Most people think it’s difficult to compose music for the piano. The fact is they weren’t taught the proper way to whip out quick piano music. Here are three steps that will have you composing in no time.
- Find a Chord Progression
Most musicians like to start out with a piano chord progression. There are many chord progressions out there. Chord progressions are a series of chords strung together. They’re almost like a musical puzzle. Once you piece them together, you’ll hear nice music, and it won’t go wrong.
Because chord progressions are so helpful, musicians like to start out by choosing the most used chord progressions and giving their own “signature twist” to it.
Because learning to play through different common progressions in various keys is such an important part of music composition, you need to learn to recognize these progressions from Roman numerals, so you can quickly master and transpose them to other keys. Here are a few famous piano chord progressions, and you can pick any of these as a starting point.- ii-V-I
- I-IV-V
- I-vii-IV-V
- I-vii-ii-V
- Choose Your Melody
Once you find the right chord progression, it’s time to pick the melody’s notes. So, how do you go about it?
The easiest way to create your melody is by picking the notes that belong to the chords. For example, if you’re using the C chord, you can pick C, E, or G as the melody’s notes. Using this as rule of thumb, you will have multiple notes to pick from, or you can use a single melody note and decide to have it last longer.
As you can see, this gives you many possibilities for creating your melody. - Design Your Rhythmic Pattern
This is my favorite part. The rhythmic pattern of your music portrays the music’s mood. If you decide to go with slow music, you can have musical notes that last slightly longer (two beats or more). Similarly, if you want a fast rhythmic song, you want all musical notes to last a shorter duration so it doesn’t get too boring.
Now that you understand the process of composing, watch this short video, and you can start cranking out your own music.
Would you agree that creating music is really not that difficult? I would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your ideas or experience on composing music by writing a comment below!
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