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you know, I've recently changed my view on this I think we write for ourselves, and most of us don't have much of an audience outside of ourselves. I've recently gone back and listened to a whole bunch of stuff I've written, and it's better than I thought when I closed the chapter in my mind. It's inspirational to listen to your stuff, because, well, if you're like me, I'm constantly writing. And sometimes I forget the efforts I've put into past work, even if I think it was amateur at best. You are your own biggest fan, and you should get enjoyment out of the music you write. Although I cringe and hear the mistakes I would have changed, it's cool to hear live recordings (thanks Henry) of me or others who have taken the time to make a moment of music special. Listen to your music, people 🙂

If you're on the YCF Spot discord you probably saw my message about my troubles with the piano pedal in some of my recent works rendered in Musescore Studio. The first file exemplifies the audio with pedal errors towards the end of the piece where chords bleed into each other as if the pedal was down even though it's not. The second file fixes this issue by using the Musesounds Piano sample but because of that sacrifices the clarity of the melodic line which I brought out with higher velocity values in the first. This Microtonal Miniature is meant to use microtones to enhance the creepy/horror atmosphere. Also, this time I used the Sub-diminished chord/scale which has 10 tones and the Super-augmented chord/scale which has 8. I created the sub-diminished one by stacking sub-minor 3rds on top of each other until I reached the original tone (Bb) and the super-augmented by stacking super major 3rds. I hope you enjoy and I would appreciate any comments, suggestions, critiques or observations you may have! Thanks for listening. Edit: Musescore Studio 4.5 has come out and they seem to have fixed the issues with the piano pedal so I updated the first mp3!

Sometimes when I've found myself listening to my favorite compositions written by me, over and over, I start to wonder if my own creativity is leading me to become an artistic narcissist. I guess it might make sense that as a composer succeeds more and more at writing music, it will become better and better and more the kind of music that they really enjoy listening to though. But regardless of how good or sophisticated their music actually is, do you think the tendency is for them to be more attracted to their own music? I've heard interviews with John Williams that surprised me from this perspective though. He commented that when he listens to his own music he can't help but hear all the flaws in it. When I listen to his music on the other hand, I don't hear any flaws - I mostly just hear beauty and good music. Is this him just being modest or does he really not enjoy his music as much as others do? Or maybe he's heard it so much that he's grown sick of it? Then there's also something to be said about writing music with flaws and all included in it. That's what gives music its variety and interest. I don't think writing music should be about perfection or always striving to create the next masterpiece - I think that kind of approach could lead to burnout if anything. So maybe when I listen to my own music over and over, I DO in fact hear all the flaws but I've grown to like them through repeated listenings? What do you think and how do you approach your own music? How much do you listen to it and how much is too much?

Thought I'd share this little rondo I wrote in a few minutes, a couple months ago. The dynamics and articulation could be refined more but ehh I can't be bothered. Feedback is welcome, though

Hello everyone! I just finished composing an Adagio for piano. It turned out to be quite a melancholic piece so it reminded me of a lament, that is why I named it "Adagio Lamentoso". It is a rounded binary form [:A:][:BA':] with a coda at the end. m.40 is the measure I am less confident about. I always have troubles going from one motivic idea to another one. In m.40 I transition to the main motive of the A section but I am not sure if it is smooth. Also, the piece stays mostly in the tonic Key, which can be a negative thing, specially since it is 4 minutes long. I tried to counter that lack of key changes with an interesting melody and varied chords voicings but I am not sure if it worked. Any feedback is welcome and hope you like it! PD: I composed it at the piano but I did not manage playing it as well I wanted to so, for now, I used the midi sound :S.

Introducing the Tunescribers Arranging Competition 2025! Are you ready to put your arranging skills to the test? The Tunescribers Arranging Competition 2025 is your chance to create a unique solo piano arrangement and compete for fantastic prizes, industry recognition, and a chance to showcase your work to a global audience! How It Works 🔹 Receive the prompt – On 1 March 2025, you'll receive a public domain melody and one other creative prompt to guide your arrangement. 🔹 Create your arrangement – You’ll have until 14 March 2025 to craft a 2-minute piano arrangement that’s playable by a human pianist. Any style, any genre. Do anything you like to the prompt melody – play it backwards, upside down, chop it into tiny bits – get as creative as you can! 🔹 Submit your work – Send us your notation file, PDF score, and audio mockup using our simple submission form. 🔹 Judging & Public Vote – A panel of expert judges will evaluate the shortlisted entries, and a public vote will determine the Audience Favourite winner! Make sure to follow us on social media to be the first to hear when we announce the judges. 🔹 Winners Announced – Results will be published on 14 April 2025. Entry Fees Early Bird Standard Early Bird Entry + Critique Standard Entry + Critique Standard $12 $15 $45 $50 Concessionary $8 $10 $20 $25 All prices shown in USD Choose your ticket: Concessionary: Entry for those aged 16-21, in full-time education, or over 65. Proof of eligibility may be requested. Standard: Regular entry for all participants. Concessionary + Critique: Entry for those eligible for the Concessionary tier, plus written feedback from the judges on your arrangement. Proof of eligibility may be requested. Standard + Critique: Regular entry, plus written feedback from the judges on your arrangement. All tiers are available with an Early Bird discount if you purchase your ticket before 16 February 2025. Free Entry (Financial Difficulty): For those experiencing financial hardship, a limited number of free entries are available. To request one, email info@tunescribers.com. These will be provided on a no-questions-asked, first-come-first-served basis. Prizes 🏆 1st Place – $500 cash, publication on Tunescribers, and a perpetual license 🥈 2nd Place – $100 transcription credit and a perpetual Cantai license 🥉 3rd Place – $50 transcription credit and a perpetual Graphical MIDI Tools license ✨ Honourable Mentions – Recognition on Tunescribers’ social media 🌟 Audience Favourite – A professionally recorded piano performance video of the winning arrangement (subject to playability) Critique Tier: Receive Personalised Feedback For those looking to improve their arranging skills, our Critique Tier offers detailed, constructive feedback from our panel of judges. If you select this option, you will receive at least half a page of written feedback, covering: Your harmonic, rhythmic, and structural choices. How effectively your arrangement develops the given melody. Playability and practical suggestions for performance. Suggestions for improvement to refine your arranging style. Critique Tier feedback will be delivered no later than 14 May 2025. This is a fantastic opportunity to gain expert insights into your arranging style! Key Rules & Guidelines 📜 Your arrangement must: Be an original work based on the provided melody. Be playable by a real pianist. Be no longer than 2 minutes. Be submitted in PDF, notation file, and MP3/WAV formats. 📌 Read the full competition rules & T&Cs here: 👉 Competition Terms & Conditions Stay Connected Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content: 📷 Instagram: @tunescribers ▶ YouTube: @tunescribers 🎵 TikTok: @tunescribers 📘 Facebook: Tunescribers Share your journey using #Tunescribers! For any questions, contact us at info@tunescribers.com. We can't wait to hear your arrangements—good luck! 🎶

Thanks for copying me in to this post. I think the piece has much promise, although there are several areas that need tidying up. For example, the opening bar which is blank need not be there; also, there is a time signature change indicated in bar 92 to 3/4 which is unnecessary as nothing is changing. As for development, the piece is 114 bars long and would benefit from some tonal variety. Consider how you can manipulate our emotions better... However the motivic development is generally sound. I notice you use irregular phrasing at times, notably for the opening theme which is a little usual, particularly considering regular phrasing then follows. One other thing you should consider is increasing the independence of each part. There is very little counterpoint. Overall, it is a good effort considering you spent only a "few minutes" on it; although a little more time could be spent on increasing its sophistication. Please feel free to ask any specific questions 🙂

Thanks. There it stops, it's atonal. Basically it has no tone. Although I know it's an atypical conclusion

hmm I like the reverb and ambiance of the second version more, but the clarity of the 1st version is better to me, the melody doesn't seem as far away. I think the way you're using microtonality is best served when going for an effect with music, or using a more ambiguous language. When you've been very tonal, it's been a bit harsh. But when using dim or aug scales, chromaticism, "getting weird", it seems to work more advantageous. As I mentioned on discord, posting a lot of small pieces composed in a short time really shows the techniques we lean on. You show a variety of motif-driven invention type of pieces. What about exploring rhythmic variation, or longer melodies in your studies? Not sure of the overall goal (if there is one), but these could be easily organized into a set of microtonal studies, and the more variation in your compositional technique you offer, the better outcome they would be as a set or the on the whole. I like this one more than some of the others because it was weird haha, perhaps microtonal deviations in your language enhance that. Well done, this was great. 🙂

Call me Sextet, it's my personal pronoun Sextet

What a lovely piece! You nailed it with the title - although there were some slightly brighter moments, the piece has an overall lamenting tone. I've heard a LOT of compositions where just because the piece was in minor, the composer expected a "sorrowful" or "somber" tone, yes the overall sonority of minor keys tends to be more somber, I believe, if arranged correctly, even major keys can have a melancholic tone to them - BUT, that's a discussion for another day. One thing I enjoyed about this piece is that it sounds more modern without sounding too modern. I'm not sure if that makes any sense lol. Your phrasing is another one of the things you've done so well with this piece. I don't always hear NT and PT and stepwise, scalar motion being used in such a sophisticated way. I like the leaps, they added brightness, while maintaining the shape of the melody. Your harmony is simple, but I'm a sucker for i-iv-V7-i in minor 😂. Overall this piece is very strong - I don't have much more to add that hasn't already been said. I know you have more material in you, I can hear it 👀 As a pianist-composer myself I understand the struggle to balance composition with practice and such - BUT, I would love to hear this piece orchestrated. Nothing too elaborate - maybe a wind quintet with a flute on the melody, just a thought - a bass clarinet on the "tenor" and bass voices 😮‍💨👌🏾

Hey @General Pokopo! 1) LoL I didn't know that cats could play drums. Usually starting a piece with this much heavy drumming is a big turn off for me because its obvious to me as the listener that it's not a real drummer playing the drum set so unless it's some awesomely humanized drum fill/solo that starts the song off with a bang then I perceive it as kinda like a bummer/let-down. This is another one of those songs that seems to be based almost completely on the drums as the center stage instrument, and if it's not awesome it's going to disappoint the listener who expects the drummer to really kick-ass. If the drums weren't the focus of the song then they wouldn't be as important to be realistic though. 2) This is a different style than the first track - what I perceive as more of a electronica/glitch-fest drum loop type of thing. This is really far from the kind of music I usually listen to so I don't know that there's much constructive criticism that I can give. 3) I like that the drums aren't the focus in this one even though they're still present. This does have more melodic substance than the others. It seems like in your pieces, if the drums aren't the focus of the track, then you don't know what to focus on. Maybe try writing a piece for a solo monophonic instrument and a polyphonic instrument to back it up (like piano, guitar, harp or any keyboard instrument, even celesta or marimba or vibraphone or something). I think if you have only 1 solo instrument and 1 accompanying instrument it might force you to focus. Or maybe you already know how to do that and it's just not obvious in these particular pieces. If that's the case then feel free to ignore. Thanks of sharing!

I'm glad someone gets my username 😁 Thanks for the review and your kind words! And if I end up expanding the piece I'll also try to clarify m. 62-78 as you stated

Hi @user011235 and welcome to the forum! I like your username! LoL Like I said in the discord, great piece! With lots of thematic unity and charm that is brought out even more by repeating this little charming melodic snippet multiple times after it is first heard in the oboe: That is probably my favorite part of the piece, melodically speaking. I do perceive some rhythmic confusion in the piece where it isn't clear anymore where the downbeat is from bar 62 through 78. The Flute, Oboe and Clarinet all have a figure which seems to emphasize beat 2 as if that's the downbeat and for the duration of those measures that's how I hear that fragment. Also, like I said in the discord, it would be great to hear this expanded by including a contrasting section in a minor key. I will also tag @Markus Boyd because he also frequently writes pieces for this kind of small wind ensemble in this kind of classical style and I'm sure he'd be interested in taking a look at your piece. Thanks for sharing and I hope to hear more of your music as well as hope for your participation and input in the rest of the forum!

@JorgeDavid also to touch on arrangement, you don’t have to arrange a piece to be 100% like the original. And you don’t even have to publish it! but I’ll give you another example of something I arranged recently. I’m sure you know about the Halo Game franchise. I took the Halo 3 OST track “Never Forget” and completely overhauled it using the same instrumentation and same intervals of key changes using a different starting pitch, and added in my own styling, as well as combining elements from the Halo 3 version written by Martin O’Donnell and the Halo 4 version written by Kazuma Jinnouchi heres the Musescore Link to that one just to give you an idea about what I mean by arrangement. The possibilities are endless with things like that! You can MAKE it your own! Doesn’t have to be someone else’s from start to finish. One big aspect of music is the theft of ideas. It’s one of the fundamental parts of composition. Composers steal ideas and expand upon them all the time.

Yes, mixing the study of an instrument with composition is not as easy is I though mostly because, at least in my case, if I do not focus full time to the learning of the instrument I feel like I do not progress at all. It is like if I learn only 30 minutes a day I cannot improve my piano skills and need to spend at least 1~2 hours on it everyday for seeing results. I also though about arranging other pieces for practicing, and it is a really good idea but, to be honest, I feel like arranging my own pieces give me that motivational boost that I need for taking real effort on studying orchestration. But I guess I should start considering arranging existing pieces even if it is just for practicing different orchestral techniques in a more mechanical way. I listened to the 'long artic midnight suite' and I really liked it! Specially the first movement. Even though the time signatures were unusual the whole movement felt so smooth! And the orchestration was great too. I did not expect the Spitfire instruments to blend so nicely with the MuseSound ones! Really nice piece! If I have to nitpick the couple of piano parts that started a couple of sections were a little bit to "new age" for my taste, but that is just a matter of taste, and it is not like they were not enjoyable. Thanks for sharing the piece! I agree. I actually bought in the past a few Berlin instruments for Musescore. And at first I thought "these sound amazing!" but as soon as I started composing with dynamics and expression markings they became quite unusable. Even the piano, where the change from mp to mf is like the change from p to ff in a normal piano. So, in the end, I ended up using only the MusesSounds. As you say, some brass are bad. I only like the Saxophones, that is why I used Saxophones for that Soli of the Jazz piece that I am still working on. I think it is not a bad idea mixing some instruments from Labs with the MusesSound! I think LABS work with subscription plan, right? I might consider trying it out in the future. Thanks for the explanation, @UncleRed99!