How To Travel From World-To-World In Song

If you’re a musician you might be asking yourself: “What does he mean by traveling from ‘world-to-world?’” Well that’s a good question and I have a simple answer for that. Let me share with you a recent discovery I happened upon while banging on the keys (that’s “playing the piano” in music-speak) and trying to come up with a song.

I’ve gone through 6 years of formalized Western Classical music training and 4 years of Ethnomusicology studies and for whatever reasons, I never picked up a thing about the musical elements of structure, motifs, and dynamics in any piece or composition. If it came to my own songwriting, I hardly ventured out into a different key and mostly stayed in one, differentiating sections by production or instrumental arrangements instead. I mean, in theory I knew about those elements but I hadn’t grown into them until very recently.

So as I dabbled on the keys some ideas here and there to try and transition from section to section (perhaps with an intention to escape my boredom of creating songs in a mono-key structure), I accidentally hit a bass note that was a relative 4th that did not belong to any of the notes in the key but was based on one of the octave notes in that key. For instance if I’m playing in the key of F Major (which only has a B flat in that key), but I move to an E flat (that does not exist in the key of F) from a B flat I had just played, I’ve successfully transitioned from one key, or world, to another without it sounding weird.

Now I’m not the most savvy when it comes to explaining music theory (even if it’s my own music), but play out the bass notes and you’ll hear what I mean. Add some chords to those bass notes and you’ll amplify your scope of understanding by listening to the full spectrum of the music.

This is a very basic example of what I mean by traveling from “world-to-world” but if you try this, you’ll soon gain a whole new experience into music composition as well as simple music appreciation. In essence, you’re moving outside of your original key, or outside of your world, by moving into that E flat, which changes the sound seamlessly into a new E flat Major while giving you the flexibility to come back to your original F Major.

Needless to say, this was an ear-opening experience for me and provided me a renewed appreciation for past musical greats that didn’t have technologies like sampling and sound engineering to alter the timbre of their instruments. They worked with what they had. And in a sense I worked backwards by relying on technologies to structure my sound. Now I’ve got the greats to stand on their shoulders to integrate my future sound fusing my present technological recordings with their past arrangement innovation.

By: Jay Wang