Welcome to the first of a series of lessons on musical composition, here I will show you some techniques I use when I run out of inspiration, they will not guarantee you masterpieces, but they will give you a lot of musical fun.
Hope you enjoy it!
First, choose two notes from the chromatic scale(I chose A and F).
Decide in which clef do you want them to be(I chose the bass clef) and transpose them accordingly.
Repeat those notes three, five or seven times(I repeated them five times), and end the sequence with a note one semitone higher or lower than our first note(in this case I chose B flat).
Play with the notes and add a third or a fifth to any of them(I added a minor third over the central F, I also put a time signature).
Do small note changes for variety.
In order to end the sequence, I took out the second and tenth notes from the last bar, turning it from a 11/8 to a 9/8.
Add some articulations and accents to finish our basic accompaniment(I also added a metronome mark).
Let us start working on the right hand, first choose a simple chord and add a note to it(I chose G major and added a C sharp).
The resulting four notes in descending order.
Take those four notes and repeat them four times, in each repetition, raise one of the notes a semitone higher.
Combine one iteration of our original four notes sequence with each one of the new sequences.
Starting with the third note, take every two notes and transpose them an octave up.
End the sequence with a descending scale derived from our sequences.
Play with rhythm, repetition, transposition and rests, and distribute it on our four original bars.
Now let us play two 11/8 bars as an introduction, and then we will play our first theme twice.
We will continue in 11/8 meter, so we will derive our next section from the last 11 eight notes from our first section's right hand.
Make some alterations and add some notes to form harmonies(I transposed the result so it will start on B, just a semitone away from the last note on our first section's accompaniment).
Repeat this sequence four times, on the third repeat I transposed it a minor third for variety.
In order to connect our second section back to our first, end the four bars sequence with a little bar of three, five or seven notes(I made a three notes phrase).
For the upper part of our second section, we will take the last bar(9/8) of our first section's accompaniment and transpose it two octaves up.
Repeat it once, this time taking all the notes below the upper F and transposing them an octave up.
Add a kind of pedal tone to the sequence every two notes starting on the first note(I added G).
Distribute this sequence on our four 11/8 bars and add some connections and articulations if you need(I added an almost diatonic sequence to connect the repetitions, and reused it at the end).
Let us play our sequences together(I added the same connecting phrase an octave higher over our three notes ending bar).
Now we will play our finished piece combining our two sections(I added a little "cadence" at the end).
Score here.
This is it! hope you had liked this lesson, any comments or questions, feel free to contact me.
Joaquín Mendoza Sebastián | 2013