5 Things to Make Better Music INSTANTLY

hello everybody and welcome to the shed um today i'm going to be giving you five things you can do pretty much straight away in order to make your music better and it doesn't matter whether you're writing um instrumental bits of music edm songs film score anything these are eternal things which people eat could easily fix but sometimes don't spot and what the reason i know this is because um i run an organization called think space education when i'm not writing film and television music which is what do i do with the rest of the time and i've listened to two or three hundred bits of music by students in the last year and after a while like after the sort of first hundred you go hmm there is a theme emerging here a theme which i think i could pass on to people like you because a lot of them are things you could go oh i do that and then you can go in there and fix it so i would like you to make yourself a fresh beverage and we will get stuck in now for the sake of argument um i've taken a really really bad piece of music uh it's this one uh and i can say in all honesty that it's a really bad piece of music because i wrote it um because whilst all the students were writing in uh for having work reviewed in order to write better music i was learning how to write a bad piece of music at the same time so it's a sort of fair knowledge exchange if you see what i mean um no this is a lot of the students have been sending in really amazingly good piece of music all i'm doing is picking up on some of the most uh common shortcomings um i think it's fair to say um which we've we've noticed as we've gone so are you ready to listen to um this piece of music which i have slaughtered here we go and it goes yep it's i think it's living up to my billing of being really bad isn't it any redeeming virtues not that i can hear oh okay what did i tell you okay so we're starting right at the bottom with it's sort of like lift music but it's so bad you notice it and most lift music you're supposed to not notice actually you notice it and want to jump out of the lift regardless of which floor you weren't on um now the first thing to notice about this is there is no big central idea the theme just kind of wanders about it's sort of aimless it's like a small child lost in a you know supermarket somewhere just wandering around looking for its mother it has no idea where it's going and that is the first thing so the first thing ask yourself what is my idea and declutter simplify get some of the stuff out the way so you can actually expose the idea because if the idea is any good it'll stand up and be counted and if it's not any good if what you've done is you've taken i i could have one good idea or i could have four ideas which are sort of a quarter good each no that doesn't work that really doesn't work because then you lay them up on top of each other and what you end up with is a kind of blemish of ideas which have been machine gunned at your listener and you go ugh it's not very good but i just don't know where to start okay where are we going to start therefore decluttering is we're going to turn a whole load of stuff off uh let us what should we do let's get this this what passes for a tune and the piano bit [Music] it's sort of wandering around okay oh it's out of time as well it doesn't have any shape it doesn't it's just i'm sorry that's not a tune that's a musical car crash um what i'm going to do is get rid of it for a moment completely because it should be the very center of our idea but it's not it's just kind of getting in the way the this and so we're going to come back to it but we need to sort some other stuff out first um because you may have noticed already those of you who are paying attention um that there's a lot which is not lining up with the actual track itself and this is point number two is make sure everything lines up harmonically and rhythmically so that you know if you've got rhythms which are working against each other do it on purpose not by mistake if you start listening to things particularly pairs of tracks like we could listen to piano and the vibes and the strings and see how all this so far so good okay that's not too bad chord one going to chord four chord four then going to chord six oh what went up ah there at the end there what was that what was i thinking what's happened is um the piano parts played one chord progression the strings played another and as far as i know the vibes were just drunk and it's just kind of all going along then suddenly you should kiss me back and crash wallop and then that's what you get but the funny thing is when we listen to it first through and through other than being trying to look at the way how can i get out of this elevator i want to throw myself other than that um i didn't it didn't stand out as being harmonically uh so what we need to do is work out which one is wrong okay those two are definitely wrong so let's take that one out let's listen to the bass line the bass line is often okay chord six so we're going to chord five okay so the piano is wrong um so let's start with the piano um we're gonna stick it in the merge i'm actually gonna fix it [Music] okay if you're new to the channel um i sort of try and fix things i try and write stuff in real time something and all that kind of thing and sometimes it's really bad and sometimes it works out so what we've got here is something which is quite bad and we're going to try and make it less bad so what we want is this piano part here so it's going here we go top down okay so we want it to go so we're going into chord six which is a minor so when c so it's going c um f major a minor g very very one four six five it's the world's most well it's not the most hackneyed chord progression of all time that's one five six four it's the first cousin of the most hackney chord progression of all time so it's pretty bad [Music] i think it's going to go like that here we go we're in mojo oh don't [Music] something like that that'll be all right he says will it be will it though really is it going to be all right guy yes i'm going to will it over the line it's just going to be great it's just not great yet now we line up the wrap the other bits [Music] okay vibes line up let's now try the strings [Music] that's six isn't it [Music] no what they're playing is they're going to call one rather than six so what's happened and this is quite common is they play that slightly diff only one note different and it sort of fits together so what we have is chord one which is c which is c e and g then it goes to chord four which is f a and c then it goes to chord six which is a c and e so apart from the a that's called one that's chord six and what the strings are playing is just one note different so it doesn't sound radically wrong it just sounds [Music] a little bit squeaky so what we've got to do is sort them out okay right you string lock pay attention here we're gonna go so we're gonna go or something like that [Music] okay that's where it starts oh wake up guy sorry i wasn't really paying attention how can you not pay attention you're in the middle of a youtube video how can you not be paying attention you know you you can't have your mind wandering in the middle of a youtube video it's not possible or i think you'll find it is okay here we go [Music] there's more to be said about that string line but i'm not going to say now we'll come back to it so now it does at least line up even though it's still [Music] there is another thing which i have to do with the string line because strings sometimes they sort of speak a little bit late um so you just need to nudge it back a little bit so i'm just going to get in there and do a bit of nudging where are you my friends where have you gone uh we're back in bar 10 i don't know where you think you're off to i'm really sorry let me come back then oh here we are oh look there's a nice screw that's not very good so when you start this getting into the detail you start noticing all kinds of stuff which is not quite right and the more you tidy it up the more mysteriously it sounds [Music] sounds more in time now doesn't it the reason it sounds more in time is because it is um okay so now it's not terrible it's still pretty bad isn't it i mean it's still it's tidy but bad now which is a okay so how do the vibes go is this all lining up okay another aspect of um the badness of this look at these drums we haven't got onto the drums yet but for no apparent reason they suddenly change halfway through [Music] okay i'm not wild about it but at least it's not a fence it's not too offensive now suddenly what okay again you know what is your idea clarity you know you can evolve your drums but do it on purpose not just because you get bored that's really the worst reason to suddenly start just doing something else the other thing which we need to do is try and make sure i mean it's the world's most obvious and oldest thing is you've got to try and make the kick drum line up with the bass a bit and only a decent cup of tea will help you do that if you haven't got a cup of tea there is absolutely no chance whatsoever your base is going to line up with your kick drum [Music] right okay let's shall we just sort the drums out okay so we're going to try and get these drums to line up with the ah okay give myself a bottle right what i'm doing is screwing it up [Music] [Music] one [Music] a lot of that wasn't very good um one would be happy cruelty it was talentless no it's hang on a little bit of tidy up look i'm not gonna waste hours doing this um sound of dogs eating somebody outside sorry okay so right what we might do here um sometimes this happens let's have a little look no okay we don't necessarily what tends to happen actually what tends to happen is the second time through you've sort of got into your groove and you can do it better so actually a lot of the time i just copy [Music] except that last bar which was really stinkingly bad okay why don't i copy the first bar here we go we're going to copy the first bar and stick it at the end and that will suddenly fix my problem for the moment okay at least it's consistent and at least it now matches up with the bass [Music] line right okay so we've worked out what's important and um we've tried to focus on uh you know the main idea which was rubbish so we got rid of it for the time being because point number two things weren't lining up either harmonically or rhythmically or in any other way at least now now we've started to clarify things a bit we can hear that things line up but it's still a mile to go um before we get anywhere so we are gonna get we're gonna go back to point one and get the idea going but we need to move on to point three what is point three guy hmm point three is a very common one um people have uh put all their ideas in one go we're just going to start we're going to start everything at once here's my ideas take your money or where you like them that's knock yourself out have a nice time and there's no sense of tension and drama there's no essential building expectations there's no sense of you know what's going to happen next is the per you know are you going to attempt to clamber out of the lift because it's so bad yes you are except i think we've gone from really obviously awful up to a sort of slight level of nausea um but we're gonna work on it until we get to true mediocrity okay right so let's have a look at this um with or without the viola um you can see first of all just look at it everything comes in at once it's a great big swagey block okay so we're going to move some things around what you need never say what you need what what sometimes can work out best is if we uh okay uh we need to snow it up but yeah make sure everything's sort of there we go because we move the whole thing around right we're gonna move the whole thing i don't know well it might help if it starts on bar one actually to be absolutely honest what's wrong with bar one i like bar one some of my best friends are bar one okay here we go um let's move let's give us half at least four bars now what are we going to introduce first how about this little vibes idea do we like the vibes i oh i almost said i like something and let's see what happens if we just introduce the vibes there just by themselves or shall it be the piano one or the other i'm not adverse to that okay look frankly what just happened wasn't bad um now because we can add extra little bits and pieces in the front here in comes a piano now we bring in the drums and the bass there okay um so it's escalating to less awful okay but you see introducing one bit at a time [Music] we add an extra bit there because we haven't got the viola going yet the interesting thing is i don't miss it but there isn't really a central idea going on here other than this chord progression which is a bit [Music] no it's not that bad [Music] well there's so much we could do with i mean this basic production stuff in terms of sort of eq and compression and things like that but we're not going to get into that today we're just looking at the fundamentals um i'll tell you something which i do need to do i need a reverse whooshy thing okay that sounds reverse it can reverse that okay let me give that a go all i'm going to do is oh if you're watching if you can see i'm not sure if you can see this there you go here i've got this little button here marked render and it'll on my stream deck then i select it and i push normalize and it turns it into normalizing is naughty because it's lazy just recorded to the right level in the first place that's what i always do lies reverse it pushes another button now something which can save you a bit of time um with a reverse like this what you actually want it to do is to line up with the uh obviously you want it to go swoosh up to there so you want it to and we're going to just take off the very end of the reverse the transient when it was going forward so we go like that then we add a little tiny micro fade out so it doesn't go click or anything like that now we don't need all that we need one bars worth and if it snaps exactly to one bar you can then drop drag and drop that elsewhere in this piece uh sh should you ever want to come back to b and uh it will you don't have to line it up because you know it lines up okay there we go bounce it out and there we go so what does this sound like [Music] okay right um now we've got the uh the alveolar loaded up let me see if i can come up with something i like um there it is and one of the interesting things about the mrt viola is this um volume is on the on the mod wheel you can't quite see can you oh there's a little strip thing down here so on the strip thing you can um bring in the vibrato so you've got mod wheel for um uh volume and a blue flashly light strip thing for viola i mean vibrato it's a bit like hollywood strings used to do that and i was as i was saying the other week it's not something i've heard other people do since but there we go well sort of anyway let's let's see if we can come up with anything which is less um which is i said i'd say less awful yeah i mean it's pretty bad when you're working on a piece and what you're aspiring to is less awful really isn't it in all seriousness if you find yourself working on a piece and you're aspiring to less awful have a new idea okay that's not a quick fix so it doesn't count as a tip okay right um let's give this a go i just have no idea what i'm going to play um let me just make sure my record mode is set for replace okay right so the chord progression as we know is uh what is it six four i know one four five six so that's c major f major a minor g major so let's why don't you see my keyboard and see what happens [Music] oh do you remember that guy mutual oh he was really big in lift music wasn't he yeah that's true i used to go up and down in the lift several times to listen to that track what did he call it oh terrible terrible vibes or something wasn't it yeah that's the one yeah no okay look uh there is a central idea in this little thing because i've got this repeating doo doo but to be honest the viola is not working and there comes a point when you need to cut and run and so you can consider that a moment to have arrived so what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of it and oh i see i've already had a little play around with this at some point this is evil ignition [Music] oh except it sounds very [Music] i like it a lot i'm a big fan of orange trees evolution string guitar but it's a bit dry so we're going to add this particular instance we're going to add an effects channel uh hang on let's just add uh what am i sorry i was uh my my my brains temporarily stopped working there for a minute did you notice that so yeah i have no idea what you were doing guy no neither i that was the problem right so now we're going to put the reverb in okay so we're going to put in lexicon oh not plate i wasn't going to go for plate i was going to go for random hall because random hall has a nice random hall is like the old lexicon 300 lexicon 480 all that kind of stuff and i used to really like that i've got a lexan 300 somewhere um and it sits gathering dust these days unfortunately because it's just so much easier to do it like this this is you know welcome to the world of software right um we're going to put a send in hello send to fx turn it on turn it up a bit now let's see what happens to where's the vlog there we go it's um [Music] okay let's see what goes on here do [Music] so [Music] oh look as mediocre ideas go that one just got a bit better speak for yourself guy so we're training the idea over the intro then in comes the piano right what about these strings [Music] okay hang on firstly that ain't working because it then went all wobbly in the second half so i'm just for the sake of argument i'm going to copy uh the part of the idea we want which is the dude okay that bit um so hang on i need to make sure it goes to the right place so i'm going to sorry this is this bit is might be slightly down this main idea if this is the main idea and it's showing every sign of becoming a main idea it's gonna need a bit more help and it can't go through life called viola when it's a guitar um i wonder if it needs a bit of compression just to help it stand up a bit um dynamics which is my favorite i for many many many years i've been just defaulting to a renaissance compressor because i like it i know how it works well they're all pretty much the same except they've changed the look of it haven't they oh my god yeah i know so you want something quite subtle okay let's let's just do this [Music] it's a bit better [Music] right so we panned the piano left and right and we've piano vibes left and right and we've added a bit of uh compression to the guitar and it's now working a bit better now let's get turn to these strings now here's another point um you need to make sure each instrument has its own sonic space and what what's going on at the moment is an awful lot of stuff is happening about here in the middle of the keyboard which is you know it's fine but it's fighting now some of it is all right um like uh the vibes where's the vibes going they go uh they're mainly so they're all in that c3 octave and then the piano and this is noir from native instruments it overlaps a bit but it's sort of like um sort of half an octave higher so that's fine okay the trouble is the strings are in the same register so we've got the viola the piano and the strings all crowded in the middle so nobody has their own sonic space so just as a piece of arrangement the first thing we've got to do is get it out of the way so let me just junk the strings as they currently stand look there they were gone okay so they're cut so so one thing we could do we could play the same rhythm but just leave a bit more space in the middle what does that sound like [Music] okay so that definitely works better but there's something else you can do it's not just um frequency sonic space which you need to make for your little answering phrases and things like that it's rhythmic sonic space and what we could do is there's quite a lot going on right at the beginning of the bar he goes doo doo doo and everything kicks off so then we could almost use this the strings it could sort of answer not actually answer but [Music] let's see what happens um so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to try and uh sort of find a rhythmic gap in the bar [Music] okay there is one in there one two three [Music] um that was a bit on the messy side oh was that an understatement uh yes it was a big understatement but you see what i'm getting at i hope because what we've done is both find it found it a little space in um frequency where you know so it's got a little bit of the octave which is its own which is up the top here and it's found a little part of each bar where it can so you go doo doo doo boo but it sort of comes in so it's gone from being lift music which draws attention to itself where you want to cram the doors open and jump out to lift music which made you feel um mildly nauseous and now we're getting to the point where we actually occasionally say huh he knows it's not it's not that bad i said we aspire to mediocrity and mediocrity is where we pretty much ended up so look let's just recap go from the beginning and walk you through what we've done to make this less awful first thing we did was to work out what the main idea is and that came along and it's this second thing we did is we introduced ideas one by one rather than all at the same time so there's a sense of growth actually we see we could even do more than that [Music] i would be tempted to to leave the strings till next time round actually [Music] where are they going to fit is it there [Music] this sounds like one of those cookery programs where welcome to pod pudding week here on the great baking britishoff or whatever or yeah it's sort of polite english welcome to pro celebrity lift jumping yeah i would watch that all day long okay there's david beckham going to the left on the left let's see if he can last to the penthouse listening to this terrible piece of lift music the other point these little simple little things like that can really help transitions reverses are easy and it just makes the difference here we go one two three we've lined up everything so the drums and the bass now line up the harmony lines up so it doesn't crash into each other all the time i'm not sure i'm going to like that there so i'm moving that to there do i want it again that soon [Music] okay [Music] i think it's all right oh i think it's all right [Music] oh thank you very much indeed i'm looking forward to being nominated the annual lift music of the year awards it's just so it's what i aspire to thank you very much indeed for this wonderful china gnome metronome one of my kids gave it to me it was a character i invented a long i make up all kinds of weird characters and that's metronome anyway that's not the point so look i think we're done um i hope you found this useful because look this is i mean all i'm doing is i mean these aren't rocket sciency type things these are quite straightforward in a way and you could take one of those pieces of music you've got in your you know unfinished you know that folder you got with all the unfinished bits in the one which is bigger than everything else put together that one yeah just get a piece out and then try these sort of five points you know basic stuff um and see if you can't make it work a bit better for you and if this is the kind of thing you enjoy um you might like to consider our course super cheap massively helpful called how to write music it's really good and if you find some of this sort of called one called fire stuff a little bit what's going on um there's another one called low music theory anyway um i'm now going to show you a little trailer for one of those courses in the hope that you might think it's lovely but look um if you if you're new to the channel nice to see you please subscribe and uh i'll see you again very soon so from me farewell

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 86,774

Rating: 4.933733 out of 5

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, Music Education, songwriting tips, music marketing 2020, write better music, how to write better music, cubase

Id: R5KWgiZsIGY

Length: 38min 40sec (2320 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020