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I'm pretty comfortable with saying that my music is a direct result of me personally. The things that you gravitate towards certainly show up, if abstractly; maybe not so much on the interests/personality side.

First of all, welcome to YC! If I understand well, your problem is that you cannot express your emotions through music, and don't know why. Imagine, that you want to write a love poem in Spanish, but you know nothing or only a little about the Spanish grammar. Well, music is some sort of language, and if you don't know its grammar you can't express yourself through it. ( <-- it is my personal opinion, many have different thinking about this, but please, do not start an endless "What is music?" thread again. We are here to help, thank you.) Ok, here are some practical suggestions how to improve your melodies: 1. Learn rhythm and meters. Rhythm is the primitive level of music, it is vital to understand different note values and meters. 2. Learn scales, minor and major at least. Learn key notes like tonic/1st, dominant/5th, subdominant/4th, and tendency tones (leading note/7th , supertonic/2nd, ...). There are stable notes and less stable or unstable ones, the latter need some sort of resolution. 3. Learn phrasing. Make short phrases instead of a very long melody line (In other words, try using "simple sentences" instead of one long "compound sentence"). Try to build short phrases purely by different rhythm values / or purely by different pitches with same note values. 4. Learn cadences. Listen to the difference between ending on the 1st degree of the scale and ending on the 2nd, 3rd... etc. degree. Experiment with cadences and listen how they sound. 5. Study scores of great composers. Listen to parameters listed above (1-4.) Good luck! Máté

"The only composers that truly make a living off their music, are film composers and of 'new' sacred music as well for high school concert band." Not the case. There are penniless composers and there are concert music composers making a living at it who don't work in any of those three areas.

Hi guys, I was using the forums chatbox and thought that it would be great to have an IRC channel for us. The nice administrator jawoodruff asked me to write this into the announcements section of the forums. The basic idea of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is to connect many people to a live chat and have them communicating with one another. All you need to get started is an IRC client, there are free and open source ones for every operating system: For Mac: Colloquy For Windows: Xchat2 For Linux: Xchat For iPhone (not free): Colloquy The way you connect is very simple. You install the application, find the "Servers" section in the program, type in the server adress and click on connect. After that you can join a channel by either writing "/join #channelname" in the chat or just specify the channels to join automatic on program startup in the application itself. Here's a quick tutorial for the Mac IRC client Colloquy: http://docs.zetaboards.com/irc/colloquy I already setup a testing channel on freenode (the server adress is: irc.freenode.net). The channel name is "youngcomposers" so you would write "/join #youngcomposers" to connect to it on freenode. Please say your opinion on it, and if you would like a real chat, since the chatbox on the forums is very restricted and you can't do much there - even chatting is somewhat unelegant :) If you have ANY question about IRC, just ask me. I will reply to you and I am quite sure I help you setup every IRC program that you choose. Thank you