Hi everyone, I’m new to this path, namely writing tracks for someone. I got a rejection on the quality of the track, but I still can not understand what the problem is. Tell me, who is not hard.
https://soundcloud.com/defaultboys/to-yearn
Welcome to audiojungle! Good on you to post your track after a rejection, trying to learn how to improve is the way to succeed.
I can feel the desire to express emotions through your music and this is a good foundation upon which you can build in the future step by step. Here are a few steps I would suggest you’d take to make the communication of your emotions through music much more effective:
- Learn about structure by analyzing a song on audiojungle you like and reading music theory on that matter. The structure of your song is not very clear.
- Learn about writing melodies. This is directly linked to knowing the basics of structure. Common structures for melodies are the sentence and the period. Of equal importance is the arrangement of consonance vs. dissonance (your melody includes quite unsettling dissonances that were not prepared. Preparation is nothing to be done all the time but you can educate your ear to notice when and when not it is necessery). Also, your melody has quite drastic dynamic changes from piano to fortissimo which do not sound properly motivated.
- Learn about harmony. The fact you chose a repeating pattern tells me, that you are not confident in choosing harmonies. Harmony and structure also go hand in hand (as everything does in music).
- Learn about arrangement/orchestration. This arrangement of a high pitched solo piano lyrical melody above lower block chords sounds empty if you aim for a natural sounding piano mix as you did. Also the string chords come in and go out at moments that are structurally not justified (=> it sounds random). Arrangement and structure is linked. If you had introduced the strings on a very dramatic high or low in your melody and at a harmonically relevant point, it would not sound as random. Here you just introduced the strings in the middle of a decending melody.
- Learn about mixing: I get what you went for emotionally. The lyrical high pitched piano melody may be effective if mixed correctly. The natural piano sound is just too thin to go against all the base and lower chords.
As a hobbyist who started in a place quite like you did, I can assure you that not giving up and learning yields improvement all by it self. I also know that the concept of “learning the theory” sounds extremely boring. I wish that I had started earlier learning and not just following my uneducated ear, so if you really are into music, get a book on harmony, get a book on counterpoint, get a book on form and read a few pages every week. (Recommendations for free pdf books: Schoenberg Harmony, Preliminary Excercises on Counterpoint and Fundamentals of Musical Composition)
Every written note matters. Nothing should be superfluous.
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Thank you very much, now everything has become much clearer for me than before, I’ll get better! Thanks again.