How To Develop Your Own Voice as a Composer

One of the biggest pieces of advice early composers will get is to “find their voice”. To many composers, this comes across as “just do it” with no further explanation. How does a composer find their voice and what does it mean to “write like yourself”, especially in a medium like film music where one day you could be writing a romantic orchestral cue and the next it’s a latin jazz infused chase scene?

To be upfront, I myself am working on this and this is me sharing as I learn. This is another one of my “thought dumps” where I write about things I’m researching or experiencing as a means of clarifying my own thoughts. It is going to be very candid, with a “Stream of consciousness” type vibe, and also likely some of it is flat out wrong. That said, I am hoping to start a conversation rather than dictate the way things should be so please reach out, write a response article, or share with your friends and let me know their thoughts.

Listen to a LOT of music

I think the first thing that is important is to listen to a wide variety of music and figure out elements that stick out to you and that you like and even better if you can say why. This sort of active engagement with other people’s work is a great way to start discovering what elements in music excite you that you want to steal for your own work. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”. Knowing your consumption preferences also aligns with your creative preferences. Someone who doesn’t like listening to death metal probably won’t write much of it for instance.

Keeping a collection of these little elements in a listening journal or somewhere can be incredibly beneficial. It can probably even function like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: when you get stuck, pick a random one and try to incorporate it into your track. On top of this, a wider knowledge of what’s out there means a wider pool for you to draw from while composing. An artist who has been exposed to “minimalism” or the color “green” are far more likely to reach for those ideas when painting than someone who hasn’t.

So some ideas things to listen for: the way a melody develops, rhythms that are interesting, lyric structures, chord progressions, orchestration/arrangement groupings, specific instrumental techniques, textures, in film specifically - spotting (IMO the most underrated area of film composition) and in game specifically - the interactive music systems.

And I think this is where theory is really useful too - being able to analyze and understand music at a foundational level stripped from the “specific” details such as production, timbre, etc and see why something works means you can incorporate it into your work much more quickly and easily. I think theory (and all the various schools/movements) and a combination of wide & deep listening is a majority of the “Knowledge” portion of finding your voice. The only other thing I would add is feedback from composers better than you when you share your work.

WRITE A TON

The next thing I would think is super important for developing your voice is an insane amount of writing. Exhaust every idea you possible can. One of my guitar teachers, Connor Reese, once encouraged me to write the cheesiest stuff I can when I was starting out. “You have to be cheesey before you can be cool.” I think this advice is especially relevant for composers as we are often comparing our music to some of the greatest composers who ever lived at the peak of their careers, not the simple ditties they wrote while learning to write, not to mention many of the modern composers don’t write in the same tonal system we train starting composers on (which IMO is a problem that I plan to heavily explore in the future). A composer who doesn’t practice writing their 4 part harmonies will write generic cliches when they need to write in that style, where as the experienced composer will know when and how to stray from common practice. Writing a lot, and writing intentionally, will develop technique and competency and will help you get better at what you write about. Your goal should be to exhaust every possibility.

A film composer for example may want to practice writing music that isn’t beholden to a bar line. How do we craft a melody that goes from 4/4 to 2/4 back to 4/4 and then dramatically switches to 6/8 seamlessly in the span of 20 seconds? By practicing this sort of thing! When studying theory or identifying an element you like (or need to be familiar with for work), write with it write away (pun intended). By trying it in context you develop a far greater understanding of the idea than you would in an exercise. Experience by doing is far greater than theoretical knowledge by observation. And when you try these ideas, try to exhaust them. Take it to as many extreme’s as you can - you may just find a completely original take on an idea as old as time.

These pieces don’t have to be long, but they should be complete. By completing pieces (Rather than just creating sketches) you are forcing yourself to develop ideas rather than just transcribe, and by finishing an idea you also have a presentable piece of work that you can get feedback on (or at least critique yourself with!). Getting another composer’s feedback is a far faster and easier way to grow than doing it yourself, but even if you had to do it yourself it’s totally possible! Listen back critically to your piece once you are done with it. What do you like about it? What can be improved? How would you do it differently next time? All of these little bits of experience will add up and “inform” your decisions in the future. The more you do this, the more “you” your perspective will be eventually.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and combine things you like. Do you like the sound of a heavily distorted guitar but also love writing for string quartets? What happens if you combine them? Maybe you write for a quartet of electric guitars or maybe an electric guitar accompanies a string quartet? Maybe you even get a string quartet, but all playing electric versions of their instruments. These are three different ways to approach this idea, and your taste and experience will lead you more to one over the others. Don’t just limit this to “compositional” ideas like harmony, melody, instrumentation and texture. There is a lot of rich detail to be mined from production as well (sound design, mixing techniques, doubling, etc.) especially as a media composer where a live performance is secondary to recordings.

Experiment

The last thing I would encourage is to not be afraid to experiment in form and medium. John Williams did not start out as a film composer, neither did Bernard Herrmann, Hans Zimmer, Jonny Greenwood or any of the other greats in the industry. Part of who you are as a composer is writing for or about things that interest you. For example, I work mostly in film and advertising but I spend a lot of my free time writing music for food and drink - a super small niche but I would consider to be a defining element in my career. Writing for a specific ensemble, a specific medium, about a specific theme, or more can all be ways to define your voice over time: but don’t be afraid to experiment and try what you can!

Sometimes you may stumble upon an idea that you truly want to identify with and exhaust - like Steve Reich with Phase Music for instance. One compositional idea or device can create a large body of work, but that also doesn’t mean that that’s all you “have” to do. Artists have different periods in their work from Picasso’s “Blue” period to Taylor Swift defining each album as a different “era”. From someone with ADHD who tends to hyperfixate on one idea intensely in short bursts, I used to think this idea of “Style” was incredibly limiting, but with this perspective I now see it as very freeing. Write what you like and are interested in, when you like it, and write as much as possible. Develop your taste and let your taste define you. Over time, you will find more and more you will sound “like you” as your own ideas and experiments start to emerge.

Lastly, if you are familiar with the idea that “There are many ways to skin a cat” your “voice” is the approach you ultimately end up choosing over others. Not everyone will choose the same way, and after skinning many cats you will start to be able to identify some patterns of how you approach different patterns. It is hard to determine what that approach is if you only do it once. So your “voice” as a composer ultimately is not something you consciously define, but how others see you based on your work and define for you. The more you put out and the more consistent your taste in your work is, the easier it will be for others to pick up on a “through line” on what makes you you and why your music is yours.

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