COMPOSITION
By Matt2jones

Dun - Dun

Part I - Justification

This is probably gonna be the hardest part of the article; Explaining why the fuck I wrote it.  What useful purpose could an artical on score-composition serve in... Now - the era of sequencers and excessive samples and [insert other technicle buzzwords]...  I dunno, EQ pedals and shit?
	Realisticly it's not gonna be of use to most of you.  I only know of one music program that lets you write the notes onto the musical stave thing, and thats a midi program for windows 3.1, which is technically redundant and unfashionably 'retro' at the moment, and if any of you have a more advanced program that allows for musical notation, you know more then I do about the subject.
	Never the less, I persist.  Basicly I find this shit interesting and explaining it to someone else is a good way to figure it out for definate yourself (paraphrased, see Jaxom, White Rider), and, for those of you who share my interest, midi's can be, with just the touch of a button! (thank you marketing devision), converted to really sweet sounding wav's/mp3's using all your amazing samples and EQ pedals...
	I mean, if they were good enough for Beethoven/Tchaikovskii(Jesus christ how do you spell his fucking name?)/Motzart... and to a lesser extent Bach, old-school score's should be good enough for you, the modest *B coder.

See the '*' is a wild card, indicating either 'Q' or 'P' or 'F', which I here has pretty much converted the entire nation while I was gone, and while I don't want to leave QB, I don't want to unnessesarly offend someone today either, so I play it safe - that's Politics!.

PART II - Rudiments

Here be basic knowlage of music to Jnr cert standard.

I Should explain.  Everything contained her-in is the stuff I have learned in the past year and 4 months since I took up music for leaving cert in my school, cause they wouldn't let me leave a blank spot on my time table (power tripping bastards...).  Because I'm doing it as an examination subject I'm not getting a complete musical education, I'm just being told what they're gonna ask me in June, so that's all I can tell you.  Any 'topics' I skip I skip because I don't need to be taught them.  Apologies all round.

Now to the shit:

Notes:

Musical 'sounds' are divided into seven (really eleven) notes, which loop infinatly.  The seven musical notes are:

A B C D E F G

Wow, that was patronising.

Well, actually the notes are

A C# B C C# D D# F F# G G#

Notice that between each pair of notes (eg. A and B) there is a Sharp note (#), except for Between B + C, and E + F.  This is a peculiarity that exists in reality, but when you're writing the score you don't have to worry about it.

This is so stupidly simple you may not understand it until you see the point of it.

Keys:

Every song starts with the First note.  How Profound.  The first note you is then followed by a second note, and then a third (come on, you've all heard music before), but how do you choose what the first, second, third etc notes are?  Which will sound good?  Is there any way of knowing?  [I can't think of a way to conclude these rhetorical quips so I'll start a new paragraph]
	The first note of a song will allways sound good, because in music what your hearing is not the notes, but the differences between the notes (I remember there was a speach in Angle about this once),  so the first note will always sound fine.  However, once you've played one note, you are now limited in choice as to which notes you can follow this with without the music sounding dissonant, and after choosing that second note, your choices for a third are even more limited, often in different ways.  The Concept of a 'Key' is an easy means of predicting which notes can come next, taking into account all the previous notes.

In a Concice, Memorable, Simple and Obvious (but also kind of wrong) nutshell, it is this.

If the first note is 'C', then you are in the Key of 'C', and the notes that can pleasently follow are

C D E F G A B ...  repeating on...

Look familiar?  Thats because its the alphabet you retard.

Anyway, one of the proporties of the key of C is that all the notes that sound good when played after it are 'Natural' notes (ie. Not Sharps #'s or Flats b's).

If you look at the spaces between these notes, ie. the notes from the eleven mentioned earlier that have been skipped, you will find a pattern:

skip one, skip one, don't skip any, skip one, skip one, skip one, don't skip any

This is the pattern you can apply to any note from the eleven, to find all the other notes in it's Key.  For example: the Key of A is

A skip one B skip one C# don't skip any D skip one E skip one F# skip one G# don't skip any

or

A B C# D E F# G#

These are the 'intervals' for a Major Key, Ie. one that sounds happy, and can be applied to any note to get the notes in its Major Key.  Its important to remember that the "Key of C" is call the "Key of C major", even though the major is omitted, because there are other types of Keys, with different intervals between the notes, and mixing them up would be disasterous.

To Recap:

The Key is the first note you play, which determines the notes you can play afterwards in the song.

Chords and Harmony:

So far we've discussed Notes, and playing notes one after another so that they sound good in sequence, but what about playing notes at the same time?  This is called Harmony, and a simple way to get good results is to use Chords.  Anyone who knows anything about music is laughing so hard at me right about now.

Think of a Chord like a Key for the moment, like a stencil you plonk down on a note to reveal what other notes would sound good played at the same time (I'm proud of that similae), but while the Key was a stencil you...  No wait, lets call them bitmasks! We're all coders here after all...  (wow, I'm really getting into this...)
	Anyway, while you AND the KeyBitMask with the ListOfNotes...  Okay this is stupid.  While the stencil for the Keys was laid over the list of all notes to reveal the notes in the key, the stencil for the chord is laid over the list of notes IN THE KEY YOUR IN to reveal all the notes in the Chord.  As follows:

Key of C

C D E F G A B
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

So C is the 1st note of the key, D is the 2nd, E is the 3rd, F is the 4th, G is the 5th, A is the 6th and B is the 7th.

Now the Chord of C consists of

C E G  ... Repeat indefinatly
1 3 5

Now look at the Relationship between these three notes, in terms of the Key of C.  The first one, C, is called the Root note, so this is the Chord C, the middle note in the Chord is E, this is called the '3rd' because there is a '3' under it, and the last note is called the '5th', because there is a five under it.  In terms of the key the intervals between each note in the chord are:

skip one, skip one, skip two

Why skip two?  To get back to C again, in the Octave above (ie. Second iteration of the notes 1 to 7).

This is now the formula you use to get the notes of a chord, from the notes in a key.

Examples:

Key of C:
C D E F G A B

Chord of F:
F A C

Chord of G:
G B D

Now lets examine the notes in the chords further.

Key of C

Chord I - C

C E G

The 'intervals' between (Notice I am putting intervals within inverted comma's, this is because I am not  talking about actual musical intervals, which are specificly defined, but the word is useful to help describe this phenominon) actual physical musical notes, relative to the list of eleven notes I gave earlier, not the notes in the key are as follows:

Skip three, Skip two, Skip four

Now lets plonk the chord stencil down on the next note in the key, D, and see what the 'intervals' are between the notes, relative to the list of eleven I blah blah blah.

Key of C

Chord II - D

D F A

Skip two, Skip three, Skip four

Oh Fuck they aren't the same.  Whatever are we to do.

They formulae I've given you are not wrong, and the 'intervals' between the notes in the different chords should be different, and this is the explanation.

There are patterns of 'intervals' that, when applied to a note result in other notes which sound harmonious when played alongside the Root.  Like keys, which I'll explain more of later, there is more then one pattern which can be used, and each of these patterns has the desirable side effect of evoking an emotional reaction from a well balanced human being (or you).  This is how films manipulate you with sound so easily.  The four 'patterns' of 'intervals' that I know of are:

Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented

Which are, as I mentioned, names for styles of Keys and styles of Chords.

Now unfortunatly, while a C Major chord sounds nice and happy by itself, and a D major chord sounds equally happy and nice by itself, together they sound shitty.  Why?  Lets examine it.

'Intervals' for Major Chord:  Skip three, Skip two, Skip four

Chord C -- C skip three E skip two G  -- C E  G

Chord D -- D skip three F# skip two A -- D F# A

Now, in the Key of C, there is no F#, so playing C major, followed by D major in the Key of C, would sound all fucked.  So what Chords can you play on D?  Only One it turns out.  Minor.

Now to save me the trouble of working out every fucking chord and note and key I'm gonna tell you straight up.

In a Major Key, the Chords are as follows

Chord I  - A Major Chord	-	eg. C
Chord II - A Minor Chord	-	eg. Dm
Chord III- A Minor Chord	-	eg. Em
Chord IV - A Major Chord	-	eg. F
Chord V  - A Major Chord	-	eg. G
Chord VI - A Minor Chord	-	eg. Am
Chord VII- A DIMINISHED Chord-	eg. Bdim

What does this mean for you?  Well, it doesn't effect how you write the music at all, thanks to the wonderful invention of keys, but its nice to know that when you play a chord on D, in the Key of C, that its a minor chord, and so on.

Note:

Major Chords sound happy
Minor Chords sound sad
Augmented Chords sound "away in the clouds", (ie. don't ask me!)
Diminished Chords sound suspensful

Use this knowlage to your own dramatic effect.

Okay, I actually think thats it for the Rudiments.  You know have the theory to understand the next installment of the tutorial, which involves actually writing music.

For the record the following chapter should be:

1. Rudiments

2. Introduction to Scores (key signatures etc), Using Winjammer.

3. Chord progressions and writing 'left hand'/'lead' music

4. Modulating, Writing Bass Notes, writing with Up Beats, Writing drums

Matt2fuckingjones.

Email me with comments/critisism/questions: 
Matt2jones@yahoo.com

And on a Serious Note:

For anyone with actual musical knowlage, if I have made any major fuck ups in my explanations I would, first of all like to be notified, but secondly I would prefere to be notified by email, cause its private and I'd like to fully understand the situation before I publicly embarass myself, looking forward to your (inevitable) co-operation,

Matt2jones.