1) Get a DAW and a midi controller
2) familiarize yourself with basic music theory.
3) develop a healthy appreciation for "home musicians". A good record to start with is the Doldrums by Ariel Pink
4) understand that you don't have to be a virtuoso, just try developing basic musical ideas into something more interesting.
Don't learn music theory. Imitate what you like, and inevitably suck at it (this is important and it's why starting off with music theory is a mistake), and then if that failure is accidentally interesting or good in its own way, keep it. This is how half of all good music is made, probably
What do you mean by "good"?
When you hear the phrase "good music", what comes to your mind?
My answer to your question depends on your answer to my question.
Write about your feelings.
Make your writing follow a rhyme scheme.
Learn at least four guitar chords.
Sing it, play it, put a drum loop over it on Ableton.
Repeat the process twelve times, and you have an album.
Take out a self-serve ad on 4chan, shill your album on /mu/ until it gets to the normal side of the internet.
Repeat the above steps three times.
You are now a successful underground indie musician.
Being ironic, perhaps, but there is some truth in that.
There's stealing and there's stealing of course and everyone has their viewpoint. Some say that sampling is theft, or rather it is only theft when it goes over/under a certain arbritrary threshold. Some people claim that whole song ideas are stolen (see Lez Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven).
No right or wrong answer, just perspectives. It's what you can get away with. Zep got away with it because of fucking expensive lawyers. Did they nick it? Yeah, they nicked loads of stuff. It was at a time you could get away with it and call it a 'homage'. Like back in the golden days of hip hop, you could lift a few beats or two, sample a few phrases, and unless it became a major hit, it's surprising how many people got away with it. They weren't exactly flying under the radar, but there wasn't a whole industry of lawyers equipped with digital AI scanning algorithms, plus precedents already set for not being able to take anything at all off a record, not even a drum hit!
People argue this every day still on all the major music forums. I've read hundreds of hours of it. I've researched hundreds of hours of the subject. I'm confident what I can get away with and what I can't. Just keep in mind if you make any money at all, even if you didn't steal anything, someone somewhere will claim you did. Another subject for another thread.
But besides all that. We all steal. There are only so many notes, so many chords, so many ways you can put them together. Actually, shit, that all adds up and is closer to infinity than many people realise. Still, why does all music sound the same? Again, another subject for another thread. Trends come and fashions go, but you need to get in on that very slight dip in the trend/fashion continuum if you want to get anywhere yourself - to stand out from the crowd. Because the crowd is just that: it copies, it inter-breeds, it truly does steal and it creates new sub-genres of already pre-defined genres (see Dubstep). Besides, that's where the money is.
Musicians on the whole are shysters and hucksters and grifters. You don't get the camaraderie that you get from being in the armed forces and risking getting your head shot off for months at a time. Although, anyone who toured with Andrew Eldritch might disagree with that. INCOMING...
Music isn't hard. At least not that kind of music. Classically trained orchestral members dedicate their whole lives to mastering their instruments. Different kettle. Different fish.
I will assume, OP, that you are not thinking of going in to the opera game; and/or not dreaming of one day owning a Stradivarius. I will assume you mean popular music, and by that I don't mean 'pop' per se, but modern, or what passes for modern contemporary music. That would be somewhere around the realm of hip-hop, certainly 'black' music dominates this spectrum. Even the white kids are doing it. And sometimes they even do it better than the black kids.
Don't matter what colour you are. Don't even matter your class (though it helps [as it always did]) to have upper class connections, even if they are just middle class. Love and music (and war) are colour blind.
The question is deliberately broad.
It certainly is.
If you had asked 'How do I become a rock/pop star and milk it till the cows come home?', I probably wouldn't have answered you. But seeing as you asked 'How do I write good music?', I'll give it a shot.
First you need some kind of instrument. Anything. You've left this canvas totally blank, so I know nothing about what your present skills are. But I'd hazzard a guess that if you are interested in music, just even asking this question, you may very well play (even badly) some kind of instrument. That might be a guitar, a bass, some keys, perhaps a wind or brass instrument. You might play nothing at all. If you don't, that needs to change.
Guitars, and good guitars at that (and this includes bass guitars) can be had for a hundred bucks. More than good enough for your first instrument. You can get a practice amp and some kind of pedal for FX (effects: reverb, delay) for another hundred bucks. There are free online guitar lessons. There are resources you would not dream of in your wildest expectations, all available for free on the interwebz.
Guitar is a good one to go for. Consider bass if you have fatter fingers or shorter fingers. You can write great songs on the bass. Hell, if you can't even afford that hundred bucks right now, grab a hold of a Ukelele and whack off on that.
Guitars can be played quietly. Drums can't. Pianos are big and expensive and so are synths. Ah synths...
No matter your instrument, and it's essential you get some kind of musical foundation to learn harmonic theory, you will still want to get some recording/arranging equipment for your songs. People call these 'Workstations'. They can be had for 500 bucks or 5000 bucks. But there is a sweet spot in the middle, say 2-3K where the best bang for buck ones reside. Having said that, the Korg Kross 2 can be had for about 600 bucks and it is out of this world good and all a beginner would need.
So you can play an instrument. You have some harmonic theory. You've learned how to write great songs. We'll get back to that one in a bit, but let's just gloss over it for now. You even have a keyboard that can play the parts of 16 musicians and you are adept enough to dabble in arranging your songs on your Korg workstation that include all the drums, bass, piano, strings, flutes, brass, percussion etc. etc. - you are still going to need some kind of recorder to put that down to. These days a good 24 track or even 12 track digital recorder can be had for a few hundred dollars.
These things are kind of essentials. On top of all this you will need a place to write, to practice, to perform, to record and they might not (or had better not always) be the same place. But if it's your bedroom, then that will do. We won't get in to things like monitors, speakers, headphones, sound-proofing. Later for all that. I'm just painting a picture.
You can get by with a shitty little guitar, a shitty 30 dollar microphone, a little 8 track digital recorder. You can write music and songs with that. Having a proper or even adequate recording studio where you will do vocals and expect those mixes you do there to translate to other systems, well, that is a bottomless pit. It will cost thousands and years of trial and error if you are a noob.
You might not even want to sing the songs you write. Many of the great songwriters never sang their own songs. These days they do, because muh royalties, but if you do write stuff that you can't sing yourself, you need people to perform those songs for you - another hurdle.
So you just write the songs, then you go to places to record properly. You then employ someone who knows how to mix in a studio that has adequate equipment for them to take what you tracked and to remix it in to a coherent form that can then be sent to another unique individual, to 'Master'. This Mastering is the preparation of your finished product for distribution. Be it vinyl, Mp3 etc. etc.
THE TIMELORDS T H E M A N U A L (HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE THE EASY WAY) THE JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS OF MU MU REVEAL THEIR ZENARCHISTIC METHOD USED IN MAKING THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPEN. KLF 009B 1988 (YOU KNOW WHAT'S GONE) TEXT BY: LORD ROCK AND TIME BOY A.K.A. THE TIMELORDS A.K.A. ROCKMAN ROCK AND KINGBOY D.
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You asked a broad question. I gave a broad answer to the bigger picture; though I realise I haven't answered your question yet.
To which musicians hould I listen?
Listen to anything and everything without prejudice. Listen to music you love, that moves you, but listen to shit you hate, to see the harsh realities, to understand one fundamental truth with what you are trying to do:
No matter how great your music is. A significant proportion of people will fucking hate it.
No matter how shit your music is. A significant proportion of people will fucking love it.
Ok, that's two things. Whatever.
You can't second guess public opinion. The public are fickle beasts anyway. Turning on any artist that doesn't keep up with "___________________", or shunning any artist that gets in to "_______________". Or sometimes they just simply forget about you when the next big thing comes along.
You are going to want to sidestep all that. You are going to want to become so brilliant, so unique in what you do, so excellent in that thing that only you can do, that voodoo that only you can do so well, that this should not be a problem for you. David Bowie kind of succeeded in that. He can be crticized and critiqued for many things, and he's a whole lesson in himself (he's also fucking dead), but the thin white duke skated that thin ice better than most, with more astuteness than most, and certainly with a bit more aplomb than most who just lucked out.
And this brings up another point. You will need to become a business man. No great artist that ever made it was a poor business man. Even the shitty business men had great business men to represent for them. Bowie had Tony Visconti (even though he was a producer first and foremost, he was as much every bit the business man). Hot Chocolate had Mickie Most (who was also their Producer but owned the famous RAK record label). Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker, The Beatles had Epstein (no, not fucking Jeff).
A good manager is essential. I realise this has fuck all to do with writing great music. But if you do end up creating something that really is special, you are going to want to disseminate that out a bit further, even if it is to just doing local gigs or selling a few Mp3's to fund your new 'studio' habit.
But darling, this particular compressor is tube driven and has both an 'ATTACK' and a 'RELEASE' knob - does our little blind Billy Bob REALLY need more reading lessons?
Oh yeah, if you ARE thinking of doing this long term, you might want to get an understanding 'partner' or spouse.
But never mind all that, you're back on the road to wanting to be the very bestest that a man can be and damn the torpedoes.
In short, you are going to want to be 'you'. Very much 'you', and only 'you', so help you God!
All the great artists, all the people that write great music (well most of them anyway) get that great contradiction and paradox within themselves, their soul, or wtf. They twist and turn and push and pull with the flux, in real time sometimes, and if you can capture that on tape, then it makes for good theatre; good theatre can often make for great music. No rules.
You won't have rules. You will make the rules up as you go along. Most of all you will be independent. Certainly you will cherish and favour certain producers that can bring out that 'youness' in your music, you will prefer certain 'Mastering Engineers' who can give you that final flourish to your already defined sound. But none are indispensable.
Let all men count.
Though none too much.
To paraphrase Kipling. Oh yeah, read poetry too to see how it scans if you want to write great lyrics. Though you don't need to write great lyrics to write great music, it often helps.
"A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!"
You needed to be there, I guess. And if you were, there wasn't a dry panty in the house.
It's hard to go for that dollar these days. Most of it has been done. And most of what has been done, that worked, is still being worked, because we live in the age of Simulacra and Simulation.
Be your own man, but boy are you going to need some good buddies on your side.
Elvis had his ego. Nick Cave had Blixa Bargeld *. Andrew Eldritch had Tony James. James Brown had his 'syrup'.
Er, wait a minute, this metaphor is not going in the direction I was hoping for. Scrap that. Got fuck all to do with writing great music anyway. I think what I'm trying to say is don't be afraid of being yourself, of experimenting with different personas, of being above the common angle of politics of the day, be a good judge of character and try to keep people who help rather than hinder your quest, close by your side.
What resources should I use?
Well, I've mentioned learning resources, but you are clever enough to figure those out for yourself I'm sure. Resources come in many shapes and sizes, but personal internal resources and human resources that help you achieve your goal are invaluable.
Building a recording studio, buying instruments - it's a bottomless pit as I said. But there has never been a better time to build a base line of what you really need rather than what you really want. So let's just accept that you have the wherewithal to get a few grand together to achieve this. Let's also assume you have the wherewithal to get a nice place for yourself. Because you can't write good music when you got a neighbour banging on your wall at just 10pm at night because that's when they go to sleep and you tend to get bitten by the muse.
All of these things can be overcome, but you will always be fighting to get to 'that place' and until you do, the 'muse' won't really strike. The muse will come and go. Sometimes it will totally abandon you, and at other times it will drown you in waves of creativity so deep it feels like a tsunami of endless possibilities. Be prepared for both. Adjust accordingly. This is a long road. A life long road...
What spunk and what grit you have at the beginning, will be kicked out of you like shit out of a hobo, towards the end. There's also a downside!
But that's the beauty of it, all those hard knocks will be replaced by wizened wiseness, but greater accomplishment on your chosen instruments, by your greater and deeper breadth of overall knowledge. Of just knowing when to go with something and when not to.
Be wary of making big life-changing mistakes at the start of it all. Also be wary of throwing away the 'big chance' should it present itself, for whatever silly reason: ego, fear, distrust, at the end.
I've still not answered your question, but we're getting warmer...
Is there anything else I need?
No.
You have everything you need. If you have the will to succeed; if you have youth; if you have health. That is good enough. You would be surprised how many good people there are out there that are only too happy and ready to help you on your path. The trick is finding out who they are, because predators often present as great helpers. They rarely present as predators. Though sometimes they do that too, if you have the right kind of eyes.
Just get yourself an instrument to vibe with. Study a bit. Practice a bit. Try ideas out. Make sure you have a place that you can receive these ideas when lady muse comes to town, and most of all make sure you have enough tech savvy to get these ideas down so you can go back to them later and rinse/repeat/refine.
Be critical in your judgement of what you need. You don't need much. But you do need a bare minimum to make things work for you. It's all about working out what works for you.
Rinse/repeat/refine.
Most of all, love and enjoy and have fun in what you do. And make sure those around you feel the same way too. Don't surround yourself with mercenaries if your goal is to make great music. Just pay them whatever the hourly wage is that they ask and be done with it. Respect them still. Respect all people always (well, almost always). Because those you might meet when you rise to the top, you may just see them again when you are sinking to the bottom.
And still I have not answered your question.
There are a lot of great musicians out there. Lots of great forms of music. Be true to yourself in what you appreciate and what you love. Don't be afraid to take a little walk on the wild side now and again. I dabble in Jazz. It's not my thing, and I dislike a lot of the pretentious wankers that make it. And the Jazz I make is truly bad. But it's out of my comfort zone. And I have taken what I learned, what I worked very hard for, back to the other stuff that I do.
No one can really answer this question for you. It's a journey you take by yourself, and for the most part it's a very lonely journey, so make sure you enjoy solitude, and that you don't need other people too much. Then again, don't be an anti-social asshole because you may just wreck that one great musical relationship that will buoy you up and get you going.
Immerse yourself in music. Learn to trust yourself. Be big minded enough to grow. Be stout enough to admit that everything you ever knew about love and life and music was wrong. Have periods away from music where you learn about real life. Work on a building site. Learn that music is just 'dirt' like Bob Marley said. Nothing wrong with throwaway pop. What, you thought that Ode to Joy in that Vienna Opera House was going to happen every night? Nah, once in a lifetime experiences, for both performers and audience.
How did you get there?
Be confident.
Have your own vision.
Stick to it, right or wrong.
Learn when to give up when it's not working.
Have the ability to start again and reinvent what you were doing.
Have the persistence of vision to go through with what you started when it is working.
And for the love of all that is good and holy in this rotten world:
Listen to yourself before you listen to anyone else.
@benutz
That is jus that. I deliberately did not restrict myself t opera, pop, or anything. Not o recycle disproven myths, but my definition of 'good music' is a wide range, including Beethoven's 'Fur Elise' and The Beatle's 'A Day in the Life', whereas Yoko Ono's interpretation of 'Voice Piece for Soprano' definitely does not qualify.
My broad efinition is partially because I wan to encompas something that is not ied to style, partially because I, a total newbie, lack the vocabulary.
> Elvis had his ego.
[laugh track]
> Well, I've mentioned learning resources, but you are clever enough to figure those out for yourself I'm sure.
...jus the opposite; I am too exceptional and specifically need guidance in finding ou what are those resources.
More to the point, the reason why I asked this here is because I know tha the Kiwi Farms is very honest (though a times unnecessarily blunt, this not being the case here). In fact, I see plenty of members who have a surprising knowledge of real-life affairs from psychology to working wi the homeless.
You proved that yourself. You gave me more knowledge than I thought hat I would need, but needed all the same. You broadened my perspective a lot.
Thank you.
listen to your favorite songs and notice all the subtle structural and methodological similarities that they may share
1. learn basic music theory, audio engineering and pop song structure; there are plenty of good tutorials for those on youtube
2. you need a computer, a DAW, VSTs (i can recommend you some good cheap/free DAWS and VSTs), and a midi controller. if you want to sing, you will need a condenser or a dynamic microphone, an interface, xlr cables and probably a pop filter
these next few steps are not necessary by any means, but they can be used as a template to help you understand how most popular styles of music are structured.
this is typically the structure of a basic pop song. (the numbers in the second graph are typically how many bars each section should consist of, your DAW will let you keep track of them)
3. literally just play around until you create a melody that you like; after it sticks, make it into a 4 bar-8 bar loop, or an intro if you want
4. make the loop into a verse or a chorus
5. if it's a verse, create a chorus right after and then create a good 4-bar transition/pre-chorus to lead the verse into the chorus.
if it's a chorus, you will do the same thing but in a different order. you will make the first verse next and then the pre-chorus/transition that will help your verse blend into your freshly created chorus
6. when it's time for the second verse, use the first verse to construct the second, but change it up a bit and shorten it so that it's not repetitive
7. you can either keep the transition/pre-chorus or change it up as well
8. for the second chorus, you can either keep it the same or alter it just a tiny bit
9. smoothly transition into a bridge, which will be its own unique part that will only be used once in the whole song
10. have the bridge lead back into the chorus, and make the last chorus the most exciting. you can do a key change, add an arpeggiator, sing different words, sing more powerfully, add another instrument/more percussion, etc.
11. the ending/outro of the song is up to you!
generally, music has no rules but using well-known approaches as guidelines for making your own music will help you out a lot. and do what sounds good to you!
mixing and mastering is a lot more complicated and typically comes after you have a full song, or most of a song created. i would watch a bunch of tutorials on youtube and spend time learning how to use the plugins of my DAW. again, try to play by ear as well.
this is obviously a very watered-down post, but it will help you out a lot. good luck making music!
Try out all the scales to figure out which ones you like, then practice writing original music using those scales. For instance, as a metalhead I like the harmonic minor and diminished scales for being creepy and off-putting. I learned the major scale, but almost never use it because it's fucking lame. Musicians who claim never to have learned scales usually are actually playing a scale when they write something that sounds good, and just say they aren't using a scale because they used it by accident without knowing. The chromatic scale is just every note you can play in order, so everything fits into one scale or another. Figuring which scales (and subsequently, keys) sound good to you will lead to being able to express things better musically. It's not going to sound good if you're writing with scales that bore you.
I've found the music I've made that I like most are just variations on extremely obscure songs. Like 300-4000 views on Youtube obscure. I recommend you search the genres you like to their obscurest limits and get inspired from there.
Or, you could stay up for 48 hours straight and start uncontrollably scatting. The scatman kind, not the shitting kind.
Every good black metal band seems to steal riffs straight from De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. One of the greatest black metal albums, so I'm not complaining.
Most people won't write good music without first working through all the bad music they'll inevitably write. It takes sheer persistence and months/years of hammering out ideas before you find your musical voice and fluency in expressing it.
Depending on your instrument of choice, it's important to be able to learn and play music. If you're playing guitar or bass, Guitar Pro is a good program for viewing tablature/standard notation with real time playback and how the application of particular chords/melodies/riffs and rhythm create the sound that they do.
It helps to enjoy a variety of musical genres, with an effort to find what sounds appealing, rather than trendy. In this day and age, a variety of inspirations are necessary for avoiding a stereotypical/predictable sound.
Be as indiscriminate as possible towards your ideas. Getting overly serious about your output will only hamper its creative integrity. It doesn't matter how misshapen or facetious your initial ideas are, it's essential to be diligent in bringing them to their fruition. Write towards something that you find fulfilling, rather than something that would impress an uncertain percentage of people, or is possessing of mainstream sensibilities.
The influence of drugs in musical composition will tend to be unpredictable in the quality and consistency that you'll get from it.
Psychedelics are the best bet for sending your mind off the beaten path, with the usual risks being a bad trip or loss of insight. Uppers/downers are inadvisable for habitual use, with their tendency to become a crutch and high stakes in dependency - just as foolish as purposely inducing a manic episode to write under. Weed might make your music sound better to you, but what it really does is just lower the bar of standards and fosters complacency.
It also wouldn't hurt to learn music theory as well. Knowing chords beyond your typical major and minor is basically essential, along with chord progressions and scales. Though reading sheet music isn't a must, you'll save a hell of a lot of energy building an initial foundation, and then refining it to what sounds best to your ear. You can twist or break whatever convention you want without having to run around in the dark at the same time.
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