What are you talking about?

Bare with me, as I will be discussing an epiphany I had a couple of years ago. Back when I started out making music, I made tracks based either on humoristic purposes or what things sounded like. I would for example create a synth riff playing a really cool melody. With the way my mind works, this wasn’t a problem when composing, since I have a way of coming up with abstract associations for just about anything sound-related.

Ok, so what was the problem?

I was able to make music that I liked, but one period I got completely stuck. This was after creating an absolutely amazing track, and I had absolutely no idea where to go from that. The frustration followed me for months, and I really tried to come up with an idea that was equally amazing, but I had no luck. Perhaps I has reached the limits of my creative potential?

Big Bad Biker Bully Bugs

Then one day, I envisioned a bunch of Big Bad Biker Bully Bugs. Not only was it a highly respectable alliteration, but it served incredibly well as an idea for a track. 2-3 days passed, and I had made a complete track!

I was relieved and happy, and couldn’t understand how I had suddenly made a complete track again. Was it my relaxed state of mind? Was it the long time of musical ideas piling up in my mind?

Well, maybe that too, but the major realisation was that music is visual. Because I saw an image/scene in my mind, I now had something to work with. Melodies and sounds don’t help much if they don’t mean anything.

Was it just a one-time success?

This was of course the question I was curious about, so during the following months, I tried to always envision a scenario which the music was going to portray. Time after time, this approach yielded results. Of course, as with most people, I still made loads of 20 second unfinished sound bits, but my music, including those little ideas now had substance to them!

When listening to what I had made, I would always envision these delightful scenarios I had come up with. The pre-bigbadbikerbullybugs music mostly seemed empty, since they didn’t give me any particular images in my head.

How has this changed my composing?

In short, it has become much more fun. The technical aspects haven’t changed that much. I still do sound design, melody composing and beat making like I have always done; and those by themselves are great fun too. With this additional visual dimension to it though, it becomes so much more interesting.

When making a song about marching mackerel, I would try to make the drums sound really wet by applying low-pass filtering with audible resonance and envelope manipulation. Remove the “wet-sounding marching mackerel” part of that, and it suddenly becomes way less interesting, reduced to technical sound design terms without any meaning.

Same thing with “Epic Robot”: Instead of just “aiming for a futuristic high-tech sound”, I envisioned an entire story of a huge robot unfolding and doing movements even the japanese haven’t thought of yet.

Is this alone the key to making good music?

Let me put it this way: If you compare it to languages, you can say absolutely wonderful things with a very limited vocabulary. It is however neccesary to have a thorough grasp of vocabulary and grammar to maximise your communication potential.

What a lot of people seemingly do in music production is to focus too much on the technical side of things: equalising, mixing, mastering, sound design, etc. These are people with excellent grammar and vocabulary, but they’re not saying as nice and imaginative things as they could be doing.

I’d rather listen to someone telling something amazing with poor language, than someone talking about dreadfully boring things using advanced language. Of course though, the best is to listen to someone who uses both great choice of words and has something amazing to tell (i.e. someone who is proficient with both music theory and mixing, as well as the visual aspect of music).

I do hope this is an important realisation for beginners, who tend to bug themselves down about their lack of technical skills, when they might in fact already at the beginner stage be able to say the right things.

Movement is also cool to visualise

Of course, painting an image with your mind is a very exciting thing to do. Painting a short movie is even more fun, I tell you! When making “Jovial” for example, not only did I envision a man with a mustache and a hat; I also made him whistle the tune as he was walking down the street, spinning his cane and twisting his moustache, and getting “you the man”-looks from people on the street.

Movement adds one more dimension to the visual aspect; not only are you trying to portray what something looks like, but also how it moves and behaves.

Stereotypes

Stereotypes are also an important part of this way of thinking, since they help people relate to your vision. A song about a desert might have a heavy steel guitar with reverb, since that’s often what’s playing in cowboy movies that take place in the desert. Harp strumming and choirs in a major scale is often associated with euphoric visions of heaven.

I’m not able to fully elaborate on this point yet, since I’m not too familiar with many musical stereotypes, but I hope you’re getting the gist of what I’m trying to say.

What kind of music is this way of thinking suitable for?

I think this is mainly an approach that applies to instrumental music, particularly electronic music since you’re working with an unlimited range of sounds. When you’re working with vocals and a limited range of instruments, the vocals tend to convey the message in question.

I do however think that attention to the visual aspect when composing for such music is important as well. I can imagine a good sounding chord sequence without any further meaning being much more difficult to work with than if you give it a visual meaning.

What do you guys think?

I do realise that imagining crazy things doesn’t come as easily to everyone, since it’s something that people tend to leave behind when growing up. You could alternatively try to compose something to images or video clips that you like. I actually think that’s a more common approach, since I guess that’s how people make film music.

Either way, I hope you will give my approach a try. I know a few others who have had the same epiphany, who are also enjoying their music composing far more now. This is why I believe this is an excellent approach.

Please share your experiences

Have you had any similar “eureka moments” when it comes to music composing? Do you have any further thoughts on the subject? Please tell me about it in the comments.