January 2022: Composing Mr. Radio

I've composed maybe two or three pieces of music during school, and I've largely enjoyed it. I also took ages to do it and would have preferred starting from a melody, and not accidentally plagiarizing Pavane for a Dead Princess with the melody I did manage to gather for myself. That said, I really enjoyed the process once I had the sense of it coming together. Having done it so infrequently however means, that I really have no sense of how much time I actually need composing either a melody or a piece. As such I wanna set myself a manageable goal: Compose and record a piece of music. I'm aware this includes audio editing, which I have very little experience in, but this seems reasonable.

Week 1.

Coming up with a melody sucks. Or rather, I suck at doing it. Maybe it's because of all the ear-worms that I keep carrying around with me, but trying to write something that I can't pin down as an already established piece of music leads me down rabbit holes of major thirds, more often than not. I know I should probably just give in and start with something, but since I have to present something at the end of the month, I'd rather not have to rewrite this too often.

Instead, I decided to go with some lyric stubs as the foundation to this. I know, it's cheating in the sense that I was meant to practice composing, and not poetry, but as long as I come out with a not entirely terrible piece of music, I figure that'll be alright.

Because I had taken noted down lyrics as a basis, I was working with the usual pop-song structure, that is:

Verse

Chorus

Verse

Chorus

Bridge

Chorus

This makes composing something for this considerably easier, because I don't need to do too much original work, mainly one melody for the verse, one for the chorus, and one for the bridge, if I ever decide to add one. As of week one, the bridge doesn't really have lyrics yet, but maybe it won't be a bridge so much as an intermezzo. Either way, I decided to have the melodies for verse and chorus set after week one, and ignoring that my particular first "week" of January really had eight days, instead of seven, that doesn't look too shabby.

My approach for this was really more atmosphere and rhythm-driven rather than me approaching the project with a concrete musical vision, because - as I already mentioned - I don't often have one. When I wrote the lyrics, I imagined something with a very steady, with not too much temperament accompanying them, which is just as well, considering the musical instruments I can play, and the extent to which I can play them. I began with the chorus, because I didn't read my draft of the lyrics and thought that it probably wouldn't change, and maybe I could use that to write a short leading-in prelude to the piece.

I used the diction of the first two words: Mr Radio, which I think every one of my choruses begins with, to set the tone for the chorus. When spoken naturally, the stress should be on the Ra syllable, meaning I could treat the first two notes of the melody like an upbeat. Inspecting the way the chorus continues, reveals that one could repeat that rhythm all the way down. This also gave me the standard 4/4 time signature. From there, it was more or less just messing about on the piano, until I had something that felt right. I penciled that in and tried deciphering the rhythm of the verses.

Here too, I latched on to a key-word in the first verse to help me figure out something. The word towards the tail end of the first stanza, anticipating, I wanted to split into two parts, so the melody would anticipate the second half of the word. Cheeky, I know. Either way, this gave me this very basic staccato solution in the right hand piano, which I could just kinda string along the melody by.

Going over the parts of the melody and the piano accompaniment for the verses I notice that this smacks somewhat of show-tune, which I suppose makes a lot of sense considering my taste and musical upbringing. And the evergreen status of the West End Heathers production in my playlist.

Week 2.

Composing without a piano is... interesting. I've usually used a piano for all my compositions, so this time, I'm settling for my violin, which I'm significantly worse at improvising on, as well every school child's favourite musical tool: Whistling. Now that I don't need to hear how exactly the melody scans with the lyrics, I can just play the midi of the melody on loop and start whistling something over that, until I think I can find a place for what happened. I started with the chorus again, because why not.

Because I wanted this to have a slightly old-timey feel, something one could put static over and play in the background of a black and white movie, I had a lot of conceptual woodwinds and strings in the back of my mind. I don't play any woodwinds, of course, so I'll stick to the things I know, but this gave me a decent benchmark on what to shoot for, at least in the strings. I know I'll have to double those a bunch of times, if I want them to sound right, should I make a recording, but I won't be writing Tchaikovsky, so that shouldn't be too much effort.

The left hand on the piano however is a bit of a different story. I'm not sure yet, if I want it to as sparse as the strings. It would probably make decent sense, but it just feels bad. I haven't actually tested this on the piano as of writing this yet, but empirically, I dislike playing single-lines without chords in the left hand. It just feels a little cheap. Maybe this is something that I'll find a replacement for, or maybe I'll just make them chords, which admittedly isn't really much better, but then again, I'll probably have to do something about the piano in general. It's very possible that I'll take the melody for the verses out of the right hand in general and add some minimal accompaniment. Lean into the show-tune angle. That would save me a lot of thinking for the left hand piano in the chorus as well, since that would mean I could just mirror the rhythm I have already noted down in the right hand. Either way, I think that is work for week 3, because it's Friday in the middle of the night and I still have to figure out how exactly one derives a Ricci-tensor.

Week 3.

This week was a productive one, if only due to a slip up in planning on my part that left me more available for creative work than intellectually challenging work. In short, by Sunday evening I had the score more or less finished, meaning I could try to get a recording out of this. Whether or not I'll make that available though... I'm not quite sure yet.

First of all, I finished the instrumental parts for the verses, which I already touched on during week 2. Rhythmically, I let the left hand piano mirror the cords in the right hand, but then shifted them by three eighths each bar. I wanted the verses to be more active than the chorus, so besides the counter-point in the first violin, I put a very basic, but lively line into the second violin's part. I didn't fill out the staccato points on each note, because I felt lazy, but I want to pretend they're there, should I record this at any point.

And then there was the matter of the bridge. I wasn't sure what I wanted for a bridge until the moment I sat down to write it, I just knew that structurally it made a lot of sense for there to be one. As is, we would have had a bunch verses and without a bridge or maybe a solo, the piece would run the risk of getting annoying very quickly. In the end, I ended up slowing things way down in the melody for the bridge. I'm pretty sure there are more elegant solutions, if one has a better melody tucked away somewhere, but for the purposes of this, I think this works. The thing I'm very not happy with is the lyrics. Like I already mentioned, I wrote the lyrics for this ages ago and had trouble finding the mindset I was in when I wrote them. I vaguely remember what I meant when I wrote the first draft, but I couldn't figure out what to write into the bridge that would register as either a thematic break, or an independent statement that could be in line with the rest of the lyrics. What I ended up with doesn't remotely rhyme and I primarily chose the wording for the metrum.

Once the melody and the lyrics for the bridge were set, I had to decide which way I wanted the instrumentals to go. An option I considered, but ultimately decided against was turning down things, until the vocals would be more or less bare with minimal piano accompaniment, but since that was how the piece started and concluded, I thought leaning into more volume could be more fun. So I took the staccato approach for both strings, replacing that cute little motif from the first violin, and put heavy chords into the piano. Technically, these chords could be larger, but since I wasn't really using the right hand to play any sort of melody, more notes would probably add little, except maybe a little spice. That's not very well conveyed by a midi-player though, so that might get revised during possible recording sessions.

Week 4.

So I did those possible recording sessions, and as usual, it was not that fun a process. Because of logistical reasons, I don't currently have a piano to practice, so I had to more or less sightread it during the recording. I also didn't bring a long enough AUX cable, so I was attached to my recording machine by this dinky 30 cm cord while recording the violin parts over the piano track. What I basically did, was record each part, then mix volumes correctly. I haven't really worked out how to balance the levels during the recording, but I suspect I might need a second pair of hands for that, so volumes fall into post-production for me.

Even while writing the violin parts, I was pretty sure I wanted them to be doubled a few times. Solo strings draw a little too much attention for an accompaniment, I think, although that might just be something I trained myself to hear. Either way, having the strings emulate an ensemble in the background was supposed to give the piece a more or less stable foundation.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for me, rather) I can't quite figure out how to embed an audio file here without hosting it anywhere else, which I'm very much not in the mood for doing. That means that technically, I can't really present whatever I added to this project during week four, but that's not too big of a loss, since I was also really not happy with the audio, no matter how much I poked around at it. It's probably mainly due to the fact that I wasn't too comfortable playing the parts and they did have some awkward to play bars, which I would have to practice properly before feeling comfortable presenting them either. I've also decided against presenting the lyrics I had, because as mentioned, I don't remember what I was thinking writing them and in hindsight, past me really mixed up his metaphors quite severely. Maybe the recording and touching up the lyrics could be something for another time, for January, that's all from me.