PeterthePapercomPoser

I thought I'd start a topic about everyone's repertoire that they're currently playing on any instrument you know how to play. Or you can share what pieces of music you're composing/working on right now. This topic is inspired by a series of messages I recently exchanged in which I realized that basically nobody on this forum knows about all the really corny pop songs I sing and play on the guitar! LoL So this first post will be dedicated to guitar music that I've been playing (although I also have other repertoire that I'm playing on other instruments). In roughly chronological order from oldest to newest: Bach's BWV996 Bourree in E minor - One of the first classical pieces I learned on guitar from my "Bach for Guitar" book. Originally for Lute. Bach's BWV Anh. 132 Menuett in E minor - Another classical piece I've been learning, more difficult than the Bourree. In the same book. "Downtown" by Petula Clark - I found this song in the movie "Panic Room" and have since fallen in love with it completely independently of the horrific movie. Some alternate chord shapes in this song let me play it easier rather than having to barre almost every chord. "Wedding Bell Blues" by Laura Nyro - a really old song that I fell in love with and posed a challenge because of it's chords. I modify the words to "Girl, I love you so..." when I sing it. The only problem I see with this song is finding an occasion where a guy would actually want to sing it to a girl! LoL "Maneater" by Hall & Oates "Wishing" by Electric Light Orchestra - ELO is my mom's favorite childhood band. This particular song has chords that were easy enough for me to learn and a cool whistle solo that starts and ends it. "Magic" by Pilot - the Scottish one-hit-wonder band Pilot's "Magic" is irresistible to me from the lyrics and emotional tone standpoint. And maybe I also relate to this song just from personal experience LoL. I sang this at a talent show two years ago. "Easy Lover" by Philip Bailey, Phil Collins "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths - in my opinion The Smith's best song. It was a challenge to learn because of all the constant barre chords. But I've learned some alternate chord shapes to make it easier on myself. I love the lyrics. "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers - a song I got the hang of with some fussing around with different chord shapes on the guitar. "Faith of the Heart" by Rod Stewart - I found this song because it was the title song for StarTrek: Enterprise. LoL But it's also been used in a famous Robin Williams movie I forgot the name of. "Friends Theme" by the Rembrandts - the theme song from the famous TV show "Friends". This recording includes the 2nd verse which you never get to hear when the show is starting. "Like Humans Do" by David Byrne - I found this song a while back when it was included with Windows 95, 98 or XP (don't remember which). It has really funny words and tells a cool story. Some challenging chord shapes. "I Know You Know" by The Friendly Indians - the theme song to the popular TV show "Psych". The chords are easy and I've heard it so many times I decided I should learn it. "Used to be Young" by Miley Cyrus - I recently sang and played this at a talent show and won 3rd place! "The Heart Wants What It Wants" by Selena Gomez - great meaningful lyrics. "Chained to the Rhythm" by Katy Perry "Streets of New York" by Alicia Keys - I really fell in love with this song for the chorus and how it emphasizes the Subdominant. The lyrics are also full of heart. "Sex, Drugs, etc." by Beach Weather - I fell in love with this song because of its hypnotic chords and cool lyrics (and it's easy to play!) "Hometown" by Twenty-One Pilots - I love the whole album that this song is from but is probably the only Twenty-One Pilots song that I can easily play on guitar. "Hold on Forever" by Rob Thomas - a song I learned for an ex-girlfriend. "All the Stars" by Kendrick Lamar feat. Sza - a very seductive song written for the movie "Black Panther". I wrote a little commentary on the meaning of the lyrics in a creative writing workshop. "Never Enough" by Loren Allred - this song from the movie "The Greatest Showman" is full of emotional intensity and heartfelt lyrics. I still haven't seen the movie though. "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk feat. Pherrel Williams - a really simple but cool song with a dope mood. "Love on the Brain" by Noah Guthrie/Rihanna - this song is a challenge to accurately fingerpick each arpeggio. "Never Wanted Your Love" by She & Him - She & Him is Zooey Deschanel's band. Really heartfelt lyrics. "Ennui" by PeterthePapercomPoser - a song I wrote when I first started learning guitar in 2020 (also around the time I joined YCF! I entered this song in the 2020 summer competition) Some of these songs were picked by me because they had easy chords on guitar. Others because I have a soft spot in my heart for the lyrics. Some are just plain awesome. Some of the songs by female artists I picked because they set a certain emotional tone that I got attached to when listening. In some of the songs by female artists I changed the lyrics to make it more appropriate for a guy to sing the song (LoL). Feel free to share your own songs or pieces that you're currently working on! Or any composition that you're composing as well!

Another VGM track that I found that uses microtonality (I think it uses the quarter-tone scale): Shattered Pixel Dungeon Prison Music:

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!

Hello @Mihăiță Zamă and welcome to the forum! It's wonderful that you're playing your own compositions! I perceive this piece as perhaps mildly dissonant but still quite accessible. Is this the complete piece? The recording seems to stop in the middle of a sustained note, so it seems like maybe it was cut off. I'd say it sometimes ventures into unnerving and creepy territory, but not overly so. Would you be willing to provide a PDF score for the members and myself to follow along with while we listen? Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Krisp! The octave major 3rd's in the piano that permeate your piece remind me of some Rachmaninoff piece for two pianos or perhaps Debussy! I've actually written a song titled "Ennui" about the corona-virus pandemic/lockdown and your song reminded me that it's actually a French word! LoL I think this might just be one of the most simple and because of that, accessible songs of yours you've ever written! The song is really charming and I can imagine it in a film. The string writing is also very affecting in combination with the piano and the voice. Well done and thanks for sharing!

Hello @Chemathmusician0510 and welcome to the forum! From what I can glean from the score PDF, you spend most of the piece on the dominant without ever resolving to B major (what I am assuming is the tonic even though there seems to be plenty of evidence from the D naturals in the piece that you might be in B minor instead or maybe just borrowing). Can you provide an mp3 rendering of the piece to give people a better idea of what the piece might sound like? Thanks for sharing!

Hey @Gabriel Carlisle! Glad to see you're ambitious enough to have taken on the task of writing a symphony! I love the dramatic introduction in the Largo mesto 1st movement! The strings bring the tension up slowly until the breaking point which is punctuated by a forceful and dissonant tutti chord (or what seems like a tutti - I'm not following along with the score since you said that much of the notation is wrong). The quiet Clarinet solo at 5:42 sets quite a bleak mood before being soon taken over by the Violins. The 2nd movement truly does sound threatening and unnerving. I love the dramatic orchestration at 1:40 which expands on your previously exposited harmonic skeleton. The flute/piccolo line sounds really maniacal. To talk a little bit about your composition method: it seems you like to write disconnected fragments of music much like Prokofiev did. The big variations project that I'm working on right now is also coming together the same way with lots of individual files/fragments that I'll put together once I work out more of the material. They end up coming together like puzzle pieces that way. The thing that might be difficult is transitions. If you modulate to different keys, bridging two separate fragments together might pose a challenge if you have to modulate. Or you might be forced to transpose one of the fragments to facilitate an easier transition. That's fine too but would just entail extra work. The way I deal with all that in my variations piece is to fashion circular sequences/modulations into each variation so it ends up modulating back to the original key it started in. That way the puzzle pieces will fit together easier if the beginning and the end are all in the same key already (or close to the same key - you can use closely related keys like the dominant, subdominant or mediant or submediant key). That's what I mean by having each section be composed in a modular fashion in our discussion on discord a while back. Thanks for sharing and good luck on your further progress!

Hello @Display! I am glad you decided to re-edit this topic and put up your compositions once again even after your discouraging first experience on this forum. I am no expert on vocal music having myself only really published 2 vocal pieces thus far. Do you have a score PDF you could upload for the listeners to follow along with? I know it would help me greatly not only to know the intended words to be sung but also the form and harmony etc. I do hear some canonic imitation. Thanks for sharing and I hope you continue to participate on the forum by posting more of your music or reviewing others works!

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!

How about this website: https://musicalics.com/en/composer/Claude-Debussy/Mélodies-—-Flots-palmes-et-sables

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.

I found an example in Film Music of a slow, half tone string glissando which spends a considerable amount of time in quarter-tone territory: Snape to Malfoy Manor from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

Hey @JorgeDavid! I like the mood of the piece but I agree with Luis that a contrasting section with a different accompaniment or a modulation to another key would be very welcome. It seems like you are kinda using Chopin's famous Prelude in E minor as the model for this piece, no? I think the reason why the same accompaniment pattern works in that case for such a long time is the liberal use of chromaticism and a slow constant modulation. Thanks for sharing!

Hello @panta rei! Nice Habanera! I've noticed that you really gravitate towards writing pieces with a set accompaniment pattern that stays the same throughout the whole duration of a piece (with some variation of course). I think the trumpet part is fine and doesn't go too high. High concert C is probably easier to hit on a C Trumpet like you have here than a high D would be on a Bb Trumpet, but they are still well within the expected competency for both types of Trumpet. About the quadruplets: usually, in Musescore, for me to accomplish the kinds of quadruplets you want here, I would first merge the duration over which I want the quadruplets to take up (the rest). Then I'd hit Ctrl - 4 and the rest would be split up into 4 equal parts. In order to merge the rests so they're all contained in one rest, I'd select them all and hit Delete. I don't know if that helps and what program you might be writing this in. Thanks for sharing!

Hey @Thatguy v2.0! I love this song! Nice message in the lyrics too - not your typical sappy love song. I love how the piece ends on such an extended verse - it also definitely doesn't follow your standard verse - chorus - verse structure especially with that ending. There's lots of cool inflections in the guitar chords too that make the piece custom and far from standard. Thanks for sharing!