Sounds familiar?

I have been playing on my sax and on my keyboard a song that has been in my head for quite some time and I don't know if it's something that has already been written or if it's just something that I am coming up wiith on my own.

Considering how many billions of songs there are out there, how does one know if you are writing something that is truly your own or not? I have no way of confirming if it IS in fact a song that was already written.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I have been playing on my sax and on my keyboard a song that has been in my head for quite some time and I don't know if it's something that has already been written or if it's just something that I am coming up wiith on my own.

Considering how many billions of songs there are out there, how does one know if you are writing something that is truly your own or not? I have no way of confirming if it IS in fact a song that was already written.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Generally speaking, most people know where their ideas come from - I.e. whether or not they are from somewhere else or not. It does, on occasion, happen that someone writes something that's already been written - Lennon's "My Sweet Lord" as a match for "He's So Fine" springs to mind. In that particular case, it's probably pretty fair to say that John Lennon had no idea that his melody and attached harmony were so close to the original, and though it's likely he had heard "He's So Fine" before in his life, he probably was not 'familiar' with it. With a star like Lennon, and knowing his internal moral code, I'm sure he thought he was creating something original when he wrote it.

I may be speculating here, but "Pop" melodies are particularly simplistic, and the harmonic content of half of the "Pop" tunes wrote in the 50s and 60s (such as "HSF") had only 3 or 4 chords. In other idioms, I'd guess it even more unlikely that it would happen because of the level of complexitiy involved and the familiarity of the composer with the idiom. Regardless, I'd say that it's unlikely you are stealing if you can't think of anywhere else that your tune may have come from. Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to check.

Certainly, you could post it here and folks would let you know.

Once I can get a recording of it, I'll post it. Hopefully nobody has ever heard it before. :P

Thanks for the quick reply btw.

A familiar story. I put together some replica classical music. My knowledge of the era is minimal but one hears it often in the background so I was suspicious of myself. It sounded vaguely familiar. However....I asked here and the experts gave me reassurance!

:P

Cool. Because I really love the tune, but I don't want to be accused of ripping off anyone elses music....hehe