Submissions by Arcana tagged practice

Visting new worlds and finding new joy.

A song about cheer and adventure and fun. Made with mostly software synths, but has some flavors of Nord Lead and Future Retro 777.

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Sun, Jan 22. 13:00 - 15:00. Today, I'm exploring different harmonic constructions. I am not going to specifically label what I plan to use today, but things that I discovered were a thing this week include:

* Secondary dominant chords. So you might have a ii chord in your song, you can use the relative 5th of the ii chord as a V/ii chord. So a V/V chord in C maj is D major as D major is 5 scale degrees above G major (which is 5 above C major).

I got this from a book on composition I got a long while back but now I'm exploring how it's actually used in music.

Here's a stackexchange article:

http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22057/what-is-a-secondary-dominant-chord

The other thing for me to work on is transitions, as that was some feedback I got from the previous song I posted last week.

In this short theme, two of the secondary dominants are D major to G major and C major to F major.

Verse has a bunch of weird stuff going on in it but it has a neat effect.

The chorus is a standard iv-IV-V-I but there's some bass movement.

I didn't work very hard on the sound effects or mixing though today.

Total time: 2h

Hey StreakClub Weekly people, nice to see some familiar faces around here.

Every week, I am aiming to find some kind of composition or songwriting technique that I can work on during the week. I might not necessarily get an awesome completed song out of it, but I think what I want more than anything is some more breadth and some way to break out of my current no-thought songwriting habits.

This might mark me doing some remixes or covers of previous songs, as well as creative remixes if they illustrate a composition technique that I want to be able to illustrate. At the end of this series I hope to be able to work on and emphasize interesting songwriting techniques within my genre of electronic dance music/ambient music.

Sunday, Jan 8, 14:00-16:00. I think I started about half an hour ago, but I didn't record my starting time.

This week's composition technique is to use some kind of basic figured bass. I'm not doing an awesome job at it right now, but given a chord progression, it's okay for me to not just repeat the tonic of the chord as the bass note.

For this chord progression, I have the classic:

I V vi IV progression (G Dm Em C).

The bass pattern repeats but it's an 8-bar, 16-step pattern with root notes of:

G D B G G F# E E

The verses are standard tonic bass notes for now.

As usual this is performed live.

I didn't spend a lot of thought into the composition itself, focusing mostly on varying the bass, and as a result this isn't very interesting… may have to try this again to actually make a good result out of it…

Time: 2h