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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/23/2025 in all areas

  1. Hey Mooravioli, I like your piece. The harmony is weird and complex. I think for this kind of music the danger is making the harmony too unconventional, which makes the piece hard to listen to. A lot of people that experiment, do it too much. You don't: you keep the listener hooked and curious, and know how to tell a story through chords. Another thing that helps is your use of melodic motives. Really nice! I especially like the resolution and ending from bar 195 onwards. Consider using a tenor saxophone instead of alto, it better suits the melodies you've written. Low notes on sax are often harsh and unpredictable, writing a little higher in the instruments range can give a nicer sound/more freedom to the player to choose the right sound. You can also definitely explore the vibraphone's abilities more. Remember that professionals can play four notes at once! Listen to some bebop vibe players for reference. Also, five sharps (or four for tenor)? why would you do that to anyone? If you raise everything a semitone (Eb major, concert pitch), your players will thank you. As for the genre - this isn't jazz. I would probably call it contemporary classical. If you want to write jazz, listen to the music. If you'd like to write in any style, you need to be familiar with that music. Of course that shouldn't discourage you from writing this music at all! It sounds cool, and that is what matters. I just wanted to say, if you call this jazz and show it to a jazz musician, they will look at you like "šŸ™‚ that is really ~interesting~ jazz šŸ™‚". For improvisation, your best bet is to write chord symbols and let one player completely free, like in traditional jazz songs, because that is what players are used to. Saying 'feel free to improvise' and 'improvise less' is very vague, and may not give the effect you want. What you could say is 'feel free to embellish' or something, if that's what you had in mind. In general: if you don't want someone to play the written notes, don't write the notes...
    2 points
  2. Obviously everyone hates this! LOL! I wrote it at great speed, and the idea was to make a piece with a very bizarre and fluid structure, to match the odd instrumentation. I wanted to try writing for a weird collection of contrabass instruments, as I thought this would be a good challenge. The contrabass ophicleide is one of the rarest instruments in the world, with only five in existence, three of which are unplayable: so I can rest safe in the knowledge this will never be performed! 🤐
    1 point
  3. Hey man! Great work at coming this far. I can tell that this style of orchestration was stretching you, but I hope it opened your horizons and you’re growing a lot:) Here are a couple of my thoughts: Distortion: I also noticed the distortion over time. It was slight and in the background, but perceptible. I agree with both the above analyses that it’s part Musescore (which could be fixed with a DAW), and part a thicccc orchestration lol:) Composition: This is already a great start. I don’t know if I would call it a ā€œcueā€ (that seems to mean introduction to me), but it seems like a mid-scene Star Wars music. What I think would help you most would be developing your melody with a more cohesive theme (maybe using period or sentence forms), then using it to create a simpler piano sketch. Having everything sketched out on one (or two for complex pieces) pianos/organs/accordions helps to have a clear vision of how much harmony is going on at once. Then you can orchestrate and double all you want to get the timbre you’re looking for. These are some of the most helpful videos I’ve found for this topic, from my favorite YouTube composer Ryan Leach: This one covers using just a basic 4 or 5 part writing sketch, then adding octave doublings to give it an epic feel. I really recommend only using 4-5 parts/pitches at a time for emotional purity. This will also help cut down on the mud/distortion: Next is an example of another young composer who was coached into writing a cinematic piece from a sketch. Then finally, ā€œHow to Orchestrateā€¦ā€ is the pro composer’s version, starting from a more complex 2-piano sketch. I hope that in giving high quality feedback, I might be able to receive high quality feedback when I post something:)
    1 point
  4. Clicked on this and listened to it, but I just got defeated in trying to write a white-heat piano piece in one sitting, and my brain hurts, but having even read Beethoven piano sonatas ON THE TOILET! Beethoven himself would not turn up his nose at this, and it DOES sound a bit like him, though not derivative; I would say in the style of, it's like one of his easy-going first movements of a piano sonata. I WILL listen to the whole thing.
    1 point
  5. I started getting serious about music beginning with heavy metal music over 20 years ago, which Black Sabbath pioneered. Without Ozzy Osbourne, I'd not be a composer today. RIP Prince of Darkness
    0 points
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