Audio Science

If you experience a block in producing music, you may want to try writing down the concepts you are recording. It is amazing how much you can understand a song when you are the one writing it on paper. If you can, exercise writing without looking at a keyboard. If you stretch your composing abilities, you will gain a far greater understanding of your music and how it works.

If you don’t know how to write music down in the compositional sense, and feel rather intimidated by the idea of composing, you can learn! You must know how to read music first, but if you can do that, you can get started writing. Just start out with some exercises such as writing the different symbols, writing scales down, and defining keys. I promise you that if you spend some time applying yourself to this, it will be very rewarding, and can yield great results when applied in producing.

Refer often to written music to remember what the notation look like. Notice the mathematical precision of the timing and measure space. Remember that music is like an equation: you must keep the measure in balance similarly to keeping an equation in balance.

If you want to really get deep in composing, I encourage you to buy Ron Gorow’s Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today’s Musician. It will help you learn to write what you hear, to the point that you can write music anywhere you are, not confined to a keyboard, piano, or other instrument. This is your real goal: with this skill you will learn to think in notated music, a great asset for smooth and creative music production.