Shred Academy

A Few Insights on Composition

By Erik Stewart

There is a great deal of narrow minded or misleading information about composition these days. I have many years of classical training in theory and composition; and I’ll gladly share a few important concepts about composition.

Almost all music is built on Motifs. Motifs are musical ideas or gestures, in the broad sense of the term. It could be a singing melody or a driving rhythm among many things. Guitar solos naturally tend to do a composition technique called motivic development; which is taking the original motive and changing it in any variety of ways. In fact, if a guitarist simply adds a pinch harmonic to one note of a motif he has developed it in some way. To the most extreme complexity of motivic development Wagner wrote entire operas with subliminal motifs hidden in the music to help his audience sense the characters thought; meanwhile Haydn wrote monothematic Sonatas, with really only one motif the entire time. In my opinion Beethoven is the all time master of motivic development. I have studied his scores to see how he constantly developes his music craftily. There is a reason that a symphony can be over an hour long and not repeat itself boringly. It is important to consider how your motifs relate to each other and are developed through the piece.

Just like the the feel of a basketball, music has textures. Solid palm mutes over power chords create a different texture than sweeping arpeggios; even to the same exact chord progression. There are countless textures possible in my mind, coming from sitting in orchestras for years; that are untouched by the guitar world today. Some of the virtuosos like George Bellas I’ve discovered have started to tap into some of them, but, they are mostly unkown to the popular ear. One slight difference in an orchestration (the way you assign the parts to the players) can make a striking difference. The example that comes to mind is how much different a two voice line (like a melody and harmony) sounds coming from one guitar as opposed to split between two. I have recorded an example of the difference between the two Click to listen I begin this example with one guitar playing the two upper voices and halfway through I switch to two guitars player each playing one of the two upper voices. There are huge sonic differences between the two because of the way Distortion handles single notes to multiple notes in the same channel. The more you understand how to create different textures; the more you can truly express to the most precise detail what you want to say. I strongly recommend experimenting with textures.

One thing in particular that I stress is careful attention to how your chords are voiced. This really just means the spacial relationships between the notes. I recorded an example some of the different voicings for GM. Click to Listen In this example I voice GBD, GDB, DGB, BDG, and back to GBD. This is done in the most simple voicings in 3 voice texture for demonstration. Each voicing has it's own sound to it, even though it is essentially the same chord. To make things even more diverse; when you add bass guitar keep in mind what these inversions could do. You should consider the bass guitar a 4th voice below the guitar. Even with (including bass) a simple 4 voice texture there are many possibillities of sounds just on voicings alone. If you simply strum open chords with no string mutes you are guaranteed to have that generic and poorly voicelead sound so commonly heard. Just like with textures, slight differences can make huge results. Along with voicing comes voiceleading; which really means how you handle the voices, or lines, from chord to chord. The rules of voiceleading when fully laid out are rather complicated and are quite often intentionally broken in Romantic and 20th Century Music. The shortcut to smooth voiceleading is to follow the law of the shortest path, as in choose to move your voices in the smallest possible invertvals between chords..

Think Outside the Neck! This is the most important thing you can take away from this article. Too often, and even I do this sometimes, guitarists will box themselves into the regular way of defaulting from chord to chord. The best thing to do is to find ways to make your hands play or else orchestrate what you hear in your mind. I find myself arming my current project, The Axiom, with 3 guitarists for this exact reason. Most of my rhythm guitar parts require somewhat difficult string skips to maintain the voiceleading and textures I hear. To shock many of you; sometimes there is not a part for one of us to play during parts of the music! This is because there is a higher musical goal; more important than ego or impatience. Music can be the expression of words that can’t be found or facets that can’t be seen any other way.

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