 Welcome to another art of composing daily vlog. I'm John Brantingham. I am your host for this and this is episode number 11 And today we are going to be talking about five tips for better sketching Okay, so my first tip is Use paper and pencil now everybody knows that I'm a big fan of doing things Traditionally, and I know that a lot of people probably look at that and just think I'm just gonna stick to my Dawes and my sample libraries and everything like that However, there's a lot of benefit to getting away from those things and going back to paper and pencil So my thought process is is that when you when you use a Daw or Sibelius or note perform or Any kind of notation software finale musk or or any other Computer program most of the time you are locking yourself down right from the beginning Let's say that you're playing around on the piano and you just Press the record button and you're starting to work on ideas Everything is very much set in stone And I believe during the the sketching process that it's actually good to have things a little bit fuzzy You don't necessarily want to be locked into an idea And often when I'm playing around at the piano, I'm you know, I maybe play a little melody that I like Sometimes I won't write it down exactly how I played it the first time And while a lot of people could look at that and say oh, you've lost that idea that you had Really what it is is you get time to work on it as you're writing it down You get time to refine it and change it. So the first one paper and pencil. I love to do that I just love the flexibility of it. You can make squiggly lines. You can you know, you can block out things You can do whatever you want. You can draw. You could do art It doesn't even matter as long as you know what you're doing. So paper and pencil is definitely a big one Next start with constraints. So Constraints are things that feel like they're going to make it more difficult for you to get a good idea because you're limiting the possibilities In reality, the more constraints you have usually your creativity expands within the space. So It's kind of like building yourself a little room if your room is a massive hall, right? There's no way you're going to fill it up. It's going to be overwhelming. You're going to probably feel like There's just too much possibility But if you have a little box, it's very easy to fill up a little box with ideas with whatever you want So I like to set just some basic constraints. Usually things like time signature key signature tempo Often I'll choose a form beforehand and remember this is sketching. This is not necessarily The final version. So a lot of this can change, but just the act of picking it Usually frees up some creative space in your mind. Now, there's other things that you can set constraints on which can be very helpful For one setting a time limit during your composing session I find to be extremely helpful when I'm composing and I've written plenty of pieces where I've set 30 minutes as The time allotted and I'm not supposed to go over that now often I'll continue on with that long beyond that but just that the time or staring you in the face Gets you moving along pretty quickly things like instrumentation. That's a great thing to set constraints for I mean if you if somebody says write for orchestra that could mean a million different things and there's a lot of possibility there however, if somebody says I want you to write for harp and piano violin viola cello And clarinet well now your mind starts to open up with possibilities What kinds of sounds can I create with those instruments? How are those instruments going to blend? How am I going to be able to make you know really cool sounding textures that people haven't really thought of just because That's your limit. You can't you know to say what's it going to sound like to have harp and piano playing together That's just a cool idea to try to work out some cool techniques things like that so constraints Obviously, uh, I love them and I think you should be using them in your sketching tip number three make Progress and make progress quickly So I think that the biggest thing that you can do when you're sketching is not stopping you just got to keep on Going it probably you've heard of me talk about the problem of noodling if you've ever seen any of my symposiums Um We as composers we love the sound of music. We love kind of just getting into the things that we're doing I love sitting there and improvising just as much as anybody else However, it can bite you if you don't actually stop and put down onto paper what you're doing More often than not I find that if I don't make a concerted effort to write a bar at a time at least or maybe You know two bars Then I'll spend 10 minutes and I won't even realize I haven't written a note of music And often too I'll start off with good intentions and I'll be doing a bar And then I'll play and then I'll do a bar and I'll play do a bar and then you'll get to a point where you're not quite sure Or maybe you had a good idea and you're just trying to follow it And that's where it starts to creep in you just start to play ideas out Instead of actually playing it and then writing it out and playing it and then writing it down So a good exercise for everybody. I think it's it's letting go of what the music is letting go of what it sounds like Play something and then write it down immediately play something write it down like one bar at a time And just forget about what you're writing Make that the exercise and then when you actually come to your real sketching sessions when you're really trying to compose some music You'll find that you're a little bit faster at it a little bit quicker and you get more material down Tip number four is rewrite as little as possible So one of the the best ways to make forward progress when you're composing is to not Do things that are redundant Now there's a couple things specifically that I like to do first is if I've got a note or a chord that's repeated I'll just write the rhythmic value. So for instance, let's say I'm writing a Chord and it's repeated eighth notes, right? Something like that I'll write the chord first And then I'll just put Lines and I'll connect them so it looks like eighth notes, but you won't see the heads on all those That's a really quick way to write a lot of notes and make sure that it's the right rhythm And you know exactly what that means. You know that those are repeated notes I see this a lot if I'm looking at composer sketches. That's a that's a common technique Another thing that I don't like to repeat, but I can reference is complete idea so If you've ever listened to me talk about Form there's something called a basic idea, which is a two measure idea that allows you It's kind of like the raw material for a theme. It's usually something that you'll fragment or you'll you'll Use as the basis for other ideas within that theme Often what I'll do is I'll write the first two measures and then if it's say like a sentence and I'm going to repeat it Exactly, I'll just give it a letter in a number. So it'll be a one and two And I know this is basic idea a and then measures one and two and it's a really quick and easy way to reference And then I've also got a way to modify that. So if I'm doing a one and that doesn't change but a two changes I'll still label the repetition as a two But then I'll do like two point one or something that lets me know that it's similar It's got the same feel maybe even the beginning of the measure is the same But then at the point that I start writing notes, that's where it changes So that's a quick way to repeat material and you don't just have to stop at ideas You can do phrases. You can do themes. You can do entire sections Although at that point there should be enough change between this section to that section that it should probably be an exact repetition and now my final tip And I think this is a critical tip for everybody is you need to make it a habit So composing music is one of those things that if you don't do a little bit all the time And it doesn't necessarily have to be every day But I try to do a little bit every day and if you don't do a little bit all the time It's not going to become something that feels natural and easy for you for me to sit down And write a two measure basic idea or a four measure phrase or an eight measure theme It's really not that much work. I can usually pump that out pretty quickly now Is it always my best work? No, it's not it's not always going to be good music that you write And that's something that you just have to get over Most of the stuff that you write in your entire life is probably not going to be very good And the evidence is there in a lot of great composers. I mean, obviously Most composers you don't get to see their early works. There's stuff that they were going through school with their teachers Their juvenilia works But even beyond that if you look at what's actually performed for famous composers It's usually not their early stuff. It's usually the later stuff I mean, everybody knows Beethoven symphony number nine You know, everybody knows the gross of well not everybody knows the gross of fugue if you're a composer you should know the gross of fugue You know, everybody knows Mozart symphony number 40 But very few people have actually listened to Mozart symphony number one Or Beethoven symphony number one They're just not nearly as popular. It's because they're not as refined They hadn't built up the kind of skill and experience That they had composing their later days And it's one of those things you just have to accept that a lot of the music that you're going to write Is not going to be very good You have to make it a habit every day to just sit down and write music though That's the only way you're going to get better and definitely you'll get better at sketching If you sit down write a little bit every day work on these practical Tips that i've given you and just make your way through a lot of music So hopefully you enjoyed episode 11 of the daily vlog if you're looking to learn composing head over to art of composing.com and check out I've got articles. I've got uh podcasts. I've got Videos I've got a free course and then I've I've got uh two major paid courses So composition one-on-one takes you through all the fundamentals and composition two-on-one takes you through long term form So basically I show you how to take the skills you built up in composition one-on-one And turn them into something That's a much longer piece like four or five minutes and that's composition two So I will see you