Blog #3, 3/28

Hello World,

Ok so I kind of forgot about this blog until today (Saturday), so I will have to do some catching up.  Just like last week I will do some "research" and also some actual composing stuff.  I think I have somewhat of a solid melody down so I will try to come up with some variations of the melody.  But of course I will start with the "research" part.  Also this is a cool new font but I don't like it that much, I'll try to stay consistent with it for the entire blog post though.  Oooh look it's a random image because I want to include a picture.  Gneiss

Research

1. https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/understanding-music/theme-and-variations/

Oh this is interesting, I thought it was only about making variations of a central melody but it is about a whole style of music.  I'm too lazy to go back and start over so I won't follow this exact same style but I can use elements of it to make variations of my melody.

This says that variations are made in four main ways: Melody, Rhythm, Harmony, and Time Signature.  Concerning the first one, melody, well, it kind of says that "you just do stuff", which is true.  It doesn't really tell me how but like can it?  I don't know.  Rhythm and Harmony are both helpful, but Key Signature?  I mean, it would still sound more or less the same with a different key signature.

Rating: 9/10

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3sugzHktc8

I agree with his first statement: It is hard enough for me to make an initial melody but then I just repeat it a lot and it gets boring.  A lot of it is DAW talk; I actually had a yearly subscription to Presonus Sphere but I didn't really know how to do it.  I should learn how to use it better sometime.  Ok so the video mostly talked about moving stuff around which I thought was cool but it was more oriented toward music production and stuff.

Rating: 6/10 (Good but not really good for what I am doing)

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KkDbc7XMa8

So this isn't an instructional video, I'm just watching how these people do variations on Paganini's 24th Caprice.  The first one is the original.  The second one keeps the same chord progression, moves the melody to a lower instrument and changes the meter.  The third one changes the meter again; the chord progression is still the same but it sounds different.  There's also an interesting change to the melody.  I don't know what to call it though.  The fourth one is really slow and doesn't really sound that much like the original.  I got too bored so I stopped paying attention to it so I'm not sure if it has the same chord progression or not.  The fifth one sounds really different from the original, albeit more than the fourth one.  There is like no chord progression.  The sixth one is weird, at this point they all sound nothing like the original.  Wait, the seventh one finally has the same melody and chord progression, it's warped really strangely though, I like this one.  Yeah sorry I don't feel like listening to it anymore.  I also watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcL0IsklM3M on the same thing and it was honestly easier to hear the melody in this one, but in the end it's really just the same thing. It is helpful but I'm not really looking to make something like this.

Rating: 6/10 (I mean the music was good but not that helpful for my purpose)

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gghl3GGsIo

Ok, that's it with variation things now, back just to looking at melodies.  This video seems kind of weird but I'll go ahead and watch it.  Ok it says that using octaves in the left hand is good because of some weird minimalistic thing.  And that's a really long chord progression (or maybe I'm just bad).  Ah now it's talking about melodies, that's good.  Something about using motifs and transposing them, and also with arpeggios and a lot of weird stuff.  I feel like this is more for advanced people.  Yeah I closed the video at the advertisement I don't want advertisements,

Rating: 6/10

As you can see I only have four sources this time... sadly.  Only 830 words too.  So sad.

Real Doing Stuff

This week I didn't actually do that much composing stuff but I did get a little bit in.  I still played it kind of bad but next week is spring break, which means more time to work!  Or more time to procrastinate, I guess.  We'll see what happens.

I couldn't figure how to embed my audio file (there's image and video but no audio), so here's a link: https://bit.ly/lukebraisted1

(If anyone knows how to embed audio please let me know that would be helpful)

And again, any and all suggestions would be super duper helpful.

Why are you down here?  What are you looking at?  Hehehehahaha

Commented on the blogs of: Andrew Nguyen, Kevin Gao, and Brandon Furman