Thoughts on theme and variation

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Thoughts on theme and variation

Postby NightmareRare » 06 Jan 2015 21:59

Hey ma brony and pegasistas!

I was just cruising the forums and noticed that a lot of people were wondering how to make there melodie/bass lines/harmonys sound less repeditive and more interesting. So I though I would share my thoughts about this awesome little piece of music theory called theme and variation :D

So I've been experimenting with differnt applications for it for about a month an found out... It's the shiznit!
Working with it has defiantly added a useful new hammer to my tool kit, it was originaly ment to be used on longer themes (8,16,32 bar ect) but I found after some playing around it can be used down to the motifs in a bar or even with metric cycles!
Basically all you do is create a "theme" this can be anything from a bar of piano to 32 bars of wubby madness, then you copy and change it. Add notes, take notes, add bass, remove harmony, change drums, you can do anything so long as the core idea of the theme remain at least remotely visable. Doing this help a lot if your like me and have some trouble maintaining a groove through out your songs.
As you can see its so simple yet so effective a composition method that had awesome results, personaly I found electronic music to benifits the most from this but other genres can still rock it to great effect.

Try it out! Play with it, you'll get some intresting results!
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