If you want to improve as a composer, you must write more music. A lot more, in fact. There is no getting around it: quantity beats quality at first. Here’s how to use this to your advantage as a beginner composer or songwriter.
This article is part of the Musical Inspiration series.
The Shallow Learning Curve
When you’re just starting to write music, the list of basics might feel endless: how chords work, how to write a melody, how to develop a motif, how to orchestrate, and on and on. Progress feels slow and the learning curve is shallow.
We usually hear “steep learning curve” as a complaint, but technically it’s the opposite: a steep curve means you’re picking things up quickly. A shallow curve means slow progress, exactly what beginners face.
Pottery, Photography, Music?
In Art & Fear, David Bayles tells a story that’s become legendary in creative circles. In a ceramics class, students were split into two groups. One group was graded on the weight of their work: 50 pounds (around 23 kg) of pots earned an A, 40 pounds (18 kg) got a B, and so on. The other group just had to make one perfect pot to earn top marks.
On grading day, guess where the top-quality pieces came from? Not the perfectionists, of course, but the ones who went through dozens of imperfect pots. This group learned the craft with every false start and every dead end. The other group spent their time planning and speculating, materialising very little and acquiring no experience in the process.
The ceramics story has a real-world counterpart. Photographer Jerry Uelsmann ran a semester-long experiment in class. One side of the room was graded on quantity: 100 photos earns the student an A. The other side was graded on quality: take one perfect image.
As you can predict, the best work came from the quantity side. They’d shot everything: angles, light, composition, different subjects, learning through trial and error. The quality group simply hesitated. The hesitation to get the perfect photo resulted in almost zero practice.
This isn’t just classroom theory. Great artists insist on it:
- Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, described his process as “write, finish, and move on”, sometimes going as far as writing one song a day.
- Film composer Ennio Morricone wrote everyday at 5 am.
- Ansel Adams estimated that he took thousands of negative photographs before any of his work caught the public’s eye.
- In The Creative Habit, choreographer Twyla Tharp writes that volume leads to breakthroughs.
- Comedian Jerry Seinfeld is known for his commitment to write jokes every single day.
- Miles Davis emphasized constant playing over correctness. His quantity of experimentation led to enduring breakthroughs.
Application in Music Composition
So how does a beginner composer apply this concept?
Think about a basic skill within music composition that you really want to be fluent at. Maybe it’s writing for piano, writing vocal melodies, chord progressions, or orchestration. Apply the concept of volume to that skill:
- Write ten 1-minute piano pieces in the next 30 days
- Compose five vocal melodies (to the same text) this week
- Invent thirty 3-chord progressions and then write two melodies on top of each one
- Orchestrate 50 bars from a classical sonata
Whatever it is, commit to a daily or weekly writing schedule where your task is to put ideas to paper (or laptop). If you’re unsure where to start and the blank page gets to you, try the 1001 Music Composition Prompts book (or invent your own). Here are some ideas from that publication:
Prompt #19. Pick any three chords you like and rearrange them in every possible order. Write a piece that exploits as many arrangements of your three chords as possible.
Prompt #479. Compose a piece in which the intervals get smaller and softer, as if losing momentum
Prompt #875. You walk into an abandoned theatre. There is nothing much except for an old piano with several missing keys. The keys that are still left, don’t always play a sound.
~ from 1001 Music Composition Prompts, Matthew Ellul
Back at uni, an important section of our exams was four-part writing in Bach’s style. I knew the rules well, but I needed speed and fluency because it was all handwritten. So I bought a copy of Bach’s 371 chorales and set myself a challenge: I copied out every bass line and melody separately, and then harmonized each one as if it were a timed test.
Over the next few months, I worked through them one by one, comparing my results to Bach’s originals. Some of my attempts were clumsy, others surprisingly close, but I got sharper with each exercise.
The grade I earned at the end was excellent, but honestly, the real reward is Bach’s harmonic language drilled into my bones. There really is a quality to quantity itself.
Conclusion
As we said in 11 Composition Lessons for Beginners, no one can skip the awkward beginner phase. It’s only a matter of how quickly you get over it by how much you compose. It’s easy to be seduced by perfection but that is where inspiration dries up.
Even genius minds don’t shy away from practice. They embrace it as part of the journey. As Mozart wrote in 1778:
“People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied.”
~ Letter to Joseph Bullinger, Mozart
The conclusion is clear: quantity is the path to quality. In the process, your instinct picks things up you wouldn’t consciously notice for years, if ever. Some of your output will be bad but that’s the whole point!