mark styles

Step back and evaluate your composing process.. Are you spending excess time, 'finding' the right notes, correcting things? Perhaps set a goal of composing a short piece in a specified time. As an exercise, doesn't have to brilliant.. Progress - not perfection is the goal.. Is there a way you can shorten your process. copy/pasting/transposing sections. If notes have the same rhythm - copy/paste, then fix the individual pitches etc Sometimes as we work to perfect our music, we run into which choice do we make.. And that can take longer then we did when we were younger. Because as the piece grows, we could have taken a better choice earlier in piece, and now we must go back and rewrite something. Now I'm not a classical composer, so there are certainly many issues in addition.. As individuals we each are uniquely different.. If you have perfect pitch, a photgraphic memory. Know a number of composing techniques or devices, it perhaps come quicker. After spending many many years working on music.. I will play a part and then be able to correct what I play looking at orchestra type score, or sometimes just looking at the piano roll. My hands seem to know where to move the notes.. Be patient, it will take as long as it takes. Be on the lookout for guidelines, and techniques to adapt to your work..

I don't quite call the style myself. I call it EZ listening for the flower child generation.. It has aspects of impressionism, pointillism. I view these more as musical landscapes. While there are some melodies, They aren't focused on repetition, and re-inforcement.. For my whole live I composed music for other people, sound libraries, etc.. While I enjoyed that. I eventually kind of burnt out.. I happend to get a good side gig as doorman at NYC nightclub. Short hours, very pay.. It allowed me to only focusing music I liked. and wanted to focus on.. I have only one or two clients at this point.. So I don't have to worry about deadlines, fulfilling a clients musical demand.. A whole lot of this is experimentation and exploration for myself. I started writing my own songs at 10. Very rock, pop. By teenage years a string of bands, were we did a lot of pop, English pop, rock'n'roll. Then 1 1/2 years straight, in an all white 'James Brown' band. Seven nites, a week, six hours a nite. It was grueling, but we made a lot of money and learn't a lot playing in an Beer hall of 500 pretty drunk people. Play bad, and they would throw crap at you.. really hones us in. Then came a series of 'original bands' We did 70% original material.. I wrote most of it. created basic demos at home, playing parts myself, enough to show band the idea. Eventually I tired of that, bout an ARP 2600 synthesizer, Then it was all synths for many years. Working in multi-track studios. I was allow any studio downtime, to use 16, track, then 24.. That's where a whole new level of real learning began. Took a long time for synths to get past raw sawtooth, and square waves. The early samplers were a bit help.. The last number of years I have been using some sample libraries, along with virtual synths, but trying to coax more organic sounds out of them (but also throw in definitely electronic sounds/ When you think about orchestral orchestra's are the perfect organ analog orchestra. The number of performs, ratios of horns/strings/woodwinds, allow a composer a limitless pallet of tonal colors. I try to take the synths, (UVI, U-he, a slew of others, and the morphing Kontakt libraries) to create instruments and sounds unattainable by traditional means. (I also like to throw in some sci-fi and psychedelic sounds.) I also like to use a very large pallet of sounds, some parts are only 1 bar long.. Granted another instrument in conventual orchestra would 'cover' that sound. But I also like to create a 'surreal' sound.. I don't create a traditional sound stage. some instruments, have different delays, some instruments various reverbs, (length, color) some instruments so locational data at all.. Why should I? It's all synthetic.. I want the music to have a dream quality, like your in your bedroom, but the north wall is 20 miles aways with hills, and a river in it, yet that doesn't bother your sense of reality in a dream does it.. Dreams ignore the laws of physics, reality, and we don't question it. But in our waking hours, those boundaries, might drive one to a breakdown.. well enough of my personal viewpoint for now. About my personal health note.. I wasn't sure whether to include it. But it did give me great concern.. I come from a long lived Italian line. Most in my family lived to reach 100 or over. I always envisioned myself happily composing into my 90's.. Although the treatment went well, my main point, is to alert others to think about your future.. Are we all doing what we really want to be doing? I'm 73, In the last 12 years, I continually cut more 'crap' out of my life, drama queens, people who only make you waste your time trying to deal with them.. Time is too precious to be f#$%KKing off especially after 50's - 60's. I urge all guys (and woman too to be aware of pychical body changes. It's easy to shrug of aches and pains, to 'getting old'.. Deal with them. There have been tremendous advances in medicine.. but we as individuals especially as we age, can be most aware of when something in us is not working right.. Don't be macho, and shrug it off till it's too late.

Kept thinking about this piece, came back for additional listenings.. On further ponderance, perhaps some strong compression, along with EQ and volume, could get the slide guitar work = more into the same family sound palette as the electric guitars. Just my opinion through. Still GREAT WORK

This is RIGHT ON target..Brilliant guitar work.. Would you consider EQ'ing Slide Guitar brighter and raising volume so it would feel like the player was sitting right on stage with the solo electric guitar.. Excellent chord progression, instead of a standard blues progression, you through in some surprises which let you made the different snippets of E Guitar solos quite effective... very impressive..

Thanks a lot. Yeah it took me a while to get the big drums going, with out it sounding forced.

After a long period of silence, here is my newest composition.. I continue to use a large amount of different sounds. There are a few traditional instrument libraries, but many sounds are synthesized, or 2-3 layers to give the sound (hopefully) an organic sound.. In a some cases, the individual score parts, might be containing a few different sounds, because they are in the same 'family of sound'. I suppose I could also look at them as different 'articulations' of a traditional orchestral instrument. A significant amount of time has been put into refining, the original sound, also refining some of the melodic or note content of individual tracks. I used to (decades ago) start with creating my palette of sounds first. but with many of Kontakt, UVI and other companies, a patch may easily have four sound sources that morph, so that creates a small world of (infinite variety). So often creating a new track with a new patch, will suggest a different sound, note content for what is to follow. As I've mentioned before I use a technique like Prince and many others, who primarily compose and perform alone. Since I am not a band with several members, I have to lay down several tracks, before I get a good indication of 'what the song might be'.. This leads to re-recording individual parts over.. Say I added some great bass motifs.. I'll then go back and re-do piano, so that it sounds like the piano player is paying close attention to the bass player, etc. After many rounds, the song may sound substantially different than what I started with. A final note - I had to stop and spend 3 months dealing with Prostrate cancer. I got radiation, and glad to say, everything is working out OK. But I do urge male composers, as they age, to insist their doctors ask for a PSA blood test.. This is a fair indication of impending cancer starting. In recent years, Dr.s rely only on a physical 'finger' exam to determine size and shape of prostrate. The medical industry was sort of jumping the gun to do Prostrate surgeries, lasers, radiation. Any procedure incurs some risk. So work with your Dr. and a Urologist, then finally a surgeon, or radiologist, to determine best course for you.. Many men, wait too long, and risk becomes more serious. One of the intriguing and great thing about composing, is each composition becomes a learning lesson for the next piece. Hopefully he can enjoy our senior years in discovering new ideas, techniques, we wouldn't have come across, had it not been for all the work we did before Mark Styles

Very very nice. Love the chord progression, shifting thru keys, like colorful falling leaves in the autumn..

Hey Luis... a long time away for me.. intriguing piece.. I've gone thru the deaths of a few friends recently.. Not mates, close family, but friends I've had for many decades, and knew well. I struggled to a degree with their passing, but somewhat used to this as I have lost a lot of family friends over the last 30 years. They are just at a more steady and faster rate now. What concerned me more was the suffering of those who remained, wives, sons, daughters, etc. So in a way I feel your choice of the two instruments and the motifs they played, reflects your emotions and realization, and the other members of your family. For a pet is a very loved member of the family. These thoughts eally made me re-evaluate my perception of death yet again.. And your piece reminds me of the different thoughts/feelings I was experiencing. At odds at the beginning but gradually becoming more unified. The beginning piano statements, are sort of reaching out, trying to find something cohesive to latch on to, but can't decipher the pattern in the data it's receiving..The descending notes, feel like leaves falling off the tree in fall, (The consciousness is trying to make sense of what's happening to it, but can't a repeatable data as bodily process slow and come to a stop, the need for nourishment stops, The brass/oboe? is gradually sinking (unconsciousness understands there is nothing to exactly correlate it too).. So as these two instruments wander, trying to find their place, they gradually become more in tandem with each other. I know this is a kind of ' very outside' observation. But your piece reflects, and also helps me to understand my own re-assment of accepting the death of someone I cared about. Sort of like the soul or another term, one aspect of consciousness understands it is time to leave the physical body, Another consciousness (the ego, personality, does not want for this to happen, the body itself understands, and relinquishes control. Gradually the ego, is forced to accept the transition.. Not sure if any of this resonates with you.. But I have always found your ability to create meaning with a minimum of notes, and parts, a great skill.

Across The Universe - Lennon McCartney Across The Universe has always been one of my favorite songs.. It has John’s ‘wonderful sleepy quality’ he can summon when he feels a song need mystique.. It has an emotional simbiance to some of Georges spiritualness that seeps thru his music.. And like they sometime did (John and Paul would take stabs at writing in the style of the other).. At the time of recording this I had been in a resurgence of PinkFloyd listening.. They would go to Abbey Road studios put the tape into record and just play, jam improvise on the spot, shooting each other looks or arm waves to indicate next chord, get heavier etc. They then would play back this very long piece of music and pick sections to use in a song. They would listen to their jam, remember what they did, then perform it again, stringing together the sections of jamming they liked. The Beatles earlier had done a similar thing.. where they would just run a two track, and play what ever came out. Often while jamming, they would stay in that spot, repeating, refining their parts, till it was somewhat more concise. Since I compose alone, it’s somewhat hard for me ‘jam’, but certainly The Yamaha Genos (this was done on Tyros). You can improvise chords and melody in real time, with a reasonable rhythm section.. I started by listening to Across The Universe dozens of times alone. Figured out the chords, and just played around with the sections.. I sometimes just jammed 8 bars over and over, finding perhaps an alternate motif they might have used, or created an additional part, that Martin would have added later, I usually prefer Beatles covers to be pretty close to the original. Sometimes a talented artist, does come up on a unique angle on a song. And it is the nature of music, that it is not written in stone. As I played around with it, I put it Beatles trademarked Leslie guitar, quasi George Martin string lines, and tried to do it in the spirit of perhaps the Beatles might have done it this way, had they the time and the technology of 50 years later. I certainly did take liberties with it, sticking in brief wanders from the chord progression.. And part of that is for me is to ‘loosen up’.. I have sometimes gotten comments from other musicians, that I never loosen up (God forbid I play something really bad).. and I certainly used to when younger. With this I wanted to expand on the scope of the original song, but stay within ‘emotional values’ of what I perceive to be John’s original intent. This piece was recorded in 2016, and judging by the take number 737, I probably spend close to 6 weeks on it. A lot of that was making parts, refining, decided by brilliant idea of a week ago , sucked the big folotus (For fans of The Expanse), I would toss that part totally out, and create a part to substitute in.. (a lot of expirementation, which I love to do) Hell - Life is on big experiment is it now? Lastly, I’ll quote Paul McCartney. An interviewer was going on and on about the power, the scope, the profound effect of ‘Yesterday’.. Paul listened politely and then responded. ‘Hey it’s only a song’.

Here is a vocal piece I did several years back. Some friends in Baltimore send me the vocals only, and a 2 track reference mix of what they did. Since they also used Logic, I had no problem instantly getting tempo and sync together, I laid in the music, and then laid in the vocals to match the 2 track reference. I completely re-did the music, altering/adding 6ths, or 7ths to original chord.

Hi Locrian7.. Nice piece, I really love when the song picks up. Although I'm not versed in Band arrangements, I composed written, produced mostly pop for a long time. Sonically the beginning feels somewhat 'bottom heavy for quite a while. I greatly appreciate the score. Monarcheon and Maestrowick certainly covered all the points. Well done. Perhaps the close disonance should remove quicker. in the beginning riffs. The interplay of motifs is very nice.

Hi Noah: This is great.. It could start as a great Jazz tune, but with Xmas feel, you give it double duty which is perfect. Possibly the kick a bit busy. In two places at 45 seconds and 1:13 the chord makes my left eyebrow go up. It's really a small detail. The melody and chords really give it a very valid 'sentimental' quality, which I love. I should learn this piece, to see if I can get some insight into emotion you invoke so skillfully.

Thanks Maestrowick and Monarcheon. I greatly appreciate your thoughts. I will go back and put some more effort. I tried making the pauses more exaggerated, (glitching, weird snd effect etc, but then realized simpler seemed more effective. As I worked on this, the piece seemed to expose it's 'personality' to me..

Can't remember the last time I wrote in 3/4 time. The piece is rather humorous, with the rhythm, and the grasshopper sounds (kinda twisted)

Hi Seraphs. This is quite a lovely piece. What is your method of composing? Into a DAW I would imagine. There are/can be two perspectives. I usually record what ever come out of me be first. Letting my fingers do what they do, not being too analytical about it Then I assume my 'observational' mode. I listen any number of times, looping the song. Then after a while, I begin to notice patterns in it, I was first not aware of. Like I've used one instrument too much, or repeated something too much, or stuck with the same instruments too much. Or find I've stayed with the same 'density' of notes too long. With a DAW, you can go in there and re-work a segment without breaking the composition. Just take one of the instruments you've used and give it a descending line, or a slight variation of what it previously did. Very good work