The Creative Process: Finding a Problem to Solve

Brian Moore

14 The Creative Process: Finding a Problem to Solve

Have you ever thought about how a particular piece of music was written? There are probably as many approaches and ways as there are musicians and composers! In this section, we are going to listen to lots of different styles of music written across many years and think about the process and ‘why’ behind this music. For some composers, finding an interesting problem to solve is a very creative activity. Let’s look at problem-solving as a way to begin to compose a piece of music.

Musical Starting Points

The various musical elements can each be a starting point for turning into a full piece of music. Many composers start with a small fragment of a rhythm, or a melody, or a chord and from that create larger pieces.

Musical style also can be a great starting point for new pieces. Examples of musical style include classical, blues, rock, and country.

Sometimes the instruments/voices and/or the genre of music is a good starting point. Genre refers to a category of musical compositions such as ‘song’ or ‘symphony’ or ‘concerto’ or ‘ballad’. Very often you’ll see genre used when really what is being talked about is style…

For each musical element, musicians have vocabulary that they often use to describe what is being heard. Here are some terms that might help you in your musical thinking…

Rhythm

beat, bar, measure, pulse, tempo, driving, slow, fast, duple meter, triple meter, mixed meter, accents, rhythmic patterns, rhythmic motives, non-metric

Timbre

Strings, woodwinds, drums, percussion, keyboards, brass, electronic, vocals, harsh, mellow, thin, thick, raspy, pure, rich.

Texture

Thin, thick, layered, doubled, color

Harmony

Chord, flat, sharp, scales, major, minor, blue, pentatonic, octave, transposition, progression

Melody

smooth, shape, contour, disjunct, conjunct, phrase, range

Form

sections, imitation, echo, call & response, AB, ABA, AAB

Practice Logic Pro: Harmony, Style and Idiomatic Use of Chords

Think about acoustic music you have listened to and the way various instruments are played, you can begin to appreciate how composers write for a specific instrument such as keyboard vs. guitar. A chord on a guitar might be strummed, whereas on a marimba it might be played all at once. A keyboard player might play the chord in a “pianistic” manner. Composers and musicians can write music that is referred to as ‘idiomatic‘.

Create a project with a keyboard track (Grand Piano, organ, etc.)
Add MIDI FX “Chord Trigger” – configure the FX to your liking
Add MIDI FX “Arpeggiator” to the same track – configure to your liking
Repeat this with a new track with different family of instrument (guitar or vibes for example)

Demo of working with the MIDI FX “Chord Trigger”

Practice ProTools Intro: Harmony, Style and Idiomatic Use of Chords

Think about acoustic music you have listened to and the way various instruments are played, you can begin to appreciate how composers write for a specific instrument such as keyboard vs. guitar. A chord on a guitar might be strummed, whereas on a marimba it might be played all at once. A keyboard player might play the chord in a “pianistic” manner. Composers and musicians can write music that is referred to as ‘idiomatic‘.

Create a project with a keyboard track (Grand Piano, organ, etc.)
Add Note Stack as an insert
Use ARP in the virtual instrument settings panel (click on the Expand!2 Instrument button)
Repeat this with a new track with different family of instrument (guitar or vibes for example)

Extra-Musical Starting Points

Non-musical ideas can be starting points for a piece of music and you have heard lots of examples of this. Music in movies almost all of the time is selected or composed to accompany the story telling on the part of the director. In fact for some movies, the music has become so closely associated with the film that you can’t listen to it without thinking about the story line in the movie!

Movies such as the Star Wars franchise used music to help tell the story as each character often had his or her own theme. Through our experience and understanding of our world, we have ‘learned’ that certain musical ideas can remind of us certain emotions or feelings.

A trumpet fanfare might cause us to think ‘military’ or ‘battle’. A march played by a marching band might be ‘patriotic’ or ‘true to your school’. Bagpipes will make you think and hear of Scotland or Ireland.

Timbre and texture greatly influence what we feel and associate with what we hear. A love song might be performed by a singer with acoustic guitar. A large symphony orchestra with fast rhythms, loud brass sections and bright sound strings might cause us to think ‘music for an epic blockbuster movie’.

The Story Spine

Writing a new song or piece of music is much like creating a story. There is mood, feel, plot, characters, pacing, moments of action and quiet. Let’s improvise a few stories and then use one of the stories as the inspiration for new musical ideas. One idea generator for creating stories is The Story Spine^[1]
You can do this by yourself, but it is better in a small group… Just finish each sentence!

Try this a couple of times…

If you do this by yourself, you’ll probably end up with a fairly predictable story. Do this in a group and you will all end up in a very different place from where you started!

1	“Once Upon a Time…”
2	“Every Day…”
3	“But one day…”
4	“Because of that…”
5	“Because of that…”
6	“Because of that…”
7	“Until finally…”
8	“And ever since that day…”

Lines 1 & 2 set up the story and are similar to each other in that they introduce the story to come. It is when we come to Line 3 that a twist in story occurs setup by the word “but”! Think of the first three lines as “idea – repeat – contrast”.

Lines 4, 5 and 6 setup a pattern that continues to develop the story.

Line 7 is the largest sense of contrast and in fact brings the story to an ending.

Line 8 might be thought of a quick summary of the entire story – you might even think of it as ‘and the moral of the story is…’.

So, as an “interesting problem to solve” how could a short musical song be based on the Story Spine? Here’s a quick example using Logic Pro and the arrangement track to set this up…

attributed to Kenn Adams see this link ↵