Venus Theory is one of my favorite YouTube channels these days. I’ve been devouring some of the older content after finally subscribing, and I came across this little gem:
At the risk of over-simplifying it, the idea is to take a simple lick, and then copy it and mess around with variations of it (keeping the notes the same): Stretch it out, change octaves, change instruments, reverse the directions, etc. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I’m not doing it justice and Cameron is a droll dude and well worth watching, so if you want a better idea of what the video’s about, you should probably watch the video. There’s a reason why he’s a successful music and video guy and I’m…not.
Anyway, he ends it with a “try it out for yourself” and, seeing as this sort of thing is just barely within my technical and musical skills, I figured I’d give it a go. So, I did. And I learned a lot, and I thought I’d share it. Some of this gets pretty hard into the weeds, so if it’s not your jam, I get it.
My first thought was “Simple lick? Nah, let’s get a little spicier with it!” Instead of a single arpeggio, I tried a descending run of three arpeggios, going from F to Ab sus 2 to Bb*. It sounded really nice, so I copied it to three other tracks: One stretching the two bars over four bars, one doing the same but with the note order reverse, and the last one stretching it to eight bars.
I played it back and…yikes. It was very, very bad. In retrospect, I can see why. I probably should have seen it before I tried it. What went wrong was, in single note lines, you don’t have to worry about the intervals, the relationships between the notes. By using notes from three chords, including a passing chord that doesn’t really relate to the other two (the Ab sus2) and stretching and/or reversing the notes, I lost control over which notes hit at the same time. This gave me some very sour intervals (the A in the F chord and the Ab in the Ab sus 2 did not play nicely).
You don’t have this problem if the lick is just using notes from a single chord because all of your intervals going to be relatively consonant. So, the score so far: Ridley: 0, Actually Following The Instructions: 1.
The next thing I tried that seemed clever but wasn’t was build everything on an odd number of bars. Seventeen measures ensured that the stretching and chopping and reversing were going to get wonky. That seemed really cool, and I suspect there’s something there if I were better at music, but for me? Nope nope nope. It just didn’t work at all and my loop points were not nearly as smooth as I wanted. Keeping it nice and even might be less “interesting” in theory, but in practice, it sort of defeated the exercise.
So, I settled on a little noodling using the notes of an Fm7 chord and kept the stretching to 2x and 4x the original length. When I did this, it sounded pretty good. But…the note timing was all kinds of cruddy. When Cameron says to quantize your MIDI notes, believe him. Latching everything to a grid is your friend for this kind of exercise.
I wound up using seven tracks based on the original, each with a different instrument as well as some effects. Here’s what made the final version, and by “final” I mean “I have more ideas, but I think I’m done with this particular bit of homework.” It’s meant to be looped, so the beginning and end aren’t really beginnings or endings.**
What else might I do with this in the future? I could certainly get more creative with the effects. This method seems perfect for granular stuff. I could try to make a real “song” out by having parts drop in and out, playing with the dynamics more, adding more instruments, etc. That really wouldn’t be that much work, but I think I’m done for now. I’ve learned not just about the how of something like this works, but I’ve got some new tricks to use in my DAW and another tool in the toolkit when I’m stuck for ideas. All in all? I’d say it was a worthwhile use of time.
My time, at least. YMMV.
I do recommend the Venus Theory channel. I’m very much an amateur and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it and even enjoy the non-musical stuff when he waxes philosophical. That’s one of my favorite ways to wax.
-RK
* Yes those are the opening three chords of Michael McDonald’s “Sweet Freedom.” I regret nothing. #RodTemperton4Eva
** I’m have almost no hearing in one of my ears, so I understand the panning may be wonky. I try to use the levels to figure out what it would sound like with balanced hearing, but there’s some guesswork in there.