Lost in Translation: Sketching Music
Lost in Translation:
Sketching Music
If you are a musician, composer or really anyone who works in a form of creative design, you will (hopefully!) be aware of making musical sketches. It’s a really useful tool and a valuable skillset to have in your creative arsenal. When it comes to sketching, there is scarcely any guidance on the best methods or of the benefits of doing it in the first place. I have been studying music now for the majority of my life, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that I started to pay attention to sketching and began to take it a lot more seriously. I have found that by refining your skillset in sketching, it’s possible to increase your overall workflow and efficiency. It’s a subtle skill, but one that can be used in a variety of different situations.
One could argue that there are many finer, more complex dimensions that represent sound and space and the solutions they represent. Music is a curious domain in that is able to represent ranges of non-spatial dimensions that are generally treated i.e. pitch, tempo, timbre etc. Giving the composer an opportunity to explore the more geometric, aesthetic and temporal ideas which are better suited to manual drafting. Contemporary technology, while effective, can sometimes be a hinderance. Sketching is able to aide the ambiguity that comes with an underdeveloped idea and facilitates the creative process and further analysis. All things considered, it is a way of describing and designing the fundamental structure of the piece.
Musical sketching is exactly what it sounds like. As a musician though, it’s not always the most practical thing to pop out some manuscript paper and start handwriting a score. The main constraint is time. The idea here is that in a situation where one may be stuck with an idea, it should be instinctual to jot it down and return to it later, the issue however can be with the information that is actually being taken down. Sketching is an important aspect of creative design and is the correlation between the hand drawn graphic notation and the compositional practice itself. It supports the vibrant interplay between the drawing pad, semantics and compositional approach in turn contributing to the revision and interpretation of your work. Sometimes in music the themes of ideas can me non-translatable to our normal language, which may require us to have a method of exploring these ideas in a way that exploits the multi-dimensionality of sound sketching. This way, manipulating the parallel relationships like relative position and orientation.
Musical sketching is useful for retaining ideas, exploring visual approaches to music and defining a grander structure and complexity. Unlike sketching in other creative mediums like architecture, art, games, clothing etc., musical sketching has an intricacy and dimensionality that other kinds of creative outputs don’t necessarily have. When sketching for music, there is a lot more to take into account like timbre, texture and space. This can be important when the visual information can simultaneously act as programme instructions. In serious design sketching, there is more of a focus on the abstract, where pertinent domains imply an arcane relationship with the sketching space. General aesthetics and temporal/thematic structures.
Sketching is admittedly beginning to find itself in a niche, with the technology available today able to support composers and musicians in creating a much more realistic sound for a fraction of the price and effort. Although, it wasn’t always this way. I think there's a certain physicality that bridges a more personal connection to the music that comes with sketching. Again, being a person who predominantly works visually, this is a really good way to diffuse information in a more digestible way.
Interestingly, the study found that the beginning stages of composition mirror those in other platforms of creative design. Sketching in this way could be seen as a sort of incubated hub for ideas. It’s an idiomatic process of sketching and revision, drawing from a vague initial idea, the abstract can be vital in developing such a process. Although not essential, sketching is a skill that is used by all and is an importantly beneficial element of composing.
As I mentioned briefly in one of my previous blogs, I’ve always found one of the hardest parts of the writing process to be the very first step. It’s likely typical for composers or producers that the eagerness to get started on a project might leave too many options available. The difficulty lies in improvised, rambling musical ideas. Compositionally, that would hopefully be a natural process by this stage, but it’s choosing what is an effective, flexible and unique idea. In a lot of ways it is easy to compare musical sketching to an artist’s sketch. Taking the essential details - form, structure and maybe focussing on the one or two elements to render in further detail.
A Leap of Faith
Trust you judgements and the value of your work. It’s in the nature of sketching that it is not a detailed, refined idea. So, try not to concern yourself too much with the finer details. Sketching is time efficient but lacks the smaller, intricate details that will eventually unify the piece. So it’s important that when sketching, the main focus is filtering the most informative details and leaving out the irrelevant information. Generally, try to ensure that you will actually be able to fill in the blanks later. It’s really only with practice, trial and error that polishes your process, which will be different for everyone.
Set your Scope
Setting your own limitations will improve your workflow and will reduce the amount of choices you have. Limiting choices may seem like a backwards approach but by reducing the amount of possible paths to choose from, you can save valuable creative mental energy. As mentioned in my last blog (which can be read here.) Having material to work with, is easier than working with nothing. This way you have something that is relative to the proposed finished project, a have perspective and material for moulding. So, by the the time you are closing in on a finished piece, it should become exponentially easier to finish. Well, the piece hasn’t actually gotten easier per se. It’s just that the amount of choices you can take has been reduced. Try limiting the length, structure, instrumentation, tonality or set your own specific restrictions. The idea is that you will know what you don’t want, and tend to have too much option to choose from.
Imagine slipping a coin. A moment before you observe the face of the coin, in turn breaking the probability of either heads or tails, you will have had an inner revelation of which side you do not want it to land on. So before revealing the result, you will ultimately already have decided.
Pack Light
Composing is mentally tasking. There is a lot of creative focus (at times frustration) that blindly drives us. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Writing down what you think is relevant, only to look back and wonder why you ever thought these squiggles of half words and half notation was a good idea.
Ideally, don’t save things that can be readily pulled up at any moment. Focus on unique characteristic traits, that will give your piece it’s individuality. Pick an odd interval, create an odd rhythm, add sting chords to standard progressions or play with instrumentation.
Learn how to shorthand your writing, only taking critical information or using information in a way that can be easily translated. It can be good to work from other people systems, but to be honest I’ve always found it more beneficial to come up with a system that works for you personally. Create a sort of key or methodology for approaching a given project.
We have the tendency to procrastinate when it comes to daunting projects, understandably. However, facing the biggest challenges head on, will make it easier to manage your time and focus better in the long run. Be careful not to confuse the more challenging elements of your work with tasks that will seep your creative energy but leave you with no complete, satisfactory idea.
Finish.
Create and complete. A finished project is a finished project, an unfinished project is an open book.