AngelCityOutlaw

I didn't really get a choice about playing music, and I never really cared about it for years. I didn't understand the point of music as a kid. Then, I heard Guns N' Roses when I was like 11 and I realized I HAD to create my own rock songs that now suddenly existed in my mind. Fast forward over 20 years and the guitars and drum kits mostly disappeared in favor of the orchestra, but there are all these pieces that keep demanding I set them free.

Hey thanks a lot, man! Tbh I should have stopped 597 posts ago

I got sidetracked composing my new album, and did this arrangement of the classic opening song. Let me know what you guys think. Mocking up that sort of vocal melody with samples, with a lot of repeated notes, and where the singer deliberately isn't always on pitch and the lyrics are half-spoken is tough.

Hey thanks! There are a lot of libraries I use. Olympus Choirs, Nucleus and Cinebrass, Cinematic Strings 2, the free MTPowerDrum Kit by Manda Audio,...

Thanks Quinn

Guilty as charged

If I had the amount of followers on YouTube these audio engineers do, I'd honestly make my own video tearing these apart. The irony of these videos produced by audio engineers stating "the real reason today's music all sounds the same!" is that they are all saying the same things every other audio engineer is. and they're all wrong. This is a subject that really needs an experienced, old composer's perspective on. To his credit, Billy does passingly mention things like 120 bpm, loop packs and a lack of key changes, but his arguments are still mainly "Everyone is recording the same way." like what Rick Beato and Glen Fricker talk about. "No one is recording guitars with real mics! They're all using Superior Drummer! They're quantizing!" etc. Yet they cannot explain why so many different-sounding albums in popular music used and still use the Shure Sm57, Marshall JCM800, Celestion Speakers, 6L6 tubes, and a Gibson Les Paul or strat with DiMarzio super distortions. How come everyone who writes for an orchestra doesn't sound the same? It reminds me of how, back in my electronica phase, guys said not to use presets because "You'll sound like everyone else!", and then proceeded to plop down a four-on-the-floor (the only beat they know) with an offbeat or side chained, straight 16th note bassline just like everyone else. Guy...I don't think it's the patch you chose for the bass that is causing you to sound the same. Stuff sounds the same now because everyone is WRITING THE SAME MUSIC I don't know why this isn't obvious these guys; it should be obvious even to a layman. Like I said in the thread about "what makes a chord move poorly": This thinking in terms of "chord progressions" is one of the things making everything sound identical, as is the dominance of "ostinato". It's just crazy to me that someone out there is laying down "epic" drums and plunking in that "root-third" 8th note ostinato every trailer piece plays on the violas and thinks to himself "...I'll bet if I had my own string library, I'd sound unique!" Granted, I do think that it helps to an extent. I don't think anyone else's mockups sound quite like mine due to me having a rather unique collection, but this by itself would not be enough. I like to lean into genre tropes, but as @PeterthePapercomPoser accurately noticed in my latest cinematic-metal track, the guitar riff is a seamless mix of Phrygian and the diminished scale. Most metal bands today would stick to the Phrygian the whole way through the song. Curious to hear your thoughts. In my opinion, it is a more damning report on the current state of the music industry that everyone seems oblivious to the obvious decline in craftsmanship at the songwriting stage than it is that everyone is using Superior Drummer.

Thanks Quinn, and good point in your previous post as well

Felt like doing something kind of inspired by the latest DOOM soundtracks,

I'm glad you find it so!

Harmonic "progression" is really quite simply the contrasting of one modal frame against another. This is why people say that "every melody implies a chord progression", because tonal melodies move through various modal frames in a phrase. When you are writing counterpoint, and thickening lines with contrary or oblique motion (especially in the bassline), if it is well written, it will inevitably fit within the same modal frames. It gets more complicated when you have a phrase that, in the span of perhaps just two bars, may involve three independent harmonized voices that use multiple modes constructed from a shared tonic, and scales that contain both major and minor thirds. Trying to analyze the "underlying harmony" of such pieces necessarily involves an abstraction. "Okay, the "harmony" in bar 1 is D....something. D5? Just a pedal tone?" . That's much less helpful (and eventually gets more complicated) than just identifying the modes and scales used by each line. Thus, composing with the idea of "I will have a bar of D(?), then G, then F#m, then..." quickly becomes useless at worst, or highly restrictive at best. I can honestly say that composing with the idea of chord progressions at the fore severely impeded my ability to compose "orchestral" sounding orchestral music for years, when I should have been viewing harmony as any and all vertical relationships between lines and internalizing how they all sound. It makes your choices much more deliberate. Now, if I compose a line that moves up stepwise from the tonic, I don't just plunk down the tonic chord because that would be standard practice. Instead, every other note supporting each note of the melody is deliberately chosen to achieve a specific aesthetic. It slows my composition down, but I can't argue with the results — results that have also attracted new clients over the years offering to pay. I will go so far as to say with this "pop" approach to harmony: Especially where the orchestra is concerned, I don't think it's possible to compose an effective string quartet, let alone symphonic piece. Look no further than Hans Zimmer or the endless slew of YouTube "teachers" who can talk about chords until the cows come home, but ask them to write a piece more like Holst or John Williams and they simply cannot do it, because that music wasn't composed in that way. It's like how you'll see all these channels doing "reductions" and analysis of JW's scores, and it's almost always a total mess with how they are writing chord names above the staff or even a full sentence trying to describe what is happening harmonically: You simply can't explain most of his orchestral pieces as "chords + melody". The "chord progression" approach really only works idiomatically for keyboard instruments and pop bands, tbh.

Hey thanks! Just sharing that this piece, and another unreleased one of mine, was licensed by a film company in Alberta, Canada for their documentary on elaborately-decorated houses and impressive horror collections. You can watch it here!

Exactly

Awesome video @chopin

Exactly. In my own writing I honestly don't even think about "chord progressions" at all anymore. It is ultimately a very restrictive view on harmony. A more horizontal, contrapuntal way of thinking is almost always better. I just write a line and then thicken it in any number of ways. Sometimes it will be as simple as thirds and octaves, other times you could examine it as full triads or extended chords, sometimes it's contrary motion, sometimes just a weird cluster that worked at that moment. Then I often do the same to different melodies that may be occurring at the same time. I find the results much more musically, aesthetically and intellectually stimulating than just "chords + melody"