REDUCING THE HARMONY / creating a song on a different basis / originalmusic

Writing new material for my band Moskau is all about going new places. We tend to change our sound from album to album because we frequently change the associated members around the band's core. That results in a never ending change in sound that somehow always manages to stay our own. I've began working on new material a few months ago and I've shared some of the demos here on Steemit, although it's impossible to tell how the material will sound when we record it with the full band. Yesterday I've made a song with no harmony changes and it got me thinking about the process of composing songs when you don't rely on changing chords. So, let's begin with a quote from Lou Reed:

As always, Lou is being provocative, but at the same time he is onto something.
Music is mostly composed around a melody (I've written about this before) which means there are chord changes that follow the tone changes in the melody. Melodies are often catchy, they are pushed way up front and on top of everything else and you often find yourself remembering the melody but not the entire song. Modern mainstream music was perhaps the first to recognized and exploit the idea completely. If you listen to the top charts on a mainstream radio station, you'll quickly notice that all the songs feel kind of the same. Of course, that does not mean they are bad, it just means they are written in a same way, a way that works. The way they are written in is pretty straight forward - you make a great groove, make sure to emphasize the first beat in a measure, you add some synths (mostly a-tonal) and put a well written melody on top. It's what Rihanna, Beyonce etc. do. Take a listen to this:

This is the latest effort by Beyonce. The main thing you hear is the groove, the percussion and the synths. There are some tones changing around but they are basically a one-step change within the same chord. The most important part of the song is the melody and the backing vocals.

Here's a N.E.R.D. feat. Rihanna track:

As far as I'm concerned, this is groove + vocals. No harmony. Now, you might say it's due to the genre of music we're talking about here but it's actually not. Mainstream sort of managed to erase the genre variable so it all became ''the maninstream genre''. To proove my point, let's take a listen to something else from the charts that isn't hip-hop or r'n'b.

Here's the lates hit by Imagine Dragons. I've heard this song a million times on the radio.

The groove is reminiscent of both Beyonce and N.E.R.D. feat. Rihanna with a slight difference. The difference is there's a simple 3 chord harmony change in this song, following one of the most common chord progressions from the key of C major

They are changing from the TONIC (C) to the IVth (F) and the minor VIth (A minor). Now, although this is a change in chords, it's not much of a harmony, given that you are in fact staying in C major.

All of this got me thinking: can I use the same method for writing an alternative piece of music? What will I rely on in a song if I reduce the harmony to a single chord? What other elements will I be using insted to compensate for the lack of harmony or melody? I had to give it a try.

I decided to stay in the key of C minor. It wasn't a deliberate decision - my guitar was tuned to drop C so I just happened to write a riff in C minor. I wanted my riff to act like the basic groove we hear on the songs above, only it's transposed from drums and percussion to an electric guitar.

THE BALANCE OF THE FREQUENCIES

So, if the harmony is reduced to a single chord (C minor), I had to work with different things to keep the song interesting. The first thing I decided to do is to have a balance of frequencies. I recorded the same riff both on the neck pick-up position (for low end) and the bridge pick-up position (for high end). This gave me a full, rich basis I could work with. The balance of frequencies give the illusion of things happening and changing in a song when in fact everything stays the same.

EMPHASIZING THE FIRST BEAT IN A MEASURE

The other important thing I've noticed in all top charts songs is the emphasizing of the first beat in a measure. Whatever the groove is, the first beat is emphasized. That's mostly the case in other genres of music (drummers hit the cymbals on the first beat, the breaks happen on first beats, the kick drum makes sure to hit the first beat etc.) but here it's taken up to an entirely different level and every first beat is highly emphasized. So I took a floor tom sample and made three different toms out of it, each covering a part of the frequency spectrum. I took a low floor tom, copied it into 3 separate tracks and made a middle floor tom and a high floor tom from the copied ones. Then I put all 3 of them hitting the first beat but I've displaced the middle and the high tom less than half a second before and after the first beat. That way I created an ilussion of having more than one tom hitting the beat using just one sample.

DYNAMICS

There's a term in baroque music called TERRACED DYNAMICS. Terraced dynamics reffered to a style of playing the harpischord which could only be played LOUD (forte) or SOFT (piano). The harpischord was unable to play smooth changes in dynamics (known as crescendo and decrescendo) so the music often went from being loud to being soft in an instant. The same method was used by many popular alternative bands such as the Pixies or Nirvana, known in popular music terms as ''soft verse/loud chorus''. I wanted to combine the two types of dynamics and achieve the feeling of both constant crescendo and terraced dynamics. Let's visualize it like this:

The changes from one step to the next are terraced but the steps are constantly ascending or, in musical terms, they go in a crescendo.

ADDING THINGS

The way to achieve the combined dynamics is this: as the song progresses, you keep adding elements and then you abruptly take everything away and bring it all back in an instant. Adding the elements gives you a sense of a crescendo and abruptly taking and returning everything in an instant gives the feeling of terraced dynamics. I achieved the crescendo by adding a C minor chord played in all 3 pick-up positions on top of the riff. I also played a hammond to get a sound of constant sustain and as the crescendo is getting louder, so does the hammond add octaves ending up with 3 C octaves played at the same time.

HIGH END

Although I tried to make sure to achieve the balance in my frequency spectrum by playing the guitar in all 3 pick-up positions, there's a point where such a thing doesn't work anymore. The reason is the nature of the sound. You can change the pick-up positions all you want, but at some point, the nature of the sounds you hear (in this case the guitar) starts to fill in your ears too much, the brain groups it all together and expects something more. At that point, things look like this: a lot of low end in the floor toms (yes, there is also a high tom and a middle tom but all within a low end) and a lot of middle end in the guitars (again, low, middle and high within a middle end). To get the HIGH END and the balance I was looking for, I sampled an 808 cymbal metronome beat and added some wind chimes. That gave me the missing high end spectrum I was looking for.

VOCALS AND LYRICS

The vocals are actually sang in the same dynamic manner throughout the song so I had to put something on them to make them more powerfull. I wanted the vocal to sound sexy and dirty so I put distortion on it and ran it thru an amp simulator. This gave me the power I wanted.
The lyrics are actually the reason I opted for such a writing approach for the song. My bandmate Django wrote the lyrics with the title FINNEGAN'S WAKE. Now, Finnegan's Wake is a well known James Joyce novel that continues to baffle critics to this day. Some say it's a masterpiece and some say it's garbage but the way it is written in is similar to combining the crescendo/terraced dynamics in music. Also, a WAKE can mean emerge or cause to emerge from sleep; stop sleeping and hold a vigil beside (someone who has died) which also makes sense with the structure of the song.

THE ENDING

I like to end big. I was always a fun of musicians who end their songs with a blast. Considering I already had massive floor toms banging thru the entire song, I had to think of something else to get the ''boom'' I wanted. I didn't want to end with adding backing vocals or the rest of the drums or something like that... I wanted to end with a ''rumble''. The best way I could think of to produce that rumble was to put my guitar on neck pick-up position, distort it heavily and then put OCTAVERS on it. I recorded two tracks of the distorted guitar, panned them LEFT AND RIGHT and used two different octavers for each one. On the left I used an octaver called ''SUB FOR YOUR BASS'' and on the right I used a one called ''THE DEEP''. When you combine the two of them, you get a hell of a lot of rumble.

Finally, here's the song. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did making it and I also hope this little insight into the writing process will make you appreciate it in different ways.