Ok, I’m not as lame as this is going to sound. I play various instruments as a hobby, (I’m not a professional musician). However, recently I've been wanting to compose music that I play intuitively. I would like to write the music into score but my lack of technical knowledge of music theory is a huge obstacle for writing down the music that I can actually already play.
The following is an example. This piano excerpt may sound like a pretty lame piece, but it’s merely a few measures of a much larger piece of music. My problem is that when I actually go to write this music out I have no idea what time signature to use. I have absolutely no sense of meter and so I don’t know how to time this.
I wrote it using 4/4 time. I also tried 6/8 time and 9/8 time, but nothing seemed to work well. In short I have no clue how to write this music, but I can play it on the piano and it sounds alright there. So my question is, how do I write this out?
Using 4/4 time works, but requires dotted quarter notes on two of the chords. Is this correct? Or perhaps I should ask, “Is this acceptable?”. The piece changes meter to 4/4 time later and then returns back to this piano part. Is this piano part also 4/4 time? Have I written it correctly? Or is there a better meter that I can write this in?
It’s hard for me to write music so that it has the same cadence as when I play it. So for me this is entirely a question of physically laying it out in the music score.
I have to use links because my computer won’t permit me to upload attachments on this site.
The following link is a graphic of how I’ve written the score in 4/4 time. (9 KB .gif)
I had to use layers to sustain the chords.
http://www.csonline.net/designer/ideas/piano.gif
The following is a midi sound file of these four measures (1 KB .mid)
http://www.csonline.net/designer/ideas/piano-J.mid
Please let me know what you think, and thanks for pondering an idiot’s question.
James