I've got a father/daughter camping trip this weekend, so I don't have much time to come up with a song. I normally spend a lot of time fretting about trying to come up with something that sounds interesting because I don't really "understand" song structure, so I decided to just use this week to study that. I took a song that I like and just studied the structure of it and tried to duplicate that with my own chords, melodies and drums and do all that in a "chippy 8 bit style".

This turned out to be much harder than I expected, but I learned a LOT. As I documented each section of music, I realized it wasn't just the chords and melody that defined them, it was the "amount of energy" in each section, so I started documenting that. That then changed the way I listened to music and I've spent all week paying much more attention to the varying energy levels in all the songs I've listened to while out driving around and what not. It's also changed what I think about composing music as that's something else I haven't really considered at all but now need to seriously think about as I'm writing things.

The particular song I choose as my example turned out to have "conversations" between the melody and drums, where an empty space in the melody gets filled in by the drums. I've always kind of thought of drums as an after thought and now I realize I need to consider them just as much as other instruments in telling of a story or a mood. (Though obviously this is something I should already know from lots of music, "In the Air Tonight" among the most obvious, but somehow I just never really connected the dots until I spent time to analyze a song.)

This also made me worry that I'm trying to learn all this on "hard mode" by using the M8. While I do love it, I can only see what's going on in one track at a time. I'm a very visual person though, so I may try to make some more songs in Reaper where I can see all tracks at once. (Ugh--I'll have to figure out that huge pile of free VSTs I've been collecting though!)

Ultimately, I ran out of time on this track before we left for camp. If you're reading this part of the message, it means I didn't get back in time to finish the chorus and outro, fix the drums, and upload a better version, so what I have is a bit of a mess. Hopefully I'll be able to apply these lessons learned to produce something better next week.

And finally, I do want to continue these studies so I can see how they apply to different genres of music. I suspect that main theme music in video games may not have as much variation in energy levels for instance. But maybe they do and I just haven't noticed... I need to go listen to more and figure that out!

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Tags: chiptune, m8tracker, week 3 2026, View by:gunnbr