Music is an interesting animal. There is a fine line between a work of art and a total mess. Sometimes that total mess actually turns out to be the work of art. Come with me as we explore the strange world of music composition and how sometimes what you set out to do doesn’t quite turn out so good and how sometimes that piece of trash turns out to be genius in the making.
If you follow the music industry you’ll notice that there are new genres coming out all the time. Go to Wiki and take a look at the list of genres just in the electronic music genre. There has to be over a hundred if there is one. If you then examine the sub genres, you will find a lot of overlap and a lot of gray areas where one genre and another are so closely related that it’s very hard to tell them apart outside of maybe one characteristic.
For example, take the jungle sub genre of electronic music. If you listen carefully to it, you will notice that it contains elements of breakbeat, dubstep, reggae and dance hall What makes jungle distinctively jungle, if you can even use that word, is the speed at which it is performed. Jungle music is typically from 150 to 170 beats per minute (BPM).
Think about that for a moment. Taking the same song, with the same instrumentation, arrangement and just about everything else and slow it down 10 to 20 BPM and it’s no longer jungle. At this point it’s anyone’s guess where it would fall.
Let’s take house music, which originated in Chicago back in the early 80s. Generically, house music was very close to mid 70s disco except that it was more minimalistic and electronic than early disco. Remember early disco? They actually played real instruments back then. House is almost robotic in comparison.
But we’re not done. See, house music isn’t just house music. You’ve got electro house which can be further broken down into complextro, Dutch house, fidget house and moombahton. What’s the difference between them all? Well, I’m not going to go over all of them because we’ll be here all day so let’s take Dutch house and fidget house.
Dutch house originated in the Netherlands and is mainly characterized by complex rhythms and Latin based drum kits. Throw some low bass lines and high squeaky synth leads and you’ve got Dutch house.
Fidget house is mad up of snatched vocal snippets, pitch-bent dirty basslines and rave-style synth stabs all over glitchy 4/4 beat.
It’s all electro house but there is a big difference between those two.
And none of this even takes into consideration the other forms of house such as acid, deep, diva and ghetto, just to name a few. In fact, there are over 30 sub genres of house music.
Try to wrap your head around that for just a second. There are more sub genres of house music than there were of popular music in general if you go back to the 60s and 70s.
Okay, where am I going with all this? Well, here it comes. This is where things get very complex.
Imagine you decide you want to write a song. You are staring at a blank manuscript. Even if you finally decided that you wanted to write a house based song, what kind of house are you going to write? Are you going to stay true to that sub genre? What if you don’t really understand the genre that well? If you read one of my previous articles, you’ve heard me talk about how we can’t possibly be proficient in composing for every possible genre of music.
So what if somebody comes to you for a royalty free track and they want it in the style of deep house which is actually a combination of Chicago house, jazz-funk and soul music and rendered in tracks that are usually between 7 and 10 minutes long with tempos between 120 and 130 BPM.
What if the customer’s video is only 3 minutes long? Obviously he either doesn’t understand what deep house really is or thinks that the other elements alone will make up for the lack of time. In either case, what you come up with isn’t technically going to be deep house. You can sugarcoat it any way you like and dress it up the same. It still won’t be deep house. So what you’re going to have is some kind of other hybrid even if you hold true to the other elements.
But what happens if you decide that because of the lack of time it would be better to abandon the classic deep house sound but still don’t want the customer to think he has something else? What you’ll probably do is pick the most obvious elements of deep house, incorporate them into the song and then maybe throw in one or two elements of your own.
If you do this, will you have, in essence developed another sub genre? Well, it depends. Without going too deep into how sub genres come about (pun intended) essentially a sub genre comes about ONLY if it becomes popular. You can invent a totally off the wall type of music and give it a name. But if it doesn’t catch on, it’s never going to be listed as an official sub genre. It’ll just be your own little thing.
Back in the 1970s, I did such a thing when I started composing. I came up with stuff that was like nothing out there. But it wasn’t all that good and it never caught on past my home studio and that’s where it died. My friends euphemistically called them “Waggy Tunes.”
Today, it’s becoming harder and harder to come up with something that is truly different from everything else that’s out there. But it is still possible. So use your imagination. Sure, fall back on what you’ve heard and what you know, but try to throw your own little spin on it.
Ultimately, that’s what’s going to separate you from everybody else as a composer.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim