A Little Observation About Music Composition

I have noticed that low pitched sounds are rare,
and high pitched sounds more frequent.

In a musical composition Bass Drums,
are a lot less frequent than cymbals.

I think this observation can be very valuable,
to people that just started learning music.

If you can get to the Beat+BassLine Editor in lmms,
you can start composing instantly.

Put the drums on every beat,
or maybe every other beat....

And then whatever sounds higher,
make it more frequent.

There is one very very very tiny complication here,
we will immediately add variation.

Find the clone steps button,
in the upper right corner of the Beat+BassLine Editor and hit it.

Now the patter you created will have twice the length,
so mess up the second part a very very very tiny bit.

Allow me to demonstrate,
Normally, lmms starts in 140 beats per minute.

I'll use the metronome to let you hear the beat,
at 140bpm.

(metronome plays)

Now let me put a drum on every other beat,
I'll keep the metronome on.

(drum1 plays)

Now, allow me to turn off the metronome,
so you can hear what every other beat sounds like without interference.

(drum2 plays)

If you were to measure beats of this sample,
your tool would report 70 beats per minute, since we are skipping every other beat.

Now let us put in a second drum,
filling in those empty beats, this will register as 140bpm now.

(drum3 plays)

At this point you can hear how this has no motion or dance,
it seems very square, very mechanical.

So, already we will perform that,
very very very tiny complication here.

Where we double things up,
and introduce gentle variation in the second part.

(drum4 plays)

You see how neat it sounds,
let me redo this one more time, to show you variation on the other drum.

(drum5 plays)

Even though we are just doing two boring drums,
by adding that one variation...

Which is just an extra hit on the drum,
we get a melody going.

By just hitting the drum one extra time,
we get a melody, out of nowhere.

I really hope you don't mind me adding that variation,
it is just a beautiful thing.

So what we have now is the low pitch sound,
or low frequency sound, or bass.

Basically hitting on every beat,
not counting the little variation, which hits the drum twice in a beat.

Now we will add a medium pitched sound,
that hits more often then the drum.

(mid1 plays)

Now let us add a second medium pitched sound,
to introduce more variation.

(mid2 plays)

And now we will add some high pitched sounds,
clicks and sticks and the like.

These will hit at a very high rate,
which means we should break-up repetition more frequently.

So we will very the pattern twice or thrice,
or whatever sounds good.

Let us give that a listen,
and I made this section slightly longer as it sounds nice.

(high1 plays)

In closing I would like to show you one more trick,
here we have to go to FX Mixer, click Master, Add Effect, and add Plate 2x2 versatile plate re-verb.

Reverb effects are magical, as they take a dry sound,
and give them wet thickness.

I will replay the previous melody,
but this time slowly turn up reverb by the time we reach the middle of the piece.

(high2 plays)

And here is the full song,
enjoy.

(full plays)