HowTo:Make Your Own Music

HowTo:Make Your Own Music

CDs and downloads are rather expensive, so why not create your own music for a fraction of the cost?

Hip-hop/Rap

This is for people only slightly more perceptive than for pop music. You will need something that can generate a (very) simple bass line (two consecutive notes will be plenty) which can be felt rather than heard. My recommendation is to stand on the platform at Tottenham Court Road and record the train coming in. Assuming you’re not shot by the plods whilst doing so, sample it and set it on a loop lasting about 20 minutes. Then make up a little up-and-down piano sample – the first 8 notes of Ode To Joy will do. Add annoying triangle notes in random places, a drum sample of some boxes falling down the stairs and repeat incessantly. Now you are ready to add lyrics. Remember, your audience will not understand words more than five syllables long. You should add numerous references to drugs, guns, etc, this is to ensure the song is ‘relevant’ to ‘da kids YO!’. And as sort of a footnote, I'd like to add that it is preferred that you are fluent in Black People Talk and/or be black.

Rock

This is easy. Tune your radio to a frequency between stations and record the white noise. Also record the random banging of pots, pans and anything else you can find in the kitchen. This should be played as loud as possible, over the top of which you should bellow meaningless lyrics, with some passing reference to a failed relationship or similar. If you are feeling righteous, touch on something which could be interpreted as being ‘ethical’ or anti-capitalist. Don’t spend too much time on this, though, for the simple reason that no-one will be able to hear anything. Anyone listening who professes to know anything about rock will immediately describe the sound as ‘original’ and ‘indie’, which means that it sounds like the other 500000000 bands who have started up this year. In order to distribute your song, spam everyone on Myspace with pictures of your band doing something vaguely illegal and rebellious, making the stock exchange crash. This may annoy the hell out of anyone trying to use the internet for anything vaguely constructive, but it will cause a record company to hire you without even having heard your music. Technically you are no longer an ‘indie’ band, but this doesn’t matter. Soon you have enough money to stop pretending you cared about poor people, and can get on with dying from a heroin overdose instead.

Modern classical

Two methods here. The first is to play the same four notes on the piano 60 times without changing it at all, then another four the same number of times, then the first lot again. Give it a depressive title and even Tchaikovsky will look like a master of development. Or else take the ‘slightly-plinky-plonk’ route and have random bits of ‘melody’ all over the orchestra. Tell the critics it’s ‘in the form of an arc’ (all modern music is in the form of an arc) and say you like Shostakovich to pacify any conservatives (small ‘c’). To name your piece, choose an interesting-sounding noun and adjective at random from your dictionary, which will result in a name like ‘revolving archliberals’ or, for a more programmatic title, ‘dire nonsense’.

Dance/Trance/House

Record a metronome for three days. This will be more than adequate for the intellectual capacity of clubbers. Another method is to talk illegibly into a microphone and have electronic bloops and bleeps in the background.