Making some composition tutorials :-)

• Mar 18, 2014 - 09:48

Hello!
I've been enjoying playing about with Musecore for the last several months. I'm a music theory teacher and I also teach composition, so I got the idea to start making some videos as tutorials for different kinds of composition, using Musescore.

I get a lot of frustrated people asking me where to start when it comes to composition - these tutorials are intended as a starting place. I'm breaking own genres into step-by-step instructions - composing by numbers kind of thing. I want to stress that the tutorials should be treated as a springboard for your own creativity - not a list of instructions to be blindly followed.

I hope that by breaking composition down into easy-to-digest steps, I might help some people to release their inner creativity! Please let me know what you think and if there is any type of composition you would like me to make into a tutorial.

So far I have uploaded instructions for a canon and a pentatonic piece. I have a Monteverdi style Madrigal coming up (not for the faint-hearted though!) and am working on a pop piece.

All the lessons etc are free of charge of course! :-)

Please find them on my blog at http://blog.mymusictheory.com/posts-about-composition/

Happy music making!
Victoria

Comments

Shoichi

• Mar 19, 2014 - 18:05

You should already be aware: your work is now on the site: http://musescore.org/en/links?language=en
(from the main page, on the right you see "links")

jotti

• Apr 3, 2014 - 12:38

With my pupils I've done the following. We started with a poem, a traditional one with rhythm and rhyme. To make it easy, I have done the rhythmic analysis in advance, then I've written the notes in MuseScore, all notes as G3, with the proper rhythm. And the lyrics. Then I've let the kids drag the note heads up or down to shape the melody.

This all is explained here.

There's also a downloadable mp3 of the melody that one pupil created.

I've also done the similar thing, but let the kids do the rhythm, too. Or we did that together. We read out loud the poem and decided together on the most natural way of doing the rhythm in the poem. After that I wrote everything in MuseScore. Again, only as G3:s, but with the rhythm we decided on. After that the kids did the dragging of note heads.

Of course, the kids didn't actually do everything. I did the harmonies and the rest of the accompaniment. The kids didn't even use accidentals, because they only dragged the note heads. So the melodies got to be very diatonic. Anyway, it appeared to be very motivating.