may plan in a lot of detail. Planning out every single section and how they’re related.
Other pieces you may not plan out at all.
That’s what I’m doing.
Give it a shot. Maybe you’ll find that you like composing in some ways that you hadn’t expected to enjoy. Or you might find, as I have, that some types of pieces and some styles work better for certain styles of writing. While other styles or conceptual ideas don’t work as well with some styles of writing.
One great piece of advice I received in college was to be curious about my instrument. Try to learn more about it. Try to find musicians that use your instrument in new and interesting ways.
Try to find different ways of playing your instrument and different styles of playing your instrument.
Be curious about your instrument.
Try to learn as much as you can about how people have used your instrument, and even look up variations on your instrument and how those instruments are used.
For guitar that would mean learning about all the different types of guitars; electric, acoustic, hollow body, semi-hollow body, steel string, nylon string, resonator. And any others. Learn about different styles of guitar playing and how different players have used the instrument. That’s a ton of different styles of music to look into for guitar. It also means looking into lute music and even instruments like oud and sitar because they have similar constructions and playing techniques to guitar. It could include mandolin and banjo if you want to include those.
But being curious about your instrument will mean that you have a larger base of information to draw from when you play your instrument. It also means you’ll have exposed yourself to more styles of playing. And you’ll be able to have a larger vocabulary of styles of music to draw from when you play your instrument. If you do further research and practice and learn those techniques you could potentially incorporate some of those techniques into your own playing.
So it’ll give you a larger musical vocabulary to draw from when you play.
One thing my jazz ensemble students struggle with, at the beginning, is coming up with ideas. Often my students won’t have any ideas for solos. Nothing. They’ll be completely lost and confused about how to think of ideas to use in solos.
That’s a skill.
The act of thinking of different ideas to use in solos is a skill. Coming up with ideas is a skill. If you’ve never tried to think of ideas for solos it’ll be difficult. But once you do it a few times and you continue practicing it, it’ll become easier and easier.
This is one reason why jazz musicians can so easily think of things to play over standards. They have no problem coming up with ideas for solos. One of the reasons for that is that they’ve done tons of work figuring out different ideas to use. They’ve practiced the skill of coming up with ideas.
So get practicing. Coming up with ideas is in itself a skill.
Once you’ve practiced it enough you’ll be able to come up with ideas much more easily.
One activity that one of my composition teachers had me to do in college was think of 10 ideas in 10 minutes. I had nothing for music to show him so he gave me a piece of sheet of manuscript paper and put on a 10 minute timer and said, “think of 10 ideas.” And he watched me. If I stopped for too long a period of time he’d say, “keep going. Just write ideas. It doesn’t matter if they’re good.”
And it made me a little uncomfortable at the time, but it was a great experience and a great exercise to do. It got me used to coming up with ideas. And it taught me a mentality or a mindset towards coming up with ideas that was super useful. It didn’t matter if I liked the ideas. Just coming up with the ideas was the goal. Just keep thinking of things. Sift through them later. Remove the ones you don’t like later. But for now, just think of the different ideas.
He taught me that it was a skill to think of ideas.
And the more you practice coming up with ideas and the more you think of new things, the better you’ll get at it.
It doesn’t help you write a full piece of music necessarily, but it helps with the initial step.
So give it a shot.
Take a piece of manuscript paper. Put on a timer. Try to think of 10 ideas in 10 minutes.
Whenever I write a piece of music for a new ensemble I do my research beforehand. By doing my research I mean finding scores I like and pieces that sound good to me. I look for music that’s written for the same ensemble that’s written in a way that I want to emulate. If I can find a recording and a score I’m set. I’ll listen through the piece and look at how that composer achieved the sounds and textures they did and how they used the ensemble.
When I wrote my string quartet titled “T(h)e R(ab)b(it).” One of the things I did before even starting to write the piece is listen to a ton of string quartets. I wanted to make sure I did my homework beforehand.
And it helped.
It gives you an idea of how other composers have used the ensemble and what sounds they’ve used. This will help you figure out how you want to use the ensemble and what sounds and ideas you want. Some ways of writing may be fairly common for that ensemble while other ways of writing may not. Whatever it is, knowing more about how music for that ensemble has been written will just give you a fuller idea of what that ensemble can do.
It also gives you an idea of what the players will likely be used to playing if they play in similar ensembles often. While that point isn’t a big deal it is helpful to know what ideas may be a little awkward or may give the players a little trouble before rehearsal.
Specifically for string quartets, it gave me an idea of how composers used only four instruments, two violins, viola, and cello to create a piece of music. Because I’d studied orchestral music mostly it also gave me an idea of what types of techniques were commonly used in string quartets as opposed to orchestra.
In an orchestra there’s a section of violin players, but in a string quartet there’s only two, and often they’re playing two separate parts.
These are two distinct sounds, and while there aren’t techniques that sound bad in one versus the other, the techniques can sound quite different. You get much more bow sound and rasp from a solo player. You get a smoother sound from a section. Sections also often sound a little warmer than solo strings.
So hearing these two types of writing is useful. It was useful to see the writing styles. The string quartets had much more elaborate counterpoint than many of the orchestral pieces by the same composers. Maybe I managed to only find string quartets that included more elaborate counterpoint, but that seemed to be a commonality among all of them.
But it makes sense because in a string quartet the array of sounds available to you is less than with a full orchestra. You only have four instruments and only three unique instruments (because you have two violins). They’re also instruments that are fairly similar sounding (as opposed to trumpet versus flute). So creating interest within those constraints may lead to using something like counterpoint in a different way.
I did notice some similarities though. Many of the string quartets passed the melody around between the instruments, much like composers will do with melodies in an orchestra. And other things like rhythms, melodies, and harmonies were used in similar ways.
So do your research ahead of time.
I did the same thing before writing my album “Expanding (An Electric Symphony).” I found a whole bunch of electronic albums and listened to them. For these I couldn’t find scores because those didn’t exist but I made sure I listened to them as closely as I could and I even learned a few parts on piano. That way I could learn how different producers used the sounds and put them together in their music.
Given that I didn’t study electronic music production in college there were many ways in which this was different than the music that I’d studied in depth. I’d listened to electronic music quite often, but I’d never listened with an analytic ear or with the intent of creating it myself.
So hearing the different sounds and how producers modulated and changed those sounds to create the effects that they wanted was useful. It was also useful to hear that certain sounds were commonly used by many different producers. Sounds like sawtooth waves and square waves were things that I heard many producers using. The same thing with certain percussion sounds. Many of those sounds were somewhat common between producers. They also often used one sound to play chords, creating like a piano type of sound.
It’s such a useful thing to do that sounds incredibly simple, but can help a whole lot. So I highly recommend you try it out.
In my jazz ensemble class I make a big deal with making mistakes while playing solos. I always tell my students that the place to make mistakes is in the practice room and in my class. Hopefully they can make enough mistakes in my class where they’ll play well at the concert.
But the mistakes I mean are trying things out. Testing what works. Seeing what sounds and notes you like and what sounds and notes you don’t like.
If you can try notes, see if you like them, and then learn from those mistakes you’ll be able to learn how to improvise incredibly well.
So get comfortable making mistakes and find ways to play better after you make a mistake.