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Re: To those who make a living off of music



On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 5:27 PM, k3zz21@gmail.com <k3zz21@gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed Im much much more of the harmony type than ambient. However I 
> definitely want to get in to ambience too because i want to break my 
> mind free of harmonic jail haha. Its like when it comes to chord progs i 
> can think of melodies quite easily to fit with them but every time i 
> tried anything remotely ambient sounding i just feel like "what the heck 
> am i doing right now?" i have now idea what the principles of ambient 
> music are.


One could say that "there are no principles in ambient but a hell of a
lot of taste required". But that wouldn't be all true because there
really are principles in ambient. It's just that you really can get
away with making interesting ambient music even if not being aware of
the principles. Making harmonically complex music without knowing the
principles would not be possible, so there's a difference.

When you are playing the harmony style music, don't you sometimes get
hit by the though "do I really play something that makes sense now -
or do I just play according to the book?" That sometimes happens to
me. It's kind of the reversed fear-for-fail-factor ;-)

A method to learn to come up with instant musical content ("ambient")
is to pick a monophonic instrument and go to a location where there is
a fantastic sound. Like a church or something. Play one note and
listen. The rest will come to you and then you just play it.

Another method can be to search for and identify other variables in
music than those based on melody and harmony. Two obvious examples are
Tension and Release. You may think of many others, but they all flow
in music like waves in an ocean, like a question-and-answer game.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen