New Old Music
Here’s a short piece I just composed in my teenage composing style:
(It’s just over a minute long— you can listen to all of it!)
^^ Here’s what all of the notes look like.
After spending the greater part of my last two years working on scoring projects, writing music for directors and developers, I’ve discovered that it often feels quite refreshing to make something for myself. That’s how I started making music, after all— I’d just sit down at my computer and write something I thought sounded cool. Or I’d somehow distill some of my emotions and feelings into a piece.
I was recently listening back to a couple of these “extremely old” pieces I wrote three, four, five, even eight years ago (I guess for me, eight years ago is indeed pretty old.) A younger me would be very critical, and hyper-aware of all the myriad ways these pieces could be better. I’m no less aware of the flaws and awkward transitions and weird instrumentation choices and odd chords and mixing problems, but I guess I can see something now that I didn’t quite see before.
Raw creativity. Not to brag on myself, but I don’t really know how 15-year-old Brett had enough creative prowess to continually think up good musical ideas, and flesh them out into dozens and dozens of pieces over the next few years. Nobody ever taught me how to write music— I kind of just… started doing it?
Many of these earlier pieces were pretty simple in structure, driven by strings and piano, and very focused on melody. Kind of Romantic-era-sounding, to put it into classical music nerd terms.
As amazing as it’s been to write all sorts of different kinds of music since then, I decided to sit down and write something in a similar style as those old pieces. I chose a piano sound. I loaded up the string sounds. And I thought up a super simple melody, and got to work at the real challenge of composing a piece— shaping and sculpting the music to say something.
I’m certainly biased, but I liked how the piece turned out! It follows the vibe of my old pieces extremely well, and I think the strings sound pretty solid. And it captures this sort of wistful, bittersweet feeling that I was, well… feeling.
See you next time! Go subscribe if you haven’t already. I’ll send out a bit of music, and some of my own musings and ramblings, each time.