3 tips to better compositions

Here's 3 tips to help you improve your music composition.

These tips took me many years to learn, and are based directly on mistakes I've seen students make that slow down their progress.

Practice these, and you can dramatically improve your music!

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Tip 1: Stick to One Key Until You Master It

If you play an instrument, it makes sense to learn how to play in every key. But if you are composing or producing music, your goal isn’t technical proficiency - it’s emotional proficiency.

Luckily, there isn’t that much material. Just 12 notes. By focusing on one key - or one starting note - and how all the notes feel against it, you can develop emotional intuition much faster.

Try This:

• 🎻 Find a beautiful pad sound in your DAW, and loop it on a note, like C.
• 🎹 Take another sound, like a piano, and play different notes, slowly and intentionally.
• 👂 Feel the emotions that each creates against the pad.

Here’s a demo.

This exercise helps you grasp how these notes feel against each other, which will assist you in crafting every melody or chord progression. Once mastered, you can apply this knowledge to ANY key.

It’s both fun and productive!

Remember, there are no "secret" scales or notes. Eventually, all scales blend together.

Notes are simply tools to evoke different moods.

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Tip 2: Learn Proven Chord Progressions… Then Make Them Your Own

Everyone wants to be original… or so they think.

But what I think everyone actually wants is to “speak with intention” through their music.

They want to resonate.

After all, if you want to be original, just play a series of random notes without any thought.

But if you want to create music that resonates, learn proven chord progressions used in countless songs, then make them your own.

These progressions work because they strike a “chord” with our nature.

Try These Chord Progressions:

• I V vi IV (C G Am F)
• IV V vi I (F G Am C)
• i VI III VII (Am F C G)

Give each of those a shot, they’re all awesome.

And if they sound “boring and basic” to you, it means you need to work harder to bring out their life.

Ways to Make Them Your Own:

• 🎹 Break up the notes.
• 🚗 Add rhythm.
• 🎻 Explore sound.
• 🧪 Add extensions.
• 🔊 Change velocities.

Making great music isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It's about knowing what chords to use to convey the feeling you want.

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Tip 3: Say Less

A beginner or intermediate producer often packs the piano roll with notes at every moment. Sometimes that’s okay, but only if done with intention.

Most times, if you just leave more empty space, you’ll sound better.

Listen to incredible music from top musicians in almost any genre. There is often ONE clear theme and a confident use of empty space.

By reducing what you play, what is left speaks magnitudes louder. Overstuffed compositions often lose their impact.

🎧 Some of the most beautiful orchestral compositions focus on repetitive patterns of 3 or 4 notes.

🎧 Some of the most impressive EDM tracks are just one “note” in an infectious rhythm, in expressive sounds.

🎧 Some of the coolest trap beats can be a 2-bar repeating phrase of 2 chords.

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So, Say LESS and speak LOUDER:

With the next melody you write, see how many notes you can eliminate.

Keep going until you find the absolute minimum… then focus on making those notes filled with life through sound or performance.

Only then add back select notes - and only if you hear them in your head first.