Exploring Transposition

9/8/2020

This past week was a great experience for me musically. Luckily, my load of school work was not too heavy, so I had a good amount of time to experiment with my music software as well as start writing some progressions. The experimentation and finding the "perfect" sound is, in my experience, the best part of the song creation process. When the final note change creates the emotion that a songwriter is looking for, the feeling is pure magic. Although, before one starts this process, an understanding of how emotions are created, as well as how songs are constructed, is absolutely necessary. The majority of my musical time this week was spent with the analysis of chord structure, which helps me by demonstrating how compositions create certain emotions. I took a close look at several songs, such as "Sweet Virginia" by the Rolling Stones, and analyzed the key and chords used in the song, along with how they made me feel. This information will be extremely valuable as I continue writing songs because I will know how to elicit specific emotions in my listeners. However, I must ensure that this process is more creative than it is analytical. It is a great idea to reference my notes on other songs, but my music needs to be mine; copying is not creating.