8 ms·

What you said about learning melodies and beats and chords kind of confused me. Do people actually learn how to make up music? I always thought it was just some

What you said about learning melodies and beats and chords kind of confused me. Do people actually learn how to make up music? I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have. For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while. Am I unuiqe in this respect?

adrianN 9y ago
Very few skills are just "natural ability". Music theory is an interesting and pretty important topic if you want to make music. Since people have been creating music for millennia, they have figured out many things that help composers.
etatoby 9y ago
When somebody asks me how to solve a particular database problem, or an IT problem, or how to write an algorithm to do something, I will think about it in the back of my mind and "just spit it out after a while," unless it's something difficult enough to warrant a literature review. That doesn't mean that those subjects aren't covered in detail in textbooks and university courses, or that people cannot learn how to do it.
csa 9y ago
You probably have learned most/all of your musical knowledge implicitly. Some people have a great ear for music and can write solid songs without formal training in music. Other folks come at music from the more theoretical side, although usually with a lot of implicit knowledge of and experience with music as well. For most people who are not formally trained in music, their songs can be improved upon on a technical level by someone who has deeper theoretical knowledge (learned either explicitly or implicitly). For a good discussion of this, check out Tim Ferris' podcast interview with Derek Sivers. Derek talked about how he had learned a lot about music implicitly. In one summer, a teacher of his formalized that knowledge so efficiently that he was able to test out of lot of classes (1.5 years worth?) once he went to Berklee School of Music.
stfwn 9y ago
I created an account just to reply to your comment. As someone who has played keyboard instruments for all my life, it's not crossed my mind lately that the idea that there is structure to music is not well known. Just for fun: chords in scales are numbered from bottom to top in Roman numerals. I feels like home base, V feels like wanting to go home. If you want to create the feeling of going home but then not really go there you can go from V to VI instead of I. 'Sad but I have closure'-type ending? Major IV - Minor IV - I. Bluesy feeling? Add a minor seventh to your I, IV and V chords. Dreamy? Major seventh instead there, except on the V. It's even entirely possible to learn to recognize all of these types of chord progressions and sounds instantly. I'm working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear.
- eriknstr 9y ago
  >I'm working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear. Sounds interesting. Please do a "Show HN" post when your app is ready for it.
  - stfwn 9y ago
    Will do, thanks!
- Boerworz 9y ago
  As someone who's recently tried to get into (basic) music theory, trying out the chord progressions you mentioned was fun! Do you happen to know of any resources that go through more of these well-known chord progressions? I'm also wondering if these chord progressions work the same way for all scales, or if, for example, the 'sad but I have closure'-type ending only sounds that way in major scales? From experimenting I think it only works for major scales, but I'm not sure :)
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Try an app like: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chordbot/id394754767?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chordbot/id394754767?mt=8&ig... https://prochords.dk/ https://prochords.dk/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-chord-progression-songwriter/id554498472?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-chord-progression-son... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suggester-chords-that-work-together/id504740787?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suggester-chords-that-work-t... There are also desktop apps and DAWs that have chord intelligence built in (e.g. Cubase and Reason do).
teilo 9y ago
There are certainly people who have natural ability, and compose melodically, applying varying levels of knowledge in music theory. There are other people who can't make heads or tails out of a keyboard, compose a tune in their head, or understand chordal progressions, but nevertheless compose music in layers and still do extraordinary work. They find what they like by playing with notes on the screen. Joel Zimmerman, a.k.a. Deadmau5, is an example of this. I am an example of the former, with natural ability, bolstered by training in music theory. But I still use a layered approach when I am composing, generally starting with a beat or bassline, playing with melodic progressions in snippets, and eventually moving into a traditional composition process when I have something started that I like. Ableton makes this process extremely easy and productive.
- packetslave 9y ago
  Indeed. As a classically-trained musician, watching Joel's class on Masterclass and seeing him compose melodies by dragging notes around in Ableton until they "sound right to him" was eye-opening.
  - teilo 9y ago
    What surprised me was how he makes melody lines: Playing with chords until he likes the progression, and then pulling notes out of the chords to form a melody. And of course it makes sense on one level. But I think melodically and tend to do a lot of counterpoint. Getting the chords out of my head and onto the screen is often the last thing I do. I don't know how well his approach would work with counterpoint, since counterpoint often creates and resolves dissonance using passing tones in double time.
richardjdare 9y ago
What I find difficult is that by the time I've got my DAW going and found some synths I like, the tune in my head has evaporated. Do all people find musical thoughts so insubstantial, or is it just me? If I imagine a picture or a paragraph of text, it'll stick around and I can remember it more or less indefinitely. I still recall snatches of crap poetry I thought up when I was a teenager, but any music I imagine just disappears before I can get it down. The most successful tunes I made were more or less "discovered" from incrementally experimenting in the DAW, and not from any kind of original plan or idea. Maybe I'm just not a musician! (I'm an indie game dev who started making my own tunes for my games)
- skybrian 9y ago
  Happens to me too. Ear training might help? There's an exercise where you take a song you know or a familiar recording and try to transcribe it by ear. (I find it's a pretty hard exercise.)
- disantlor 9y ago
  i spent 10 years building a project studio and optimizing the workflow and patch bay so that i can be recording almost any instrument within 30 seconds or so. that was a huge breakthrough and a huge commitment!
- tetraodonpuffer 9y ago
  you could consciously decide NOT to use synths to lay down the bones, always use a piano to begin with, once you have the tune idea down then you can move onto orchestration and picking synths and so on. Always keep the piano track as a guide and start adding tracks for all the other components until you have what you need. From a remembering the tune perspective, I have the same issues, but I think it's more related to not applying musical lexicon and hearing skills the same way: you remember poetry or a paragraph of text because you remember the ideas and how to go from one to the other, if you are a musician and have something in your head and start thinking along the lines of "this is using a lydian mode, the progression is ii IV V I then it modulates to the relative minor and switches to dorian, also the theme is going down in thirds for two bars, then it will stay on the chord root for one and move to the dominant 7th" you are going to remember it a lot more easily than just by remembering the melody itself It would be like comparing how easily you can remember poetry in English vs poetry in, say, Russian, where you only have the "sounds of the words" in your head to remember, but you don't have the syntax or the meanings to help you as well.
zeta0134 9y ago
I think your natural composition skills are unusual, but not unique. I also begain to compose music at a very early age. My knack for picking melodies up out of the air and playing them on a piano when I was 7 years old was how my parents knew that I needed lessons. Naturally, I was surprised later in life to learn that other people had to learn basic things like pitch and rhythm; to me it had always been just as natural as speaking. I believe the same is true with song writing, in a sense. You're still applying some parts of music theory, but most by-ear learners like ourselves simply grasp the concepts and have internalized them naturally, without needing to be taught. Music is little more than patterns at the end of the day, and our brains are very good at recognizing patterns. What you and I know intuitively, others can learn through training and repetition. Both approaches are valid, and yield interesting (and often different) observations. I went going through Music Theory classes during my brief adventure with Liberal Arts Majors in college. I felt like I already "knew" the material in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was like I was finally understanding what my brain had been doing all these years. I recommend it if you haven't yet had the experience.
bkanber 9y ago
Songwriting can be taught, yes. In most music courses you start by analyzing the Bach Chorales, which (along with some Gregorian work from the middle ages) is what really kicked off contemporary music composition. By analyzing the Chorales and moving forward from there you learn how to manipulate chord progressions, harmony, point and counterpoint. Composers classically trained this way tend (!) to have an easier time writing melodies, harmonies, and progressions in a consistent manner, ie not having to wait for "inspiration to strike". The composer, of course, still needs to develop an emotional connection in the music, but the point is that it can, and routinely is, taught.
- sbilstein 9y ago
  My girlfriend is a trained classical singer whereas I'm a self taught musician. She doesn't really gravitate towards the rock music I like to write but because of her training she can easily jam, riff, or write anything far quicker than I can. Songwriting is a very technical skill indeed.
eon1 9y ago
Do you really mean to say you write songs without using any theory or explicitly sought knowledge whatsoever? Let's hear one.
- andywood 9y ago
  I know a little rudimentary theory. Just enough to get mocked by someone with a real education. "without any theory" is sort of an impossible standard to satisfy, but I will say I never think about theory consciously, and go by how things sound. Anyway, this is what I'm working on: https://soundcloud.com/cubit/piano-concerto https://soundcloud.com/cubit/piano-concerto
coldtea 9y ago
>Do people actually learn how to make up music? People have studied music and composition since at least ancient Babylon, so, well, yes? >I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have. With natural ability you can sing some melodies. For learning to play an instrument, adding chords to the melody, you need studying, even if you learn by yourself and by ear (as many folk musicians did). Song melody, one can have a natural feel for creating, but nobody just starts writing songs in full form "from natural ability". >For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while. What would that mean? You'd write a song on the guitar for example? If so, then you already know the chords. And not all of the theory, so how complex is your song? Just barebones songwriting (country/folk style)? Can you take it further? Can you write the parts for musicians to play on your song? Can you write different genres on spec? There are more things in making music/songs than "spitting out" some melody.

adrianN 9y ago

Very few skills are just "natural ability". Music theory is an interesting and pretty important topic if you want to make music. Since people have been creating music for millennia, they have figured out many things that help composers.

etatoby 9y ago

When somebody asks me how to solve a particular database problem, or an IT problem, or how to write an algorithm to do something, I will think about it in the back of my mind and "just spit it out after a while," unless it's something difficult enough to warrant a literature review. That doesn't mean that those subjects aren't covered in detail in textbooks and university courses, or that people cannot learn how to do it.

csa 9y ago

You probably have learned most/all of your musical knowledge implicitly. Some people have a great ear for music and can write solid songs without formal training in music. Other folks come at music from the more theoretical side, although usually with a lot of implicit knowledge of and experience with music as well. For most people who are not formally trained in music, their songs can be improved upon on a technical level by someone who has deeper theoretical knowledge (learned either explicitly or implicitly). For a good discussion of this, check out Tim Ferris' podcast interview with Derek Sivers. Derek talked about how he had learned a lot about music implicitly. In one summer, a teacher of his formalized that knowledge so efficiently that he was able to test out of lot of classes (1.5 years worth?) once he went to Berklee School of Music.

stfwn 9y ago

I created an account just to reply to your comment. As someone who has played keyboard instruments for all my life, it's not crossed my mind lately that the idea that there is structure to music is not well known. Just for fun: chords in scales are numbered from bottom to top in Roman numerals. I feels like home base, V feels like wanting to go home. If you want to create the feeling of going home but then not really go there you can go from V to VI instead of I. 'Sad but I have closure'-type ending? Major IV - Minor IV - I. Bluesy feeling? Add a minor seventh to your I, IV and V chords. Dreamy? Major seventh instead there, except on the V. It's even entirely possible to learn to recognize all of these types of chord progressions and sounds instantly. I'm working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear.

eriknstr 9y ago
>I'm working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear. Sounds interesting. Please do a "Show HN" post when your app is ready for it.
- stfwn 9y ago
  Will do, thanks!
Boerworz 9y ago
As someone who's recently tried to get into (basic) music theory, trying out the chord progressions you mentioned was fun! Do you happen to know of any resources that go through more of these well-known chord progressions? I'm also wondering if these chord progressions work the same way for all scales, or if, for example, the 'sad but I have closure'-type ending only sounds that way in major scales? From experimenting I think it only works for major scales, but I'm not sure :)
- coldtea 9y ago
  Try an app like: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chordbot/id394754767?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chordbot/id394754767?mt=8&ig... https://prochords.dk/ https://prochords.dk/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-chord-progression-songwriter/id554498472?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-chord-progression-son... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suggester-chords-that-work-together/id504740787?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suggester-chords-that-work-t... There are also desktop apps and DAWs that have chord intelligence built in (e.g. Cubase and Reason do).

teilo 9y ago

There are certainly people who have natural ability, and compose melodically, applying varying levels of knowledge in music theory. There are other people who can't make heads or tails out of a keyboard, compose a tune in their head, or understand chordal progressions, but nevertheless compose music in layers and still do extraordinary work. They find what they like by playing with notes on the screen. Joel Zimmerman, a.k.a. Deadmau5, is an example of this. I am an example of the former, with natural ability, bolstered by training in music theory. But I still use a layered approach when I am composing, generally starting with a beat or bassline, playing with melodic progressions in snippets, and eventually moving into a traditional composition process when I have something started that I like. Ableton makes this process extremely easy and productive.

packetslave 9y ago
Indeed. As a classically-trained musician, watching Joel's class on Masterclass and seeing him compose melodies by dragging notes around in Ableton until they "sound right to him" was eye-opening.
- teilo 9y ago
  What surprised me was how he makes melody lines: Playing with chords until he likes the progression, and then pulling notes out of the chords to form a melody. And of course it makes sense on one level. But I think melodically and tend to do a lot of counterpoint. Getting the chords out of my head and onto the screen is often the last thing I do. I don't know how well his approach would work with counterpoint, since counterpoint often creates and resolves dissonance using passing tones in double time.

richardjdare 9y ago

What I find difficult is that by the time I've got my DAW going and found some synths I like, the tune in my head has evaporated. Do all people find musical thoughts so insubstantial, or is it just me? If I imagine a picture or a paragraph of text, it'll stick around and I can remember it more or less indefinitely. I still recall snatches of crap poetry I thought up when I was a teenager, but any music I imagine just disappears before I can get it down. The most successful tunes I made were more or less "discovered" from incrementally experimenting in the DAW, and not from any kind of original plan or idea. Maybe I'm just not a musician! (I'm an indie game dev who started making my own tunes for my games)

skybrian 9y ago
Happens to me too. Ear training might help? There's an exercise where you take a song you know or a familiar recording and try to transcribe it by ear. (I find it's a pretty hard exercise.)
disantlor 9y ago
i spent 10 years building a project studio and optimizing the workflow and patch bay so that i can be recording almost any instrument within 30 seconds or so. that was a huge breakthrough and a huge commitment!
tetraodonpuffer 9y ago
you could consciously decide NOT to use synths to lay down the bones, always use a piano to begin with, once you have the tune idea down then you can move onto orchestration and picking synths and so on. Always keep the piano track as a guide and start adding tracks for all the other components until you have what you need. From a remembering the tune perspective, I have the same issues, but I think it's more related to not applying musical lexicon and hearing skills the same way: you remember poetry or a paragraph of text because you remember the ideas and how to go from one to the other, if you are a musician and have something in your head and start thinking along the lines of "this is using a lydian mode, the progression is ii IV V I then it modulates to the relative minor and switches to dorian, also the theme is going down in thirds for two bars, then it will stay on the chord root for one and move to the dominant 7th" you are going to remember it a lot more easily than just by remembering the melody itself It would be like comparing how easily you can remember poetry in English vs poetry in, say, Russian, where you only have the "sounds of the words" in your head to remember, but you don't have the syntax or the meanings to help you as well.

zeta0134 9y ago

I think your natural composition skills are unusual, but not unique. I also begain to compose music at a very early age. My knack for picking melodies up out of the air and playing them on a piano when I was 7 years old was how my parents knew that I needed lessons. Naturally, I was surprised later in life to learn that other people had to learn basic things like pitch and rhythm; to me it had always been just as natural as speaking. I believe the same is true with song writing, in a sense. You're still applying some parts of music theory, but most by-ear learners like ourselves simply grasp the concepts and have internalized them naturally, without needing to be taught. Music is little more than patterns at the end of the day, and our brains are very good at recognizing patterns. What you and I know intuitively, others can learn through training and repetition. Both approaches are valid, and yield interesting (and often different) observations. I went going through Music Theory classes during my brief adventure with Liberal Arts Majors in college. I felt like I already "knew" the material in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. It was like I was finally understanding what my brain had been doing all these years. I recommend it if you haven't yet had the experience.

bkanber 9y ago

Songwriting can be taught, yes. In most music courses you start by analyzing the Bach Chorales, which (along with some Gregorian work from the middle ages) is what really kicked off contemporary music composition. By analyzing the Chorales and moving forward from there you learn how to manipulate chord progressions, harmony, point and counterpoint. Composers classically trained this way tend (!) to have an easier time writing melodies, harmonies, and progressions in a consistent manner, ie not having to wait for "inspiration to strike". The composer, of course, still needs to develop an emotional connection in the music, but the point is that it can, and routinely is, taught.

sbilstein 9y ago
My girlfriend is a trained classical singer whereas I'm a self taught musician. She doesn't really gravitate towards the rock music I like to write but because of her training she can easily jam, riff, or write anything far quicker than I can. Songwriting is a very technical skill indeed.

eon1 9y ago

Do you really mean to say you write songs without using any theory or explicitly sought knowledge whatsoever? Let's hear one.

andywood 9y ago
I know a little rudimentary theory. Just enough to get mocked by someone with a real education. "without any theory" is sort of an impossible standard to satisfy, but I will say I never think about theory consciously, and go by how things sound. Anyway, this is what I'm working on: https://soundcloud.com/cubit/piano-concerto https://soundcloud.com/cubit/piano-concerto

coldtea 9y ago

>Do people actually learn how to make up music? People have studied music and composition since at least ancient Babylon, so, well, yes? >I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have. With natural ability you can sing some melodies. For learning to play an instrument, adding chords to the melody, you need studying, even if you learn by yourself and by ear (as many folk musicians did). Song melody, one can have a natural feel for creating, but nobody just starts writing songs in full form "from natural ability". >For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while. What would that mean? You'd write a song on the guitar for example? If so, then you already know the chords. And not all of the theory, so how complex is your song? Just barebones songwriting (country/folk style)? Can you take it further? Can you write the parts for musicians to play on your song? Can you write different genres on spec? There are more things in making music/songs than "spitting out" some melody.