etude #7

This one was tricky. I think it would’ve been helpful to have one or two exercises to play around with rhythm & percussion first, before this one which feels like it’s really pushing you to think outside the box wrt musical phrases, harmony, and percussion.

But, I did the best I could. I did more experimenting & trying things out this time, which was helpful for starting to get the hang of percussion. It was hard to find resources on how to write for drums – two answers to that question I found basically went “find a drummer, and tell them what you want” (basically, get a drummer to improvise for you).

Eventually I stumbled upon drum cadences, though. Which, confusingly, don’t have anything to do with the music theory term “cadence”. Drum cadences are basically whole pieces of music written for drum lines, and studying those were immensely useful to starting to wrap my head around writing for drums. With that, and a couple other resources I found that helped, I set out to start composing a question and answer purely in percussion.

I’m actually going to skip the sheet music this time, since I don’t really know how to write it with ABC notation

Anyways, once I got a passage I liked, I used the rhythm of the question as reference to write a harmony question using the same pattern. This ended on the dominant, making it feel unresolved, and even though I couldn’t resolve it in the traditional way (ending on the tonic) because of the constraints of the exercise, I feel like I did an okay job.

All told, while I don’t love this piece, I do feel like I learned a lot, so it was a success in that regard.

• Etude 2.3 - percussion.mp3