Sing On Guitar
May. 29, 2021
In the previous article, I wrote that there is an easier way than singing aloud, but it’s not really a method.
To tell the truth, I cannot explain the easier way itself. All I can explain is how I get it.
‘Singing aloud method’ has some drawbacks. I don’t have absolute pitch, so I can’t transcribe the notes I sang directly into staff notation. I have to play the same melody again on the guitar, but the pitch that I sang may not be easy to play on the guitar. Besides, singing in the living room is a little noisy and I’m sorry to my family.
Then what’s the easier way? It’s just compose on the guitar from the beginning. If I can do it, it’s easier, of course. But I couldn’t do it at first. So how did I come to be able to do it?
For my first song Oh! Italia, I picked up my guitar and started to compose with the guitar, but I couldn’t do it well and it took more than half a year to complete. But during that time, I wasn’t always concentrating on composing. Because I couldn’t do it well, so I got bored and quit in a few minutes.
What did I do after quit? Since I had a guitar in my arms, I played the songs I had learned so far, that is, the songs made by professional composers. It was more fun to play a completed song than to play my song, which wasn’t going to be completed at all. I was repeating like this day after day, so my composing did not progress at all.
One day I came up with the idea of “singing aloud”, and the melody finally became clear. Then, the composition became fun, and I was absorbed in arranging the melody with harmony and bass. Thus, not having a guitar in my arms allowed me to start composing music. And as the first result of it, my first song was completed, as the second result, I got the method “singing aloud”.
But, while I was so absorbed in composing, I seemed to have another result – “singing on the guitar”. This does not mean that I got used to ‘playing’ the guitar. I got used to ‘composing’ on the guitar. These two are quite different. In order to be able to compose music on the guitar from the beginning, some training is needed to overcome these two differences.
No matter what, if we are interested and train hard, the ability will improve. But, no matter how many times I played the songs in the books, it did not train me to compose. Rather, it was a negative factor that reduced the time to train composition and the seriousness to composition. I learned that holding a guitar to play is not the same as holding a guitar to compose.
So “the way to get easier composing way” is not to play the songs written by others. Never use the guitar for anything other than play the song that come out of your hands. Continue it even if you can’t do it well. The experience you’ve gained from playing guitar songs so far will help you. After half a year, your hands may have learned how to compose.
There is another nice thing about composing on the guitar. I can create melody, harmony, bass, and rhythm all at once. The harmonies make the song rich, the bass creates the mood of the song, and the rhythm gives lively feeling on the song. By playing them at the same time as well as the melody, I can get into the song and it help me compose.
In the composition of Sunflower Hill, as soon as I saw a photo of a sunflower field, the beginning part came out all at once. (Maybe it’s because I felt high after drinking alcohol).
⇒Sunflower Hill: Stuff Notation ↗️
It wasn’t such a well-formed song at the time, but it came out with harmony, bass and rhythm as well as melody. And unlike the voice, it was clear which sound was played, so I could easily write it on the staff notation. This is convenient!
But such a clear song doesn’t always come out suddenly like in Sunflower Hill, and it is usually a hazy song like the one below.
It needs a different approach to make the piece of song like this into a proper song. I will write about it one day, but in the next article, I’ll write about how I could sing on the guitar.
← Sing The Melody / Sing With Chord →
Photo by Frank on PhotoAC