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I've listened to a lot of music by a lot of different artists, some good, some not so
good. a lot of that comes down to personal taste,
of course, but over the years I've noticed a couple patterns that tend to indicate that
the songwriter is relatively inexperienced. these signs come in all different shapes and
sizes, but at heart, most of them seem to be making the same basic mistake: they're
trying to be clever. why is that bad? well, let me explain. (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) I think the best way to show what I mean is
with an example, and since I don't want to dunk on anyone else's music, I'll just use
one from my own work. I've mentioned this a couple times before
on this channel, but for those of you who don't know, my bachelors degree isn't actually
in composition or theory: it's in vocal performance. that's right, in another life, I might've
been a professional singer. anyway, in order to get a performance degree,
you have to do what's called a jury, which is basically a giant showcase. you spend months writing charts and rehearsing
a band, then you put on a show for a couple judges who decide whether or not you're actually
good at music. at my school, a jury consisted of 7 songs,
each with its own requirements. like, one had to be a musical theater piece,
another was supposed to be a jazz song, and so on, but the one I want to talk about today
is the arrangement piece, which could be any style we wanted, but we couldn't just cover
someone else's version: we had to arrange it ourselves, to show that we had that skillset
too. I decided I was gonna end my show with my
own take on Gethsemane from Jesus Christ Superstar, because back then I could hit that high G.
oh, and because it's one of my favorite pieces of music ever written, but mostly I just wanted
to show off my power metal highs. now, for the most part, I'm pretty proud of
this arrangement. I think I made some really cool changes, like
switching the verses to 12/8 for a more complex time feel, and moving the dynamics around
so the song started with just piano and voice, giving it this really nice intimacy and making
space to ramp up the intensity later on. but there's one decision that, looking back,
I really regret, and it showed up in the final chorus. it was my grand finale and I wanted to make
it big, so I just went for a kitchen sink approach, bringing in every instrument I possibly
could, and one of the instruments I had access to was a background singer who could sing
in a coloratura range, which is a really high soprano. for reference, when I asked her how
high a part I could write, she told me she'd be fine as long as I didn't go above F6, which
is two and a half octaves above middle C. so yeah, I knew I wanted to get some of those
piercing highs in there, to create a sort of angelic-choir effect. or at least, that was the goal. and in theory, it was a good idea, but this
is where things started to go off the rails, because I didn't want to just write a simple
whole-note background line. no, that'd be too easy, and I wanted to show
off, so instead I wrote this series of arpeggios that ran all up and down in that coloratura
register, never repeating, getting gradually higher and more rhythmically intense throughout
the section. it was hard for her to learn and even harder
for her to sing, but maybe that would've been worth it if it made the song better. except it didn't. I don't have the original score anymore, I
lost it when my hard drive got corrupted last year, but from what I recall, it was just
kinda busy, distracting, and ultimately forgettable. it didn't need to be there. so what should I have done instead? well, if I was doing the arrangement again
today, I'd probably give her a call-and-response countermelody to play against the main vocals,
or I might just have her harmonize with me, but I didn't do that because I wanted to look
clever. I wanted to show that I could write a line
like that, and I didn't stop to think about whether that line was really what the song
needed. and this is what I mean when I say trying
to be clever can be a bad thing: a piece of music is so much more than the sum of its
parts, and trying to do as much as you possibly can with every component can prevent them
all from coming together into something cohesive. in my experience, this tends to show up most
in the rhythm: I've seen a lot of unnecessary syncopation and unnatural phrasing that doesn't
really feel like it's connected to what's happening around it. it's just there so that this line doesn't
sound the same the last one. this is especially common in covers, where
the arranger takes a phrase that was totally working and jumbles it around to make sure
it sounds, I don't know, special? it almost feels territorial, like you're making sure
every part of the song has your fingerprints on it so that any credit it gets goes to you
instead of the original artist, even if you're not actually making it better. another place this can happen is the harmony,
where you bust out a fancy chord just to show that you know that chord exists, and I'm definitely
guilty of this too. it's an easy trap to fall into, because once
you have these tools it can feel almost wasteful not to use them, but the thing about advanced
harmonic devices is that they're, well, advanced. they have really specific sounds, and they're
not right for every situation, so they're best used sparingly. it's good to have them in your back pocket
for when you need them, but you have to know when you actually need them. same goes for weird melody notes: they can
be an absolute revelation if they're executed properly, but if you just toss a #9 over a
major triad for no reason, it's gonna sound… questionable. but of course none of this is to say that
these clever devices always make music worse: if complex rhythms and fancy chords automatically
ruined songs, we'd never have invented jazz. so what separates good uses of advanced techniques
from less good ones? well, in a word, context. experienced songwriters and arrangers aren't
just being clever for the fun of it, they're choosing chords, rhythms, and notes that fit
with the overall vision of the piece. different styles of music have different cleverness
thresholds, and jazz is near the high end of that, but even there, it's not enough just
to do weird things. the art is in making it work. so how do you actually do that? well, if you'll excuse another college anecdote,
one of the classes I had to take was an introduction to audio engineering, and in that class, the
teacher mentioned that, when he was working on a mix, he'd always keep a copy of the raw
track open so he could go back and compare. it's easy, when you're hours deep into a project,
to get so focused on the small tweaks you're making that you lose track of the bigger picture,
so it helps to occasionally listen to what it sounded like before you started changing
things, to make sure what you're doing is actually making it better. and I think a similar approach works here:
if you're writing a song from scratch you may not have a raw track to compare it to,
but you can effectively create your own by simplifying the line as much as possible. doing some weird syncopation? try playing it straight. using fancy jazz chords? swap them out for triads. singing a weird note? replace it with a nearby chord tone. it may turn out that you were right the first
time, but hearing both versions side by side is a great way to double check that your embellishments
actually serve a musical purpose. if they don't, you're faced with a tough choice. the most obvious answer is to follow the old
writing advice and kill your darlings. that is, don't let your affection for one
piece of your work hurt the rest of it. if the part isn't working, drop it. let it go. maybe write it down somewhere and try it out
again in another song, somewhere where it might work better, but if that's not here,
then you're doing a disservice to both the song and the idea by keeping it. it can be really hard to take out things you
like, but ultimately if you're making the song better, it's worth the cost. but what if that doesn't work? well, that's where things get tricky. sometimes the simple version is just too bland.
sometimes you need to use the clever device, but it's refusing to cooperate. what do you do then? well, then you go deeper. you steer into the skid, commit to the trick,
and make sure you're actually supporting it. that, I think, is the real secret to using
these sorts of techniques: you never just use them on their own. there's always more going on in the background
to help make them feel natural, so if you're not there yet, try looking at what's going
on around it to see if anyone else can help. maybe you need to bring other instruments
in on the rhythm, or foreshadow it in a previous section. maybe your fancy chord needs the melody to
sing a particular note, or maybe your melody needs its note incorporated into the harmony. that's the great thing about arranging: you're
effectively a god. you get to make all the decisions, and if you really want something
to fit, you can move heaven and Earth to make it happen. the only thing you can't do is pretend it's
already working when it's not. or, I mean, you can, but probably don't. that sounds like a bad idea. one band that really mastered the art of doing
complex things without feeling forced was Pink Floyd, so I thought I'd take this opportunity
to recommend my friend Polyphonic's amazing series on Dark Side Of The Moon over on Nebula. he's taking an incredibly close look at the
entire album, making a whole video about each individual track. the first four episodes are already up on
Nebula, covering side one of the album, and I'm really looking forward to the rest of
it, so whether you like Polyphonic's work or you're just a fan of Pink Floyd, I highly
recommend checking it out. plus you'll be supporting Nebula, which is
a new streaming service built by some of YouTube's top educational creators, including Kurzgesagt,
Patrick Willems, Up And Atom, and, for some reason, me. we're really proud of what we've
built so far, and we've even managed to arrange a deal with CuriosityStream where, if you
sign up for their site using the link in the description, not only do you get a free month
of access to all their amazing documentaries, you also get a free Nebula account for as
long as you remain a CuriosityStream user, and with annual plans starting under 20 bucks
a year, that's a ridiculous amount of educational value. so yeah, link in description, go watch Polyphonic's
Dark Side Of The Moon Project, and while you're there, check out the Working Titles series
too, it's all about great TV show intro sequences, including one I made about my favorite show,
The Prisoner. and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our
Patreon patrons for making these videos possible, and extra special thanks to this video's Featured
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out about new episodes, like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.
3 minutes in and I've already identified a critical problem here
BACK UP YOUR MUSIC DATA
Music lesson number one.
Don't forget to cover your bases friends!
I disagree with 12tone. The enemy of good songwriting is procrastination. I would have done a video about it but I never got around to it.
"A piece of music is so much more than the some of its parts" this is so true. My bandmates and I realized recently that we've been playing our instruments/parts and not playing the song. I'm a bassist and I like to swing from rhythm to more melodic playing to show that bass isn't just a background element but sometimes its better to just pull back, when everyone is trying to show off it just makes the song busy (and muddies up the mix!). It's easy to think that more complicated is better but sometimes the greatest complexity is just in creating a well-balanced arrangement, its not an easy task.
I like the content of this video and found both his problem and solution highly relatable, but something about this format with the sped up voice and constant doodling feels like an assault on the senses.
So, I should stop trying to add Am to my usual G C and D?
Well now trying to be clever and intentionally aiming for originality or even just complexity isn’t necessarily bad, in my experience playing around outside of your comfort zone can really help with blocks and formulating ideas if not shape the frame for your next masterpiece
A few criticisms:
Clever is a dumb word to utilize for this. Clever isn't the idea of "optimizing every part to a degree that can satisfy your need for complexity" which is what the video creator is using it to mean. Clever does not mean this in any way shape or form.
Songwriting is not just the instruments itself, but also the lyricism and how said lyricism interacts with the music. What he's actually talking about is composing. I've watched a few of this guy's videos in the past and one thing I notice about his criteria is that he more than likely would think that, on an objective measure, John Darnielle is a bad songwriter even though Mountain goats has some of the best song writing I've ever heard. The issue with his perspective makes it so that you don't think about how musically things match to the lyricism. Speaking about lyricism, one other important factor is how the vocals display the sincerity of what is being said. An opera singer singing a modest mouse song off of lonesome crowded west would not sound anywhere as sincere as Isaac Brock.
there are many genres that get the "complexity for complexity's sake" mentality correct. Math rock is one of them. Since math rock tends not to have lyricism or tends to have generic lyricism, its complexity is what is driving it. Bands like chon, polyphia, polvo, etc. have overly complex and intriguing songs, but I'm almost 100% certain he would fit them under the category of too clever.
This last one is the most important. Good songwriting is highly subjective. Daniel Johnston is a good songwriter IMO, but he doesn't adhere to any of the criteria one would utilize to determine that. The point is we can argue for days as to what actually determines good songwriting and get nowhere because the impact of music is disparate on different individuals to the point that 10 different people could have 10 different criteria as to what makes a good song and subsequently what determines what makes a songwriter.
Subpar video with little nuance and zero courage. The fact he's unwilling to actually utilize a song that isn't his makes his point weak because we can't actually listen to it and determine whether his point is valid or not by ourselves. He's trying to tell us to just adhere to his narrow-minded idea of what good songwriting is while ignoring over 50% of what determines good songwriting.
I agree with the video. don't just throw everything in the song and expect it to work out. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Season little bits at a time and don't make drastic changes.
It's just balance really. An age old mix of originality and recognizability.