Going Old School - The Fanfare
I’ve been worrying that my music hasn’t been great lately (if ever). Don’t worry, I’m not fishing for compliments or pity. I don’t think it’s been bad - I’m actually quite pleased with my stuff for what it is - but I’m also all too aware of the limitations of my technique and how I compose, which is at the computer.
So, I decided to change things up and try writing a piece the old-fashioned way, the way the greats like Jerry Goldsmith, Randy Newman, and John Williams did for decades - with pencil and paper!
Computer composing has many benefits, the most obvious and important of which is that you can hear what you’re doing! There’s the instant gratification of being able to record a line or a few bars and being able to play it back instantly. Composing at the computer is also ridiculously fast.
But, there’s also an insidious drawback to composing straight to MIDI that too many people overlook - that you get lazy and start writing what’s convenient for your sample libraries. Instead of bending the MIDI to the will of the music, the music bends to the will of the MIDI. This can lead to some pretty robotic and un-nuanced orchestrations regardless of whether or not the music is getting recorded by live musicians later.
So with all of that in mind, I decided to give pencil and paper a shot with this fanfare for an Olympics production music album.
Preparing the Team
What was composing pencil and paper like? It was excruciatingly slow. At least three times as slow in fact. But, it was also a good kind of slow - a slow where you’re not recording into MIDI the first thing that comes to mind. It’s a slow that forces you to consider all the musical options before you thoroughly before committing to writing the notes down.
And interestingly, it took a much longer time programming and sequencing everything into MIDI after all the writing had been done. Why? Well it shouldn’t come as a surprise - because what I ended up composing was not convenient for the computer, and I suppose that was the whole point of going pencil and paper in the first place.
In the end, I think I got a nuanced piece that flows and gels much more organically than it otherwise would have been. I think I’ll try this some more…
