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Writing music without the guitar

If you’re a guitar player, and you write music with the guitar, you will only be able to write what you’ve already written.

Playing the guitar is a set of learned muscular responses. It’s a hard instrument to play, and it’s necessary to repeat the same movements over and over when learning it. So when you pick it up, your body will naturally make those movements.

In fact, those learned movements are the only movements that are possible. If you want to add to what you can do on the guitar, you have to repeat a different movement on the guitar a bunch of times.

You can only write what your body is able to do.

What to do?

So how do you write music if the only thing you know is the guitar?

Sit in a comfortable chair with a notebook. Leave the guitar in another room. Draw some vertical lines until you have 8 empty bars.

Now think of how much activity you want in each bar.

Maybe there’s a chord on the second beat and the rest of the bar is empty. Maybe there’s a strumming rhythm that goes through the whole bar. How does the sparseness of the first approach make you feel? What does the busyness of the second approach do for you?

While the song may have chords, that doesn’t mean that it excludes electronic sounds, environmental sounds, etc. That doesn’t mean that the chords are playing all the time. Are there any other sounds, instrumental or otherwise, that you think would work?

After you’ve filled the 8 bars (without picking up the guitar), play what you’ve written. Revise as necessary. Working this way, you often come up with stuff you don’t normally write.

Chords

You can learn new chords, or you can change the sound of the chords you already know. Try playing a chord that you know, and take one of your fingers off the fretboard.

With an open string C chord, you need three fingers. Take one finger off the fretboard. Strum, then arpeggiate. Do this for each finger you take off. See if you can write an entire song by manipulating that one chord.

Learn a new chord, and go through the same process.

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Beyond notes and rhythms

What do you think about when you write music? What are you trying to do?

In popular music it usually comes down to notes and rhythms. But there are other things to consider: timbre, articulation, register, density, dynamics. If we take these things into consideration when we write, our writing becomes deeper.

Awareness

This comes down to awareness.

It doesn’t mean that you have to structure every last thing in a piece. But being aware of when it wants to get loud, where the timbre changes, how many instruments are playing, and what range the notes are in makes your connection to the piece deeper. It gives you more material to work with.

Just notice what you’re doing.

Connections

As a simple example, you may want to connect the first minute of the piece with the third minute by using the same timbre. First minute – distorted guitar; second minute – clean guitar; third minute – distorted guitar. This kind of thing forges connections in the mind of the listener.

And of course, this can be used in popular music as easily as in avant-garde music. Just connect verses to verses, choruses to choruses, or verses to choruses by considering things beyond notes and rhythms

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Algorithmic songwriting

Try applying algorithm to chord progressions if you feel like you can’t find something new.

This can be really simple or really complex.

Simple

Use every third chord in the key.

If you’re in the key of C…

Cmaj       Dmin       Emin      Fmaj       Gmaj       Amin        Bdim

…every third chord would be.

Cmaj      Emin      Gmaj      Bdim       Dmin       Fmaj      Amin       Cmaj

There might be a couple of moves in there that you like, moves you wouldn’t have thought of without using this technique.

A little less simple

Two rules: Use every third chord in the key; make every fourth chord  a seventh chord.

Cmaj     Emin     Gmaj     Bdim7     Dmin      Fmaj     Amin7    Cmaj    Emin     Gmaj7            Bdim      Dmin     Fmaj7      Amin7      Cmaj   etc

Less simple still

Three rules: Use every third chord; every fourth chord is a seventh chord; change key every fifth chord. I’m changing keys by going around the circle of 4ths: Cmaj – Fmaj – Bbmaj – Ebmaj.

Cmaj     Emin     Gmaj     Bdim7    Fmaj      Amin      Cmaj7     Edim     Bbmaj      Dmin7       Fmaj Adim    Ebmaj7   Gmin   Bbmaj    etc.

I find this a bit limiting since it basically just plays the same four-chord progression in a different key. Let’s try making every fifth chord the I chord in the new key and move by thirds in that key. The keys are now Cmaj – Dmin – Emin – Fmaj

Cmaj     Emin     Gmaj     Bdim7     Dmin     Fmaj    Amaj   C#dim7    Emin   Gmaj   Bdom7       Dmin   Fmaj7    Amin7    Cmaj    etc.

These are just off the top of my head. They aren’t designed to be earth-shattering; they’re just for teasing out sounds that you may not have discovered by doing things the way you normally do them.

These ideas can be extended. For example, alternate moving the chords by a third and then by a fourth (i.e. Cmaj to Emin is a third; Emin to Amin is a fourth, etc.)  Notice that I’m staying in the key of C.

Cmaj     Emin      Amin     Cmaj     Fmaj     Amin     Dmin     Fmaj     Bdim      Dmin

With this technique, you get chords repeating themselves more often.

The basic idea here is to think of something to change, and then make that change at a regular time-interval (every third chord; every sixth beat, etc).

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