Prelude from Op28 No20 by Chopin There are a tonne of lessons we can learn as composers from this, it’s relevant for guitar players and classical pianists alike
First, give the piece a listen. It’s barely 2 minutes long:
https://www.youtube.com/EsKwtXgFo24
How does this piece work? The first bar gives us the main theme for the prelude, and each following bar gives us variations on that theme. It’s quite beautiful. Chopin shows us different uses of a few different music theory concepts for:
We are all naturally creative, it’s part of being human. Just as we all breathe oxygen and eat food, we’re creative.
When we think of what it means to “be creative”, it is easy to dismiss our own abilities. We often associate “being creative” with peak performers, or people at the top of their field, such as Michelangelo, Bach, Steve Jobs, etc.
There are two mistakes that we often make when thinking about our creative potential:
If you’re reading this, them I’m guessing you and I have a few things in common:
We both love metal music We both play guitar, or, are learning to (ideally the learning never stops) If you are not learning to play guitar, then this is an interesting story for you to read. If you are learning, or you are thinking of learning, then hopefully this story will save you literally years of pain.
Quite often when we are practising guitar, we are looking for “tricks” and “tactics”… but how often have you thought about… what you are thinking about?
(I’m dangerously close to a tautology here)
There are several factors that affect how fast we progress as a musician: • Having the right things to practice • Having mental focus when practising • Practicing the right way • What we are focussing on, when we are practising
I read a great quote on music inspiration the other day:
The famous composer Schubert is said to have told a friends that his own creative process consisted in “remembering a melody” that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before
and it got me thinking about creativity. A lot of people have the false belief that creativity is something that “the chosen few” are naturally born with. I prefer to think of it as a muscle.
I’m just getting back into the swing of songwriting regularly the last few days (I know, I’ve not even released the first record yet!) and I forgot how, just like any other musical skill, it’s something that needs to be trained and practised. I haven’t done any writing at all for a few months and the last serious writing I did was over a year ago.
Writing needs to be just as big a part of my guitar routine as practising technique, theory, ear training, etc.
This is a very cool technique and will serve two big purposes:
Give you a new songwriting tool Help fix up what is (probably) a weak area of your playing. What we are looking at with this lesson is creating riffs using arpeggios based on two strings. Let’s quickly recap the intervals in the arpeggios that we are going to be using today:
Major: 1 3 5
Minor: 1 b3 5
In this lesson we are going to look at how to build up a scale run on guitar. A lot of intermediate level guitar players want to be able to play awesome scale runs down the length of their neck, and it can be quite hard to know how to get started with them. So we are going to spend a few weeks slowly building a scale run up, bar by bar.
This is a neoclassical tool we can use in lead composition. We are going to look at extracts from Bach’s 1st Cello Suite, Prelude and Courante, see how Bach uses pedal points, then look at how we can apply this in our own playing.
Extract from Courante in Bach's 1st Cello Suite This extract is from Bach’s Prelude in his first Cello Suite.
You can see that from the second beat of this example, Bach is using the note D (fret 7 on the G string), and then chromatically ascending from D, and going back to D each time.
Today we are going to look at some ideas we can use within the harmonized major scale to help us compose tapping ideas. We’ll be looking at the e and B strings.
We are going to be basing these ideas around three shapes:
Major: 1 3 5 Minor: 1 b3 5 Diminished: 1 b3 b5 So, to start off with, let’s out the notes in the following chords:
C major: C E G C minor: C Eb G C diminished: C Eb Gb Next, for each of those three chords, we want to map out those notes in ascending order on the second string.