First of all, I want to mention that I was a classically trained pianist and violinist since I was young. I played pieces from various composers from Baroque until Romantic period. However, I also play the Yamaha Electone, which has Japanese pop music influence. It is hard to break from the "Yamaha" style and the linear way of composing from my roots.
In my years of study in the Yamaha Music Academy of Arts and Music, we have improvisation classes with rather fixed key chords and clear A-B-A sections. In the past three yeas, I have been trying to deviate from my comfortable zone and the chord progressions that are deeply ingrained into my brain. Therefore, I
have observed recently, another habit is formed. I despise repetition and try to avoid doing it in all of my compositions. I thought repetition a rather cheap way of extending the length of a
song, but I start to forget that repetitions are actually important in a
piece to hold a theme together, unless I am creating
a through-composed
piece. Listening to my recent songs, I find that there are a lot of variety and changes of sections. It is not necessarily a flaw
because they are linear storytelling experience but a normal listener may not grasp what I want to depict. Hence, it is not a viable style to use if I want to compose for commercial uses.
Vocaloid KAITO has proved to be versatile and demanding in technical skills. I find many useful tricks while tuning. Two years ago, what I would do is to created a track and the melody will be played by an instrument. Then, it will be replaced with the KAITO track. The problem with this method is, the melody will often become too melodious, resulting in KAITO singing like a lead instrument rather than a vocal line. A friend of mine in the Vocaloidism forum named Krystal pointed this out to me on several occasions and that is why I am more aware of what I am doing. Unwittingly, this has become a sort of trademark for my songs. I am still contemplating whether to continue with this or try to follow what others would call as normal in pop songs. My way of tuning KAITO has changed along the years as well. When I look back at my old songs, I paid less attention to the little details of his singing and emphasize more on the accompanying track. Now, I start with tuning his singing and made sure it sounds decent and less choppy before working on the accompanying track. After the relentless experiments I did few year ago with KAITO (Vocaloid1) trying to make him sing English with a Japanese voicebank (refer to my post: http://shinyakian.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/coming-up-stuff-and-kaito-english.html), KAITO (Vocaloid3) definitely made my life easier. With the new phonemes in the English voicebanks, he can finally sing Chinese with less awkward pronunciation. Of course, that will require a lot of rigorous tuning.
I also enjoy experimenting with strange chord changes, not following the expected standard chord progression of I-IV-V-I (or any variations on that). To create a different feeling, what I frequently use are augmented 6th chords and added notes. I spend much of my time finding the correct harmony while composing. This way of working is rather slow, and I often cannot plan ahead because of this. It took me some time to realize that rather than working very long on a detailed small piece of a section, a full sketch is more efficient. This happens when I am drawing as well. My habit is to work on a small part of the face until I am satisfied, but in the end, the other parts will be finished up quickly without as much attention to detail as the small part. To increase my efficiency at composing, I will begin to practice sketching out the whole song before focusing on the details.
To conclude, I am able to observe the way I compose and my habits through reading and listening to my works. I take influences from various composers and various genres to add more colours to my palette of composing. It is also important for me to not end up copying others and maintaining my own identity as a composer. I will keep trying out different ways to improve my skills of composing and polish my knowledge of musical instruments to be a better composer every day.
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