Day 2 -4: am I a thief???
I’ve been playing non-stop with the new keyboard, the last few days. I finally got some inspiration yesterday and came up with a decent chord progression.
Ever since I learned the basics of music mode theory, I find it easy to know when I’m ripping off some song I already know or when I honestly haven’t heard this combination before.
I struggle a lot with chord progressions because my goal is to make new music, new sounds that hopefully no one has ever heard before. And it’s hard to do that when there is so much music out there. Lots of people are making music every day, and they encounter the same patterns over and over. That is why pop music sounds mostly the same and you can do things like this:
Perhaps it’s foolish of me to try and make every aspect of my music as original and unique as possible. I will try not to focus this much on chord progressions in the future, and just try to take common sound and make them unique in other ways.
Yesterday I began to play this new chord progression (B — C# — D# — F# in the key of B Lydian), I added some drums and nice piano riff on top. and that was it. I’m pretty ok with the result, and although it’s not nearly done, I do see some potential.
At the time I thought I had not heard this chord progression before, but today I woke with some other song stuck in my head:
As you can probably guess the chord progression is very similar (B — C# — D# in the key of D# major) to mine.
What I learned from this is that you can never be 100% original. You will always take inspiration from somewhere (intentionally or unintentionally). And the art of making music lies in taking something that is already there and making it your own, in any way you can.
