I’ve been listening to a lot of BTS recently and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot. I don’t speak or understand Korean so a number of their songs I don’t understand the lyrics, but I still enjoy the music.
I often do this sort of as a type of experiment; find new genres of music to check out or new artists that my friends recommend and check them out. It’s a great way to expose yourself to new styles of music.
The key to doing it in a way that’s enjoyable is to do it without judgement and looking for things to like. I need to go into listening to the music with the mindset of “what do I like about this song and do I want to hear it again?” This often leads me to finding things about the song that I really enjoy even if the answer to the question, “do I want to hear it again?” is, “no.”
It’ll help you appreciate more styles of music because you’re looking to enjoy it. Just that simple switch can make a big difference in your listening experience.
Approaching listening a song with the attitude of it being “not my style” is like a self fulfilling prophecy. You won’t like it because you decided at the beginning (before actually hearing it) that you didn’t like it. Change that attitude and the whole experience changes.
I suggest you try it. You might find a new genre of music you like, like I did with K-pop.
I’ve got a new song coming out in April on the 23rd called “Powerless” and this is something I’ve posted about on here before, but I told myself “just release it already.”
I get caught up in the process of making something and want to make everything absolutely perfect before I release it. Sometimes it prevents me from actually releasing music because I keep learning more and more and going back and polishing and polishing.
And to some extent having that level of detail can be good, but a lot of the time it prevents you from releasing anything, which isn’t good.
So what I try to do to combat this is to get something good enough where I’m proud of it and just release it. I need to decide it’s done, which can be difficult, but that’s how I combat that attitude. I get the music good enough to the point where I’m proud of it and decide it’s done.
That often means that I’ll later (a few years later) hear things in my old music that I could change to improve it, but that’s fine. Those things don’t need to be changed. That’s where I was when those songs were released and I think of it as a good thing that I’ve learned enough about music making to hear things that I could change.
When listening to music, one thing you can listen for is whether or not rhythms line up. Rhythm is notes organized in time. I’ve got a YouTube video On Listening | Episode #2 – Rhythm if you’d like to learn more about listening to rhythms.
Some pieces of music will have rhythms that line up with each other. That has one type of sound. It might sound square and even because each instrument is playing the same thing.
Some pieces of music will have many different rhythms that don’t always align. That’ll often sound busier. The texture will be different. It’ll sound a little more chaotic because there’s lots of different things going on at the same time and lots of things that don’t line up. Texture is the combination of different parts being played together.
Listening for this can be difficult, but one thing that’s helped me is trying to listen “vertically.” Imagine that you’re listening to what lines up at one specific moment of time in the music.
My youth orchestra just had a virtual concert the other day so I edited together a virtual orchestra video. I had my students record themselves playing along to a track + video of me conducting and I layered them all together.
I also recorded myself playing violin on it four times. I’ve been playing violin for about a year. I’m not very good and my recordings were far from perfect, but I left them in the recording because they added some extra beef to the sound. It made the violin section sound larger.
It also made me realize that the more layers you have, the less perfect they need to be. If you have only one recording you’ll notice every imperfection. If you have two you won’t notice each imperfection as much. If you have three you’ll notice fewer imperfections in each recording. That continues. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. My guess is that if you have five recordings of one violin part and one player makes a small mistake, but all the other players don’t make that mistake, you’re still hearing four correctly played versions of that part.
And the more layers you have the more “correct” versions you’re hearing in each section.
Going back to my violin recordings for my youth orchestra. Each recording on its own doesn’t sound very good, but together they sound great. There might be one of them that has an imperfection, but the other recordings don’t have that imperfection, so the majority of the recordings you’re listening to are “correct”.
Try it out if you’re adding layers to something. Try to just record multiple quickly and if you need to make small edits later do so, but at first try to pump out a bunch of them right away.
If I’m trying to write music and just get some type of music written (whether or not it’s released) I’ll steal ideas from music that I enjoy listening to.
I don’t steal full melodies or lyrics, but I’ll take pieces.
Maybe there’s a chord progression I heard that I wanted to use. Maybe there’s a chord loop I liked. Maybe it’s just a few notes in a melody or a rhythm. Maybe it’s just a specific sound or synth.
I’ll take that idea and try to make something out of it.
It’s a great exercise to get yourself thinking of ideas and writing. It’ll give you a little head start into writing a piece of music that’ll maybe inspire you.
When listening to music, especially acoustic music or other types of music that have been performed on an instrument, you’ll notice “imperfections.” Now I don’t mean mistakes. Most professionally recorded and performed music won’t have “mistakes” in the regular sense of the word. But there’ll be imperfections.
There’ll be notes that aren’t exactly as long as they could be. If it’s guitar playing there might be some string noise or notes that aren’t perfectly in tune.
Those imperfections are what make it sound unique. If every single note in a piece of music was absolutely perfectly timed, perfectly in tune, and perfectly performed there’d be nothing unique about it. It’d sound robotic and computerized. And if it’s meant to sound like a real instrument, it won’t sound like a real instrument. It’ll sound fake.
So if you’re listening to your own music and notice some imperfections leave them in. They’ll make the music sound unique.
I don’t know where I first heard this idea, but the more I write music the more I realize how true this is. If something is worth doing, then it’s worth being done poorly because the only way that you’ll get better at doing something is by doing it.
If you want to be able to produce music or improvise solos you need to start doing those things. That might mean that you write some bad music or you improvise some poor solos. That’s fine. Eventually you’ll get better at it. Then you’ll realize how necessary it was to do it poorly.
There’s a lot more to both producing music and improvising solos than just doing it, but doing it will definitely help you do it better. Practicing improvising will help you get better at improvising solos. Writing music will help you get better at writing music.
There are things you can study and learn about to improve your composition and production skills, as well as your improvising skills, but if you never do it, you’ll never get better at it. You need to do it poorly in order to do it well.
It’s embarrassing sometimes because you have to write a bad piece of music or write a piece of music that you don’t want anyone to hear, but that’s part of the whole journey. I majored in classical composition at Berklee and believe me I’ve got quite the number of pieces of music I never want anyone to hear. They’re not good. They’re not original and they don’t sound like me. But in order to get to where I am now with composing I had to write those pieces of music. I had to write poorly in order to write well.
It’s practice. When you first start learning piano you probably won’t be amazing, but who cares. If you’ve only been playing for a week, why expect yourself to be any good? Just enjoy messing around and figuring out the basics and enjoy the process. Enjoy learning and exploring the piano.
And soon enough by doing it enough you’ll get better.
Progress takes a while to see. Imagine you start going to the gym. You won’t look like Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson in a day or a week. You won’t look like him in a month, though you’ll probably see progress in a month.
Look over the course of months for progress.
With practicing an instrument or learning how to produce music look for progress over the course of large amounts of time.
You might be able to see progress from piece to piece if you’re writing music, but even that might be a little hard to notice.
But always make sure to look back on old music you’ve made or old pieces you’ve played to see progress. It’ll let you know that you are improving, no matter how much it seems like you aren’t improving in the moment.