 Welcome to another Art of Composing daily vlog. I'm John Brandingham and today we are going to be, it's kind of like a continuation on what I talked about with sketching in an earlier vlog. So somebody had asked for me to show some of the techniques that I was talking about and I figured now let's just do this in another short video. So you can see here, one of the things that I like to do is start with constraints. So it doesn't, you don't have to give too much thought to this. Really it's about just having the constraints. It's not necessarily the constraints that you choose. So I'm going to just go ahead and start with, you know, I'm just give myself, give it a piano staff right there. And then I'm going to just pick a key signature. Why don't we do D major. So F sharp, C sharp, C sharp, okay. And then we need to pick a time signature. So why don't we do three, four is a good one. So right there, we've already set some clear constraints. We know the key, we know the time signature. We can pick a tempo and, you know, why don't we do something kind of slow. So I don't know this, I'm guessing it's somewhere around 80-ish. So I'm just going to write 80-ish right there. And now when I'm starting to come up with ideas here, I like to write as quickly as possible and get as much down on the paper as possible. But often it does start with just a little bit of playing around and right. So right there, I've played an idea instead of trying to make a judgment on it and say yes or no, I'm just going to go ahead and write it. It's the first thing that popped into my mind. So it seems to be the thing that wants to come out. So let's go ahead and write D, A, F sharp like that. And now here's I'll start to show you some of the techniques I have. We do this and we've got the rhythms there. You know, it sounds like I want to do that a couple of times. So I'm going to go like this, just give myself some empty bars. Feels like I'm doing it four times. Now you can put a little repeat symbol here, right? That's a quick way to just get the stuff down. It lets me know that this is really, it's almost like a thematic introduction. Just a harmonic material. So there we go. I wrote an F sharp. Okay, so nothing too complex here, but the chord does change it. So I've got D, B flat, and I've got G. Now I know the rhythms there. So I can save time by not drawing the lines. These are little techniques that you can use to get through a lot of material quickly. Okay, so now I know I can use, I know basically what I'm going for here, accompaniment wise, and what I can do is just write D right there. It's telling me it's a D chord again, right? So you've got a lot of flexibility. You don't have to stick to one thing. I could have easily written one like that just to let me know the left hand. Stick into the same shape, but I can write it harmonically like that. I can write the individual notes. Sometimes I'll just stack the notes like this just so I can quickly see the chord. These are all cool little techniques that help you get through real quickly. So now I'm jumping down to another line. Don't really worry about how everything looks. Now I did read in a book about Ravel once that Ravel had a lot of the issues with correcting wrong notes because he neglected to copy over the key signature. So I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to copy out my key signature so I don't have to constantly put accidentals. So now let's say I want to repeat this. I can call this idea A and then I number each bar. So what that means is now I can reference that. I don't even have to rewrite that out. I can, if I wanted to do an exact repetition, I could just, I could literally do this. A, you know, one through four, boom. And now I have copied it out. Now most of the time I won't do that. I mean, I also, I could put like a repeat sign, whatever it speaks to you personally. However, I won't usually do that. I'll usually make a change. So I'll say maybe A1 is repeated, A2. But then maybe A3, I'm gonna make a change. So I'll go. And now I have to figure out what's different about it. So right there, I wrote the chords out, or I wrote the chord out. And maybe I'll do something like that. I don't know where this is going and I may take material out. And then this is back to this chord right here. So it's like that. You can see I'm leaving a lot of information out and I'm trying to abstract just what is the critical information that I need. Now this is not a good thing to give to an orchestrator per se. This is for your internal use. If I was gonna give something to somebody to say, turn this into something more, then you're gonna wanna give more detail. You know, if you look at the sketches of professional film composers, they're often very detailed because you're not necessarily, you're not relying on the orchestrator to fill in your gaps of musical knowledge, or at least you shouldn't be. The orchestrator is there to take something that you've written and blow it up to a full score. So one of the other techniques that I talked about, which I find very useful, is let's say, what if I wanna change a pace here and I'll just go, right, well, I'm gonna start to write that out. But instead of having to write out every single chord, oh, this isn't three, four, so I need to not have four beats, all right? So there we go. Now I've made it a change. But instead of having to write every single note out every time with all the articulations, I just know that this is the same thing being repeated. And you could do that with a lot of things, I mean, if you write that figure out once, and then let's say you wanna repeat it, that's kind of like a four, four kind of figure, so I'll just do it one more time here. But then repetitions, I can just just indicate that it's the same thing. And then one, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three. So these are just some of the cool little techniques that I like to use when I'm sketching. There's a million and one techniques. And really, you should start to think of what works for you and what you can start to come up with on your own. For instance, let's say that you don't necessarily know the notes you wanna write, but you wanna write a scale. Well, just do a line like that. As long as it makes sense to you, get too detailed on some parts. And maybe I like this as an outline for a melody, but I want a little bit more, you know, right? Add more ornaments. Or, you know, maybe even put in some whatever rhythm and just figure it out later. With rhythms and things like that. But that's the benefit of being flexible and not putting too much down at the beginning. It's because your mind can play around with the concepts that are on the page. It's not. That may be what I started with, but... So, flexibility and not being too precise with your sketching, I believe, is actually useful. So hopefully you enjoyed this vlog. If you're interested in learning composition, learning similar techniques to this, and obviously the fundamentals, then check out www.partofcommunity.com. And I will tell you more.