The Composer

"Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!"

You don't need to know musical notation.

Musical notation has been replaced by a SAVE BUTTON.

No, you do not need to know Musical Notation to read Chopin's Nocturnes, either.

You just import the midi file into lmms, and gaze. He is not smarter than you, he just sat at a piano making melodies, wrote them down arranged them in a song, and became famous for having picked nice ones.

(Don't listen to people telling you that you can't become a World Famous Maestro, because you don't know notes. They are just salty because they had to learn them, and you don't.)

Like languages, music evolved to match our abilities. Everyone is a composer. The rules are very simple.

Drums must be low and simple one or two keys. When making melodies don't jump around, transition from one nearby key to another, they are grouped to sound nice together. Break the rules from time to time.

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Visualize notes as bright little objects on a timeline.

Watch the melody.

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Look how keys go together, only when melody gets too boring, is there a huge shift, a kind of a bridge, to get you to the next melody.

Notice the Intro, the song does not really start until Ralph Wiggum ends up wearing Jebediah Springfield's Head as a hat.

Look how the song has quick melodies, followed by longer key presses, and quick little melodies again. This way none of the parts get boring, and the song keeps going.

Notice the Outro. The moment Matt Groening name is displayed, a new variation pops up, and it is a melody that has a very nice closure at the end. It does not seem to leave off unfinished, it hits those four final notes in a sequence, and you know it is done, and done.

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Drums do beat.

Beat is what your foot does when you like a song. There will be a rhythm within a song almost always represented by a drum kit. A low deep sound with some stuff happening behind it. That stuff behind it is the drum kit.

Listen, The Drum Kit, is just an instrument. If it was just the drums, it would be like a piano with one key. There is more to drums, there are some quick sharp sounding things that go along with it.

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In general the instrumental sounds that can be created here fall under four basic categories.

Kick from A bass drum, or kick drum

Snare from the Snare Drum

Closed Hat & Open Hat from the Hi-hat

Clap, that's the sound that clapping your hands makes.

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It hurts my heart to say this lovely woman is doing something wrong.

As a Professional Pianist, she is brilliant, but as a teacher, she is a Destroyer of Hopes.

Don't listen to a word she says.

Watch her hands.

She is using both of them.

Her left hand is creating low-frequency sounds, and she almost never does anything there, and she keeps things simple. She is almost doing drums with her left hand, she is laying down the beat.

Ignore her left hand, now.

Look at her right hand, at first she goes up and down. Then she does the pinky & thumb, but still, even though she is playing notes apart, see it as one note, pay attention to thumb only. She does jump between keys, but it is rare and masked by her left hand that is doing the beat.

The keys she presses at the same time with her right hand should be seen as one key, she is just mixing two sounds together to create a third sound. When she presses two keys at the same time, she is adding a third key.

Why add keys to the piano. Because two keys at the same time sounds richer than pressing one key.

Making a single sound out of pressing multiple keys at the same time, is called making a chord. Chords are multiple notes played at the same time, for the purpose of enriching the complexity of what you hear.

Left hand does the simple beat, it must always be simple.

Right hand does the melody, slowly goes up and down, in this particular video chords aside, she only skips one key to get to the next note.

All of this is obscured, because she was taught Music Theory compatible with Mozart & Chopin.

You are being taught to break out. Chords are beautiful for sure, but, you just use the recording (the sound sample a .wav/mp3 of the chord) and focus on composition.

Melodies are not made by learning how to play a piano. They are made in LMMS by gently moving up and down.

You must never fear.

There are many theories.

Newton, went as far as saying that he made Calculus more complicated than it should be, on purpose.

Chopin, would never dare to simplify his work.

But that won't stop me.

You can see the same pattern in the video below, it is just rotated 90° clockwise.

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My Friends, My Readers, play.

Revolutionary Warriors. Lead The Way.

Let no one stand in it, may they face your wrath.

Make your own path.

Let no one play you like a piano key.

Be the change, you hope to see.