SubjectRuin

This graph paper technique sounds interesting - I wonder how well it works. My drawings were more for inspiration and general ideas than specific musical notation, and like you said, it's probably a good thing the songs wandered teh way they did.

A while back I posted a sort of prototype for a weird system of representing music visually. For my recent concept album project, I tried to re-work this idea into a more usable form and came up with some interesting structures. They're basically schematics that outline the song structure - not the music itself, but the different sections and how they interact. I ended up never using them to record actual songs, but the act of creating them got the ball rolling. It was more an experiment than anything, but maybe you'll find them interesting: Visual Song Structures You can download the actual music that was inspired by these diagrams at my website: SubjectRuin - The Twisted Mind of JT Bruce Tell me what you think of these, I'm interested to know if anyone has any experience with this kind of idea.

Im not sure if there are any prog fans that post on this forum, but I thought youd like to check out my new album, The Dreamers Paradox, which can be downloaded for free off my website or you can stream it off Last.fm. Either way, Im curious to know what you think, considering most of your musical backgrounds are probably of different tastes. Hope you enojy it.

This is an instrumental version of a song from my upcomming album, The Dreamer's Paradox. I realize it's not the usual variety of music found on this forum, but I feel it's a major work and might be appreciated by some. Give it a listen and tell me what you think! More music can be found at my website, www.subjectruin.net. Crossing The Threshold

I'd like to know what you all think of my song Exordium. It's a short instrumental piece but is very fast paced with many changeups. any comments or constructive criticism is more than welcome. Many other songs similar to this one can be downloaded for free off my site SubjectRuin.net. Thanks for your time and comments!

A while ago, I posted this song and got a few interested replies, so I figured I'd let you all know that I recently put out an album containing that song and 15 others like it. You can check it out here. If you want to listen to more songs off the album you can get them here. Sorry for the shameless plug, but I'm trying to get the word out!

Thank you all for responding, it's interesting to know what people think about this kind of stuff. Graham, to answer your question, these diagrams aren't for analysis, but they insead act as a sort of blueprint for a song. The diagram is purely for the song structure itself, it has nothing to do with the individual notes or chords being played, but instead each block represents a unit or segment of music. I create these diagrams first, then make the music based on them. Gongchime, interesting what you were saying about geniuses and visual representations... To answer your question, the spirals indicate the start of a segment to be repeated, and the horizontal dashes indicate approximately how many times I'd like to repeat it. Originally, the "squishedness" of the spirals were supposed to roughly indicate tempo, but looking back, this idea doesn't make much sense considering there are no other tempo indicators for the non-repeated segments. I'll try to go into a little more depth for you about what this all means, just bear in mind that I'm not formally trained in music theory, so I use terms and concepts that make sense to me but may not be the proper terms for them or may not even exist in actual music theory. Each block, as I said, represents a cohesive unit of music. Blocks of a same color are derivatives of the same musical idea. The blocks are sectioned off into "measures" or smaller segments within the larger block, and an "x" is what I call a difference tick, meaning there will be a slight variation in that measure. Smaller blocks either under or above the colored blocks indicate accompanying parts. Blocks with a half-filled circle indicate what I call "connective transitions" which are basically transitions that blend the ideas of what comes before and after the transition. Blocks with a x-ed circle represent what I call "unique transitions" which transition one segment to another using an all-together new musical idea. Free standing circles indicate "embelishments" which I view as little ornamentations or slight variations in teh musical idea. Open circles indicate "additive embellishments" which are little ornaments consisting of a new instrument simply adding a piece over the existing section, whereas filled circles represent "destructive embelishments" which change the essence of the main musical idea. I call the wedge shaped triangle "buildups" which simply mean that the particular section gets more intense towards the end. There is a bracket right after the first repeated segment that I call a "fusion bracket" which simplifies and condenses the instrumentation of the bracketed segment to create a new, solid block while still maintaining the essence of the original musical idea. This "language" is still a work in progress and I'm sure lots will be added or changed as new things become nessecary, but this will give you a basic idea of what that crazy diagram is all about.

I'm working on perfecting a system of visually diagramming song structure, outside of traditional music notation. Essentially, it's just a system of symbols with different meanings, strung together like a sentence. Derivatives of the same basic musical idea are color coded and rules are set up to accomidate different types of transitions and embellishments. It generally doesn't follow traditional music theory, but rather the way I picture the structure of music in my head. Anyway, I'm mostly curious to know what people think about such a system, or if anyone else uses a similar system to diagram the structure of their songs. This image is just a small example, as I'm surrently trying to diagram an entire concept album im working on.

This piano composition is for a longer song and started off as just a collection of random ideas, which were eventually strung together into this. Any comments are welcome. http://www.soundclick.com/bands/songInfo.c...&songID=3127882

Man, this is so funky, I really like it.

This is definately not live - all the drums and keyboard elements were sequenced using soundfonts, and all the guitar is very layered. I'm really glad that you think it sounds convincing though, and righteous that you liked it.

Thanks a lot for your in-depth review! It was very helpful and interesting to see which parts you hilighted as being good and bad. I apologize, but I think I forgot to mention that if you play the hi-fi streaming version of the song, you get a strange, sped-up version, and judging by the times you said these things happened at, I think you may have heard the bad version. For future listeners, it will sound MUCH better if you download the mp3. Anyways, thanks again, wolf. If you like, I have three more songs avaliable at: http://www.myspace.com/jtbruce

Hi, I'm new here but I wanted to get some feedback on a fifteen minute instrumental epic I recently made for an album of mine. It's progressive metal / progressive rock so those of you who are either not fans of the genre or are simply not familiar with it might find it a bit strange. While most of it is rock / metal, there are several classical sections and even a few jazzy ones, so there's a little something for everyone. Anyway, enjoy, and tell me what you think. I apologize for the lack of mp3 quality, but it is a rather large song and had to be compressed for convenience. The Artist, The Sage, and The Jester