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Music Composition For Dummies | 
 enlarge | Authors: Scott Jarrett, Holly Day
Publisher: For Dummies
Category: Book
List Price: $21.99
Buy New: $7.17
You Save: $14.82 (67%)
New (45) Used (16) from $6.33
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 33849
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0470224215
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780470224212
ASIN: 0470224215
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Want to turn that haunting tune in your head into an awesome sound in your ear? You can! Music Composition For Dummies demystifies the process of composing music and writing songs. It guides you through every step of writing your own music, from choosing the right rhythm and tempo to creating melodies and chord progressions and working with instruments and voices. In this fun and practical guide, you’ll learn how to match keys and chords to the mood you want to convey, work a form without limiting your creativity, and hammer out a musical idea, even when your mind is drawing a blank. You’ll find out how to create popular songs, classically structured pieces, and even film, TV, and video game soundtracks. And, you’ll learn what you need to know about music composition software, including Finale, Sebelius, Pro Tools, and more. Discover how to: - Preserve and organize your musical ideas
- Work with established chord progressions or create your own
- Develop great rhythms
- Select the right instruments
- Find melodies in your head, your instrument, and the world around you
- Use major and minor scales
- Work with modes and moods
- Build melodic motifs and phrases
- Use the circle of fifths to harmonize
- Write for multiple voices
- Make a demo recording
Filled with creative exercises to build your composing skills, Music Composition for Dummies is the resource you need to get that melody out of your head and into the world.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Always More To Learn--Different Perspectives Are Good December 1, 2008
Great book! I always learn something and enjoy myself immensely when reading something new or talking with someone about composition or music in general. It is such a deep and wonderful subject that it can never be exhausted. There is a ton of stuff in this book! Whenever I want to learn a "thing" I like to approach it from as many different angles and perspectives as possible and Scott Jarrett (as well as Holly Day) definitely has some cool new insights and interesting ways of looking at things. Any editing mishaps are easily attributable to horrendous deadlines and first edition gremlins. Bravo!
 An oversimplification that gets things wrong June 17, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is possible to teach music composition to dummies but you have to sacrifice a lot of detail. However, one shouldn't sacrifice correctness, and that's precisely what happens in this book, at least as far as classical music is concerned. With all the mistakes I spotted in the book, I was unwilling to learn whatever it had to teach about genres I'm not knowledgeable about, because I can't tell if that also has mistakes.
To give just one example, this is how the book describes the development section in sonata form on page 148: "The development often sounds like it belongs in an entirely different piece of music altogether -- it is usually in a different key and may have a different time signature than the exposition." If it sounds like it belongs in a different piece, wouldn't it make sense to put it in a different piece? Would it have been that hard to write something like "The development uses the same themes from the exposition but put together in different ways in different rhythms and keys"?
The very first thing that had me wondering whether anyone knowledgeable about music proofread this book is Figure 7-2 on page 71, "Beethoven's four-note exclamatory motif in his Symphony No. 5 (Opus 67)." The key is wrong and the beaming is wrong, for starters. And the interval? It does occur in Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, but not at the beginning, which is what the writers were probably trying to quote.
This book could be usable in a classroom, where you have a teacher who can explain anything that is misleading or just plain wrong in this book. But I wouldn't recommend it for self-instruction.
 A short course in a long subject May 13, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Music Composition for Dummies is much more than a basic music theory book or a collection of musical ideas. Most folks who have enough theory behind them to be able to create music could use a little help in finding inspiration, techniques, and background to implement their creations. This book focuses on that aspect of composition. The authors' style of composition is not forced on the reader, but a variety of techniques and resources are offered which will assist you in finding your voice and enhancing your creativity.
As a long-suffering play-by-ear guitarist, the section on scales and modes was especially helpful. When I have used scales other than the few I am comfortable with, I tend to sound like I'm simply running the scale. The exercises in this section helped me find melodies in those scales and made the "Circle of Fifths" into more of a tool than a mystical phrase often used, but rarely comprehended. The section titled "Finding Melody in Your Instrument" was particularly useful in helping me break old habits in chord progressions and intervals. Chapter 9, "Harmonizing with Melodies," added even more to that pallet.
I doubt that I'll ever writing anything worthy of actual orchestration, but the section on "Composing for the Standard Orchestra" gave me insight into writing for instruments that I rarely experience outside of others' recordings. I usually use synthesizers for my orchestral instruments, but the formal background provided by this chapter enhances my ability to use those artificial instruments in a more natural setting.
There is a lot of practical information about writing for a variety of markets, from commercial jingles to orchestras. Scott Jarrett has a broad background in many areas of musical composition (including every one of the styles described in the book) and his experience in creating, notating, and producing music for these genres shines through the text.
A previous reviewer mistook "industrial music" for the little heard and rarely interesting popular form, but the authors' were commenting on a different subject: "not the dance music, but the music of the working world that is used for specific, usually commercial, purpose." I have no clue where that reviewer found the link to rap, but you have to wonder what some folks are writing about in their reviews. The same goes for the weird take on "random notes." Read the book, you'll find that there is a time for randomness and a time for scale-based melody. Enough said.
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