Imagine this track of music. It starts out with a kick drum keeping a steady 4/4 beat at about 60 BPM. After 4 bars a flute like lead comes in. And that’s it. For 5 minutes, all you hear is this kick drum keeping the same steady beat with no variation at all and a flute like lead meandering about the place. And it goes on for 5 whole minutes.
How long do you think it will be before your audience turns it off? I might hang in for a couple of minutes but then when it’s obvious that the piece isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to turn off the music. Some people won’t even wait that long.
Attention span, especially in today’s “I gotta have it now” world, is limited to say the least. People just don’t have the patience to sit through things like they used to back when I was a kid. The speed at which information can be retrieved today is partly to blame, but only partly. The real blame goes to the fast pace of the world in which we live in. Because we can get things so quickly, the world around us expects us to do things just as quickly.
I blame the fast food industry, but that’s another story. Right now, we want to focus on keeping our audience interested. How can we do this?
Well, generally speaking, we do this through change. But there are many ways to change our music through the course of one song. I’m going to cover just a few of those ways here. Hopefully, this will give you some inspiration to keep your tracks interesting so that they don’t just lay their flat.
One way to keep your audience interested is through micro changes. What do I mean by micro changes? Those subtle things that don’t really stand out but you know they are there.
For example, take that kick drum. What if you had the first bar with a steady 4/4 beat on every beat but then the second bar you added a 16th note before beat number two and you kept alternating bars like that. That subtle variation would keep the kick interesting, for a while anyway. But you’d eventually have to add something.
So how about after 16 bars you had a snare come in on beat 2? Ah, something different. How about after 16 more bars we added the snare on beat 4 as well? Now things are really starting to develop. And we’ve only touched the drum part. There are other things that will be going on during all this. But even if we started off our song just with this drum part, slowly progressing as it went along, that alone could keep the interest of our audience. Change is change, no matter how small or subtle. These are little micro changes and they can be applied to any instrument in your mix.
Take your synth lead. You can add doubling or delay to it after the first 16 bars. You can try playing it an octave higher. You can have another lead come in playing harmony quietly in the background. You can have another sound take over.
What about big changes?
This is where we have to be careful. Big changes can be jarring to our audience. If there are too many or they happen too quickly, the audience doesn’t have time to settle in. They’re just getting used to one part and then suddenly there’s another part coming in and before they can get familiar with that part something else comes in that’s completely different. After a while, this can become quite unsettling.
If you’re going to do big changes, you have to spread them out over the course of the song. Naturally, since this is going to take time, you’re also going to need to do those little micro changes to keep your audience interested so that they make it to the big changes.
So what are these big changes?
Well, here are just a few off the top of my head. Please feel free to add your own.
One big change would be a change in tempo. Suddenly your 60 BPM dirge speeds up to a 150 BPM dance track. If you plan this right, it can be very effective and certainly unexpected. Naturally, you want the change in tempo to ramp from 60 to 150 and not just be a sudden split second change. That would be very jarring to the audience.
Change in key would be another big change you could make in your tune. Now you probably don’t want to have too many key changes in your tune. Sometimes all you need is one or two. Most times that’s all you want though there are exceptions. Key change can be very effective and dramatic if done properly. It will certainly wake your audience up if you’ve been putting them into a coma.
You can also use what I call the rhapsody method. Look up the definition of a rhapsody. You’ll notice that it’s a piece of music that is pretty much constantly changing. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is a perfect example of this. Even at 6 minutes long, that song never gets boring. The main reason is because it’s constantly changing. Of course we are talking about Queen here so there’s that too.
Of course writing a rhapsody is not easy work. It requires some skill to pull off effectively, otherwise the parts just sound like they’re thrown together. You want to make it seem like each part naturally went into the other even though they sound nothing alike. That takes some doing. Listen to Queen. It’ll be a great exercise to analyze that song.
Those are just a few of the things you can do to keep your audience interested in your music. I am sure if you sat down and gave it some thought, you could come up with some of your own. The key is to keep things moving. Don’t let them just sit there and stagnate. That’s a sure fire way to put your audience to sleep.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim