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music creative process
When discussing music with other musicians and composers, it’s inevitable that at some point the topic of this mysterious thing called the “creative process” will come up. It’s often a difficult thing to describe or nail down. How exactly does the music come into existence if not by suddenly taking shape and proclaiming itself glorious?
The answer most people not led by the mystique of divine inspiration will give is sketching, noodling, jamming, or some other variant verb—all of which being words that could be taken vastly out of context.
Granted, this can be understood by most people that play any instrument. The majority of composers write using their preferred instrument of choice, be it piano or guitar. In fact, I don’t think I’ve met many composers that don’t use either a piano or guitar, though obviously they exist! A composer vested in such proficiency can then start playing away and eventually come up with a melody or chords that sound nice. The creative process has begun. From there it’s a matter of playing parts into the sequencer, writing it out on sheet music, or just learning it to play later.
Now, let’s apply this to the fact that my primary instrument is voice. I don’t own a guitar, nor do I even have my keyboard set up in the studio. To be fair, it isn’t much more different than any other instrument—the key factor being that inputting to the sequencer involves much more clicking and programming velocities/dynamics/je ne sais quoi.
The piece I’m working on currently began as a little melody I found myself singing in the shower one morning. Keen on not letting it evaporate into the ether—I had things to do and wouldn’t get a chance to sequence it out—I booted up Sonar, hooked up the vocal mic, and recorded the melody and counter-melody.
A few weeks went by, and finally I had time to expand it out from a sketch into a full piece. Using the original recording as reference, I started sequencing out the main melodic line for my instrument of choice—in this case, the lovely santoor. After that was written out, I played it through several times and started tapping out a rhythmic accompaniment that would end up getting written out as the dumbek line. Just taking it layer by layer, the piece gets built up from its melody into a rich grouping of instruments. (The other two featured at this point are the gyil and a fretless bass that will forgo the Wikipedia treatment.)
The mp3 streaming above is an example of how the piece went from vocal sketch to the full (unpolished) production. While the piece is still a work-in-progress and far from completion, I wanted to share even just a small window into my creative process. More often than not, the vocal sketch is only present during the composition, gone into the air once it’s no longer needed.
