(Part 2) Best music composition books according to redditors

Yay! I love pop, and I try to produce pop from time to time. IMO, what makes pop different from "normal" EDM is the vocal arrangements, the vocals have such a major position in the mix and the arrangement that you can't afford to get it wrong. Listen to Die Young by Ke$ha for example, so much detail in the vocal production.

This focus on vocals also adds a whole new dimension to the songwriting - you have to be a great songwriter (music as well as lyrics) as well as a great producer to make good pop music.

Many pop producers them are also accomplished musicians which is clearly evident in their tracks, e.g. frequently recording live instruments. Calvin Harris does this too, his songs is so much more than just a couple of VST's. I'm not saying this is necessary to make good music, it just adds something special.

My top 3 in pop producers: Dr. Luke, Max Martin, and Shellback (video of him playing the Moves like Jagger riff)
. Check out their production credits and get blown away!

Edit: I recommend this book for those who are interested in common songwriting techniques and tips.

If you think you are ready for some heavier academic writing on music theory, here's how you can get into it:

1. Music Theory Online, the free, peer-reviewed journal created by the Society for Music Theory. It's convenient and very legit. Some articles have animations, videos, and sound linked right there.
   
2. Look at the award-winning publications list on the Society for Music Theory website. If something piques your interest, get it! Either from Amazon or from a university library (or really, really good public library).
   
3. If you go to university, you probably have access to JSTOR—a huge database of academic articles, including articles about music theory—through your university's library website. The big journals are Music Theory Spectrum and Journal of Music Theory. You can also check out Intégral, Theory and Practice, Perspectives of New Music, Music Perception, and way more on JSTOR.
   
   I would also recommend getting familiar with counterpoint and set theory, if you haven't already! My recommended books on counterpoint are by Robert Gauldin, A Practical Approach to 18th-century Counterpoint and the 16th-c. version as well. It's called "a practical approach" because Gauldin does not teach via the species method. (I tend to find species unrelated, anyway—species counterpoint is a good and important exercise, but not exactly the same idea as 16th- or 18th-c. writing.) For set theory, I recommend Joe Straus's Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. It's expensive for such a small book; unfortunately, this is a fact of life for any book about 20th- and 21st-c. music, since copyright laws make publishing them quite expensive. You might be able to find older editions for cheaper.

Without question, the best way to learn how to arrange is to put in the work transcribing some of your favorite arrangers and dissecting the way they approach things.

Study the chord progressions they use and analyze their voicing. Break down how they use counterpoint vs. countermelody. Pay attention to how they use every single voice, common articulations, and where in the range do they have each part "live" (1st vs. 2nd vs 3rd).

Write down what you observe about how they do things, try to put it into words. Compare/contrast between arrangers. This will help you better internalize what they are doing and help you to find your own style.

But...

Before doing any of this, however, I suggest to read, read, read. Here are a few books to get your started:

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The Study of Counterpoint - Johann Joseph Fux

https://www.amazon.com/Study-Counterpoint-Johann-Joseph-Parnassum/dp/0393002772/

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Contemporary Counterpoint: Theory & Application - Beth Denisch

https://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Counterpoint-Theory-Application-Music/dp/0876391838

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Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony - Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky

https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Practical-Study-Harmony-Dover-ebook/dp/B00DGBMH06

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Principles of Orchestration - Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Orchestration-Dover-Books-Music-ebook/dp/B00DGBMDNM

​

Essential Dictionary of Orchestration - Dave Black & Tom Gerou

https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Dictionary-Orchestration-Comprehensive-Orchestrators-ebook/dp/B00EUMY7LC

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Treatise on Instrumentation - Hector Berlioz & Richard Strauss

https://www.amazon.com/Treatise-Instrumentation-Dover-Books-Music-ebook/dp/B00DGBMN8C

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Arranging for Horns - Jerry Gates

https://www.amazon.com/Arranging-Horns-Jerry-Gates/dp/0876391455/

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Another excellent resource is Bandestration - https://bandestration.com/

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BONUS:

Another great read that is HIGHLY applicable to writing for marching music is:

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Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics

https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Musical-Acoustics-Second-Revised/dp/048626484X

​

If you are interested to explore interplay between wind/percussion arranging and electronics:

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Acoustic and MIDI Orchestration for the Contemporary Composer - Andrea Pejrolo

https://www.amazon.com/Acoustic-MIDI-Orchestration-Contemporary-Composer/dp/113880150X/

​

>It's perhaps the least romantic gift ever

Hahahahaha! I would definitely agree, though—I think the CHWMT would be an excellent book. If she goes through any sort of History of Theory course (which most PhD programs do), I can't imagine she wouldn't use this book. Even if she didn't have such a course, this book is a collection of (with perhaps one exception) excellent essays written by top scholars on almost every major theoretical approach or issue in the history of Western music.

I won't speak for other sub-disciplines—vornska's suggestions are definitely some of the central books in present theoretical studies—but let me make some suggestions for books more oriented towards Schenkerian analysis.

Schenker's Free Composition — this is Schenker's magnum opus in which he lays out his mature theory. For any Schenkerian, this is definitely a Bible of sorts, and a must-have. Just be sure, if you end up purchasing this, to get both volumes; one volume is the text and the second is the examples. You can also find the hardcover first English edition, sometimes even for less than the price of the two paperbacks.

Cadwallader and Gagné's Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach — this has become the standard textbook for teaching Schenkerian analysis, and I still find myself referring to it after years of Schenkerian studies. A somewhat dry but very clear and beneficial book.

Schachter's Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis — Carl Schachter is one of the greatest Schenkerians; nearly everybody who's anybody in the world of Schenkerian analysis studied with him. This book is a wonderful collection of some of his greatest essays. His writing style is exceptional and his analysis are some of the best I've seen.

These are both UK based, but The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records was quite interesting bc it explains what was going on culturally/historically for each song/time period, and explains why things became popular when they did.
The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters made me interested in a few artists I previously didn't really care a whole lot about, as well as reinforcing why I care about certain others.

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, Guide to the Practical Study of Harmony

Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition

Music Composition For Dummies

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Composition

Music Composition 1: Learn how to compose well-written rhythms and melodies (Volume 1)

More at Amazon.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/Composition/

If you want a general, but very broad (it's a huge fucking book ~1200pgs) overview check out The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads. If you have a strong math background and really want to get into the nuts and bolts of digital sound check out The Audio Programming Book by Richard Boulange. For something sort of in the middle Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance by Charles Dodge. I took a two years of sound design / engineering at a UC campus. These were the three books we referenced most.

Actually, wiki is a pretty good resource here. People have been doing speech synthesis for a really surprisingly long time, and doing pretty well at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis

As for your question about "Sss" vs. "Shh", it is actually amazing that our brains are so good at fuzzy logic that they are able to not only distinguish between these sounds, but even understand them over a radio with limited bandwidth or from someone who is heavily accented. The actual waveform difference is a matter of filtering different frequencies. The "sss" has lots of very high-frequency content, while the "shh" is much lower.

If you're not familiar, Charles Dodge wrote like the manual for synthesis. Don't be put off by the title, many of the techniques are applicable outside of computers:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Music-Synthesis-Composition-Performance/dp/0028646827

http://www.amazon.com/Serial-Composition-Atonality-Introduction-Schoenberg/dp/0520074300/


http://www.amazon.com/Serialism-Cambridge-Introductions-Arnold-Whittall/dp/0521682002/

A lot has already been said that needed to be said, but I want to add that little bits of writing everyday goes a long way. Like training for a long race, building up your creative stamina bit by bit will give you a lot of ability when sitting down to write.

There aren't a whole lot of inspiring books on composition, but reading books by composers (ex Schoenberg, Hindemeth, Messaien, etc...) will give you an interesting insight into their creative process. I'd also recommend The Muse that Sings which is a nice collection of interviews from major living composers who talk about their processes as well.

Other than that, learn theory/form, analyze a lot of music that you like, and learn instrumentation. The rest will be up to you.

Some of my favorites:

Messaien - The Techniques of my Musical Language

Straus - Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory

Ross - The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Chinen - Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century

Gottschalk - Experimental Music Since 1970

Perle - Serial Composition and Atonality

Xenakis - Formalized Music: Thought a d Mathematics in Music

Mann - The Study of Fugue

There are a few books by an author named Jonathan E Peters on Amazon that have been very, very beneficial to me (the first time I learned about tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chord substitution, for example). I haven't read all of these, but the ones I have read are amazing:

• Music Composition 1: Learn how to compose well-written rhythms and melodies (Volume 1)
  
  
• Music Composition 2
  
  
• Music Theory: An in-depth and straight forward approach to understanding music
  
  
• Fundamentals of Writing Four-part Harmony
  
  If you're looking for more advanced theory, Rick Beato's YouTube channel has a ton of videos on really intense theory. He also has a book, The Beato Book, but I just started reading it so I can't vouch for how good it is yet.

I've played a decent amound of rock, (mostly into Wilco, Sufjan type stuff) and I feel that playing Bach helped me a lot for writing memorable parts with good voice leading. It's mostly about giving yourself a solid harmonic framework to go off of. Like building a house... you can kinda do whatever you want with the decorations, but the framework and structure has to be there. Bach gives us that framework, even for rock/pop/jazz (to an extent).

Some things of his that might help you for guitar parts: his solo violin (and solo cello) stuff. He was able to coax polyphonic sounds and a sense of harmony out of two instruments which are mostly monophonic, and you really learn how to write a good melody. For two-part structure (bass+melody, the most important voices), check out his Inventions, and for 3-part, check out the French Suites. For heavier stuff, check out the Well-Tempered Clavier or B Minor Mass. It's mostly about being aware of how you're moving the voices, and how your parts are moving melodically... thinking of harmony as melody.

Obviously, there's a huge difference between Bach and something like funk or afrobeat, which are groove-based, but I think studying him is really helpful for writing parts that "just fit" with the rest of the band, or knowing how to keep strong harmonic structure with minimal instrumentation (solo, duo, etc).

Some other books to maybe consider:

Exploring Jazz Arranging (He also talks about Bach)

Contemporary Counterpoint

Tonal Counterpoint for the 21st Century Musician

Voice Leading: The Science Behind a Musical Art

Thank you :)

I've been reading this book and trying to get better at songwriting so I can maybe do something with my voice someday. I'm too old to be a pop star, but maybe easy listening!

Maybe start here for an extensive overview of literature and software: algorithmic.net

A pretty good book on algorithmic composition: Algorithmic Composition: Paradigms of Automated Music Generation

There's also a book available for athenaCL, a "modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition system in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment" written by its creator Christopher Ariza, but I've not read it yet. It looks to be quite in-depth and much needed considering the complex nature of the athenaCL system.

There is a book called "Song Starters" by Robin Frederick that addresses this.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAB6G4W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

What I've always tried to get across whether it's writing or painting or composing, if you say to someone "Paint me something," they'll be frozen by options paralysis.

But if you tell someone "Paint me a picture of an apartment building at night," . . . well that "restriction" is ironically very "freeing."

Good luck.

The ones that I felt were the most comprehensive and not so boring were these: and I recommend using them in this order:

https://www.amazon.com/Producing-Music-Ableton-Quick-Guides/dp/1480355100/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652098&sr=8-3&keywords=ableton+books

https://www.amazon.com/Interactive-Composition-Strategies-Using-Ableton/dp/0199973822/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652133&sr=8-1&keywords=interactive+composition

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Mixing-Mastering-Ableton-Guides/dp/1480355119/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1483652098&sr=8-2&keywords=ableton+books

I went through a handful more than this but those three probably helped me the most. Notable mention is Ableton Live 9 Power! But I found it to be really boring.

You could just go with the first book and it would be a fantastic step in the door to Ableton. Interactive Composition is the most fun but it's definitely less thorough. The last book is just if you want to go even deeper into using Ableton, it just shows more of Abletons uses for mixing. It basically starts off right where the first book ends. It's also shorter than the first so it's pretty quick to get through.

This guy's books explains it better than anything else I've read. He has a corresponding online course as well. Really, it's just great at giving you a vocabulary for analyzing music. That way, after you've transcribed something you like, you can analyze the methods the composer used.

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Composition-1-Jonathan-Peters-ebook/dp/B00I9JF3PG/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1518845768&sr=8-16&keywords=music+composition

Physics helps develop an understanding of acoustics, but I'm not sure that it can account for musical phenomena in the way that music theory can. For instance, as far as I know, you can't determine whether there is an EEC deferral in a sonata exposition through the tools physics provides.

There are musical applications of mathematics, however. Group theory, geometry, topology all have a spot. I point you toward the following:

Guerino Mazzola et al:

• The Topos of Music I: Theory: Geometric Logic, Classification, Harmony, Counterpoint, Motives, Rhythm
  
  
• The Topos of Music II: Performance: Theory, Software, and Case Studies
  
  
• The Topos of Music III: Gestures: Musical Multiverse Ontologies
  
  
• Cool Math for Hot Music: A First Introduction to Mathematics for Music Theorists
  
  
• Musical Creativity: Strategies and Tools in Composition and Improvisation
  
  John Clough and Jack Douthett:
  
  
• Maximally Even Sets
  
  Jack Douthett and Peter Steinbach:
  
  
• Parsimonious Graphs: A Study in Parsimony, Contextual Transformation, and Modes of Limited Transposition
  
  Neo-Riemannian theory, as represented by Richard Cohn, David Lewin and Brian Hyer, can get a little mathy. Also look into the work of Dmitri Tymoczko.

A few items you might consider reading but honestly, picking up one good general introduction to post-tonal music would be more than enough to get you started. These links are just to get you started on ypur hunt; you can find many of these for waaaay cheaper than the listed price. And there's always libraries.

Strauss's Introduction to Post-Tonal Music Please choose this text first, it's just divine. Like seriously, if you read nothing else on this list or in this post/thread, please read this book. Please!

Persichetti's 20th Century Harmony

Kostka's Materials and Techniques of Post-Tonal Music

An old lecture(?) on serial materials by Fields

Schoenberg's serial Odyssey by Haimo

Krenek's treatise on counterpoint

Serial Composition and Atonality by Perle

And the various essays and articles by Babbit.

As for how exactly to get started. I would pick up the Strauss book and read about both pitch-class set theory (really important!) and serialism. It will give you a very nice overview of the techniques in question. Honestly, it's some of the easiest music theory I've ever learned so this step shouldn't take long.

Realize that no two serial composers approached serialsim the same way. Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Boulez, Babbit, Stockhausen, Nono, Seeger, Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Krenek, Wuorinen, and Lutyens all approach it differently with equally different results.

I say this because you absolutely must listen to these various styles in action. Your likes and dislikes here, combined with theoretical knowledge will help you decide how you want to approach 12-tone composition. The people over at r/classicalresources have made spotify playlists for 20th century music or you might just work your way through listening to the piece from this wiki list. >!Okay I lied, you should listen to this advice as well!<

From there, I would recommend, if you can, find journal articles or dissertations on your favorite pieces/composers so you can really dig into analyzing them, so to speak. Not everyone's a theory wonk though so I would understand if you don't deep dive anytime soon :p

And the entire time you're doing that, write some etudes. Experiment with the various serial techniques like derived rows, combinatoriality, partitioning, multi-dimensional set presentations, set multiplication, rotations, reordering, multiple independent rows, etc.

But whatever else you do, please feel free to ask more questions here. The more specific, obviously, the better able we'll be to help you (There's genuinely nothing I love more than a well-honed question!) This was a very quick and dirty reply and I'm positive one of our Benefic Legend-Keepers will have something to add but I do hope it at least gets you started.

Have fun serailizing and take care! I'd love to see and hear what you come up with!

>!Maybe one of these days, I'll work up the gumption to start a thread about tone row design and application. Maybe.!<

I really like the tactical approach in Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting: 126 Proven Techniques for Writing Songs That Sell

My suggestion would be to take the approach that Robin has and break songwriting down into actionable tactics. You can borrow her tactics, but the best thing to do is listen to tons and tons of songs and start creating your own conceptual framework for understanding the mechanics of songwriting. Everyone hears songs differently, so you should really focus on developing and refining how you understand songs. Then it becomes much easier to deploy the tactics that resonate and come natural to you in your own writing.

I'm a tech house producer and I spend 90 - 120 minutes a day analyzing songs, so I can apply the techniques I extract to my own productions. Every day I discover something new and I get more nuanced with my ideas. It's starting to translate into my productions as well.

I found Robert Gauldin's books on 16th & 18th-Century Counterpoint very easy to read and fairly inexpensive.

i suggest you read this if you want to learn about serialism

also, reading Schönberg's essays will show you the artistic intent

read about expressionism as an artistic movement to understand its aesthetic goals

i personally can't improvise a fugue, does that make it noise? difficulty of a style doesn't make it noise, it makes it challenging, not all of us like living life in easy mode

The best way to learn Max is kind of a tricky subject and I'm sure the other people on here would be able to suggest some more ways, but here are a few that have helped me out:

1. Read the built-in tutorials. They're listed under the Help section as Max tutorials, MSP tutorials, and Jitter tutorials. In case you don't know, Max deals with data and was primarily designed to handle interactions with MIDI. It's grown to encompass more data structures, but MIDI is where it really shines. I'd recommend doing this one first to get a feel for what Max is all about. MSP is audio rate processing and the kind of thing that you're doing now. Jitter is all about matrix operations (linear algebra if you have any experience with that) and is primarily used for processing video and images, though there's a lot of really awesome stuff that you can do with audio from Jitter.
   
2. Watch some of the Delicious tutorials on YouTube. Some of them might be more advanced, but they're really helpful and he teaches you how to make some really awesome stuff. From what I know of the guy that makes them, he has some really impressive credentials.
   
3. Get ideas for projects and hack them together. One of the more fun things about Max is that there are many ways to solve the same problem. Having the ability to go from idea to prototype to working implementation is really useful when you start using Max in a professional (whatever that word means in this context) setting. The ideas can be something like a simple synthesizer, a looping pedal, or an audio effect. Something a friend of mine and I used to do was to pick an audio pluggin that we liked and try to replicate it in Max.
   
4. Pick a topic to focus on and do a few projects in that vein. There are so many different things that you can do with Max that it's worthwhile to get really good at a particular topic. You might want to only build synths for a while. Or, you might be more of an effect guy/girl. Max will do both really well and a bunch of other things too.
   
5. Solve programming puzzles in Max. Remembering that Max is a programming language, try and solve some common programming puzzles that people normally use to learn other programming languages. A quick google search should reveal quite a few of them, but a few more simple ones would be something like getting the Nth Fibonnacci number or reversing a string. Not all of these exercises would be of benefit, but doing a few will really give you a sense of how data flows in Max and what it does well versus what it does badly. For instance, passing numbers around in Max is really easy while dealing with strings can be a real hassle at first.
   
6. This one isn't Max specific, but if you don't already have it, get a grasp on the basic concepts of electronic music and digital signal processing (at least as it relates to audio). Learn about the different forms of audio synthesis such as additive, subtractive, and granular. Learn how sound is represented in the computer. Learn about the basics of filters and what they do to sound. Learn how to implement common audio effects using basic DSP building blocks such as filters and delays. Getting a firm grounding in this kind of stuff will keep you from being what a I refer to as a "knob-twittler electronic musician" or someone who just blindly twists knobs on a synth until something sounds good. Note that there's nothing wrong with this approach and there are many good musicians who make beautiful art with it. But, as Morton Subotnick is fond of pointing out, this approach leaves you completely at the mercy of the people who build the tools that you are using. Max is about a different paradigm, one in which you build your own tools.
   
   Here are a few books that have helped me out in the past:
   
   

• Composing Interactive Music by Todd Winkler
  
  
• Max/MSP/Jitter for Music by VJ Manzo
  
  
• Introduction to Digital Signal Processing by Tae Hong Park This one's my favorite book on the basic concepts in DSP
  
  

If you want to do sound synthesis with MSP, check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548401/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371667980&sr=1-5&keywords=sound+design


You can check out Todd Winkler's book for ideas for control data and MIDI:

http://www.amazon.com/Composing-Interactive-Music-Techniques-Ideas/dp/0262731398/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371668024&sr=1-1&keywords=todd+winkler


Check out this guy's youtube tutorials, definitely some of the best that I've found, he's making cool sounds, and you can probably get a lot from building along with him, (I'm pretty sure he works at Cycling'74)

http://www.youtube.com/user/dude837?feature=watch

Have you used a DAW at all so far? Are you familiar with making music and performing/playing anything?

This book is gold.
https://amzn.com/0199973822

Also, there is an Ableton Subreddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/abletonlive/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/

And, if you go through Computer Music magazine on digital copy, it's cheaper and always a good read.

On October 15,2018, my second published book “The Loney Smith Locksmith Music Theory 1.0” was released on Amazon!

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