Composing Music for Guitar

Many guitarists ask me how to compose for the guitar. Well, we are all players, right? We know the guitar pretty well, or at least we think we do. So why should it be difficult to write music for it?

Anybody who has tried knows. It’s just not that easy to make good music. It is far easier to become a virtuoso guitarist than an excellent composer. Proof is in the pudding – we are awash in technical chopsters but not in excellent composers for our instrument. Interesting. Why is this?

Well, composing music for classical guitar requires more than just a knowledge of chords, scales, and the fingerboard, even though these are clearly essential skills for composition. After decades of writing music for the instrument, I've come to believe that the deepest challenges of composition involve creativity, intuition, musical structure, and the relationship between our conscious and subconscious minds.

So why are there so many virtuoso players, but so few good composers for the instrument? The truth is, I don't know. But I have some ideas. First is, I don’t think it is the best approach to ask, “How do I compose for the guitar?” There are immediate limitations implied in the question. Better would be, “How can I create personal and authentic music that can be played on the guitar?” A very different question, with very different suppositions up front. Because first, we want to write music. And music is a big, abstract, ineffable part of being human. Music is unique among all art forms, it is fully abstract and points to nothing in the real world, unlike paintings, movies, stories, etc. It is a mystery, a language understood by our non-verbal emotional selves. Music can also be fun, danceable, humorous, light – but it is wise to at least have respect and some awareness of its highest aspect too. Why limit music’s power right at the start?

Music as Order

So, after decades of writing and thinking about all this, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. I see music as order – specifically, pattern-rich order. We think something is beautiful because we sense levels of rich and complex patterns that touch our emotions as our subconscious perceives hierarchical and multi-faceted interrelating patterns, often not perceived consciously. So, to be good, music has to be pattern-rich with rich patterns, or to put it another way, good music shows a high level of internal order. A couple of examples will suffice. Bear with me, I don’t speak (or write) in sound bytes. No complex or worthy idea can be expressed twitter-style.

Music as an Unfolding Process

Okay, a tree. We look at it, and it is pleasing. Why? I think because it is a frame of an algorithmic fractal process frozen in time. In other words, the form of a tree is an unfolding process. Its form expresses deep order, evolved over eons, that gives it structural integrity and viability over time. We sense all this in a moment, and perceive the richness of its patterns, extending both into the future and into the past, as beauty.

Music as Richness of Pattern

So if patterns are perceived by us as beautiful, why can’t we just stack one million iPhones in a grid, and see that as beautiful? Because it is not a rich pattern. It is simplistic, easily perceived and explained, both in words and equations – stack them 125 high and 8,000 across – and that’s it. Now, if every 17th iPhone was pulsing red, we introduce a hint of pattern complexity. Think about it. You look at a brick wall that is one hundred years old. It looks kind of nice. Probably because the bricks are irregular in shape a bit, and their coloring varies, the edges have worn to varying degrees – all these things add deeper and deeper components of pattern richness. Hence it looks more pleasing than a brand-spanking new brick wall, most likely.

Music is the same. Patterns within music can reside in the melodic contour, intervallic relations both vertical and linear, phrases, form, syntax, rhythmic structure, harmonic relationships, counterpoint, timbre – the list is endless, and so are the patternistic possibilities.

This is a problem with some (but not all) of current popular music (he says gruffly like every grey-beard throughout time criticizing the music of the present-day generation). But I can explain why - the richness of the patterns is being seriously eroded. When someone sings through auto-tune, there can be no extra patterns from using subtle pitch variations as another level of order. Just listen to Bob Marley. He often sang a bit sharp, and it added amazing tension and power to his expression. If he had sung through auto-tune it would have lobotomized the music. Same for direct repetition of a phrase by sampling. It goes nowhere, as there is no variation or evolution, unless it is carefully textured in, which it usually isn’t. Brand new bricks in a row.

Fingerboard Knowledge is Essential to Composing for Guitar

So now the guitar. To compose on it, you have to understand it. What did Charlie Parker say about improvising? “First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play.”

That is absolutely profound, a philosophy condensed into two succinct maxims. The same thing can be said for composing. The better you know the fingerboard, the better. Unfortunately, to really learn the fingerboard conceptually is a very different process from practicing repertoire, which many guitarists spend most of their time doing. A jazz player will know the fingerboard far better than a classical player, typically. So real effort must be made to understand harmony on the fingerboard. Without functional harmonic knowledge of the neck, writing well for the instrument is well nigh impossible. So if you want to write, or already do compose and want to be better at it for the guitar, spend some real time learning chords and inversions up and down and across the neck. This is a huge subject, and worthy of a separate discussion. To help teach composition, in my subscription website Andrew’s Den I do deep-dive explorations on understanding and using harmony on the fretboard. In the videos I discuss and demonstrate musical examples to help players open their personal process of acquiring real fingerboard knowledge.

Non-Linear Learning and Creativity

The world is a dream. We spend one-third of our lives sleeping, and a good portion of that dreaming - a world without limits, rules or boundaries. The vast majority of our personality is unconscious, and most of our processing, emotional and otherwise, takes place at levels far below and far richer than our conscious, intellectual minds. I say this because you have to enlist the larger parts of your personality if you want to write good music. Think about this – when an emotion surges up within you, it doesn’t originate in your intellect. Far from it, indeed. In fact, it threatens to engulf your intellect with forces far out of its domain. Now, the intellect believes it is in control. But in truth the intellect is a thin veneer of consciousness overlaying an ocean of profound depth, currents and mystery. If you want to make profound art, let it arise from the deeps. If your efforts at creation are centered only in the intellect, the results will be disappointing. Art derived from strictly intellectual thought rarely moves anyone, as it doesn’t contain evidence of our emotional depth and humanity. See, problem is many folks are trapped in their intellects and believe that that is all there is to themselves. Thus they will gladly accept and defend the output of others that is created from this veneer of the mind, as something they can relate to. All truly creative artists are immediately at odds with the status quo. Most fields exist to protect and propagate the established views. This of course is the antithesis of creativity. It is also human nature, and the guitar world is no exception. So there is an innate tension between creating art, and any structure that purports to represent that very art form. An examination of the protocols of the major guitar organizations today will confirm this.

The reason I am telling you this isn’t to disparage the state of affairs. The world was always this way, and always will be. But if you want to create, you have to listen to your own personal passions and interests, and largely ignore the opinions of others about your work. No one can truly judge the expressions of others, as art is an intensely personal expression of the self. But this means that the onus is on the artist to learn their craft in great depth to allow unfettered and authentic expression through their art. And, of course there will be times when advice from truly wise ones will come to you, which you should heed. But for the most part, criticism from others is not a helpful or accurate gauge of your work. A more reliable indicator of your music is this: If your music is responded to with lots of words and dry analysis, positive or negative, then you are probably not writing from the deep water. However, if the response to your music is authentically emotional, as in people expressing how it is there for them in moments of transition, how it enhanced their joy or helped them through their pain, how it made them want to learn guitar, how it changed or informed their lives – then I salute you. You are most likely on the path of an artist, and you are introducing richness into the world.

Intellect is a Tool in Composing, Not the Boss

After their journey within, all mystics come back with the same insight: “The world is one.” This is a concept that frustrates the intellect, because it is out of reach of linear thinking, and despite the left brain’s breathtaking self-confidence, it cannot think in gestalt wholes. None of this is to diminish the intellect or conscious mind’s importance. We must view the intellect as an invaluable tool in life, and also an essential ally in composing. We will let it help us compose; but we will not let it try to run the show. If you succeed in this, it is a recipe for music with the soul-stirring richness of pattern that only the non-verbal, non-linear parts of ourselves can bring to the table.

But how are we supposed to begin writing this way? I think the first thing is the way we approach our musical ideas. When casting about for thematic inspiration, it is best to look for ideas that you find fascinating, stirring, exciting. The kind of little melodic or harmonic fragment that just sounds so cool that it delights you, and you can’t wait to share it. Beware of musical ideas that you have to talk yourself into; if you have to convince yourself verbally of its worth, that is often a bad sign – the intellect is trying to talk you into something. But if your responses to the musical idea are feelings of mystery, deep interest, joy, introspection . . . then this shows a deeper emotional connection and a more powerful potential for producing compelling art. To me, when an idea is really interesting, it gives me the feeling of a doorway into another realm. This feeling can’t be verbalized. Well, it can, but then we are shifting our artistic focus into poetry or story writing. So, while in the abstract musical domain, beware of thinking too much. Feel it first, and then . . .

We invite the thinking mind into play. When we have a good theme that we find intriguing, now we ask the intellect to help. How can we sketch it? Where can it go? Augmentation, diminution, reharmonization, fragmentation, adding counterpoint, putting the melody in the bass? These ideas make the intellect very happy, because it requires thinking and analysis. So we begin to sketch and develop, often going far afield into styles or techniques that we won’t even use (because this helps keep us from building a box around our creativity).

Making Musical Decisions from Subconscious Cues

Now, we don’t let our thinking selves decide what is good, however. What I do is a simple ‘comfort test.’ If I play a phrase, or just hear it in my mind, I watch to see if I am comfortable with it. If anything about it bothers me, then it is not right, and I begin to sketch again. However, I don’t need to analyze it in words. That doesn’t take me anywhere I want to go with the music. It either feels right or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, begin to change it. If it does feel right, it is probably fine. The same approach will take you up to the finished piece. If you can play or think through the entire piece, and nothing feels wrong, then it might be done. If you feel, “the ending of the third phrase, something isn’t satisfying . . .” then that is a clear indicator that you must work and sketch some more. And this feeling of musical satisfaction will work at any hierarchical level, from needing to change a few notes in the contour of a phrase, to increasing the contrapuntal texture of an entire section to make the energy flow right, to the structure of the overall form of the piece. This is learning to trust subconscious cues for our musical decisions, paying attention to the ‘comfort quotient’ that arises from within when honestly assessing our musical ideas and choices. By trusting the deeper parts of our minds we often make much better musical decisions.

Rich Content Teaching

In Andrew’s Den I disassemble a multitude of pieces to describe the deeper structures within and the compositional processes that created the interwoven patterns that extend throughout the pieces. I call this kind of teaching ‘rich content teaching’, which feeds information in a non-linear way to our minds. This is the way we learn as children, and the way we always have our most significant ‘aha!’ moments, setting the stage for leaps in progress that can lead us to truer and deeper understanding. Linear teaching, while useful to a degree, is only functional in regards to a possible end result, where acquired information hopefully will result in a gestalt restructuring within the mind, making musical and spiritual growth happen and allow the new skills to emerge. But this happens, if it happens at all, despite the linear introduction of information, not because of it. I have found that ‘rich content’ teaching in the Den is far more effective for awakening deeper skills in a student than simple linear instruction, and that is why the majority of yearly subscribers to Andrew’s Den have remained in the Den for seven years now.

One more thing. It’s not just about the guitar, or even music. It’s about life. All true personal development on guitar (or any other instrument) is more about self-awareness than anything else. And music to me is inseparable from our journey through life. And that is what Andrew’s Den is all about.

I hope you enjoy each frame of the unfolding process.

Subconsciously yours,

Andrew York