This is Francesco Artusato, here again for the second part of my column talking about the writing process.
Last week, we were talking about creating moments of “tensions” and moments of "release."
Think about following a horizontal wave line that goes up and down, depending on the sections of the song. A flat line will translate into a very boring song, while a line that changes its inclination regularly will create smart transitions into sections of different intensities. Those are the parts of a song that most intrigue us and keep our attention going.
We are talking about the rudiments of writing songs, and these concepts work for almost all the western music genres; of course, there are always exceptions.
Another important factor to keep in consideration is, of course, the harmonic context you are dealing with. It’s important to know how to control chords, scales and arpeggios in order to develop sections with a logical but musical order. It’s also very important to understand how to modulate to a different key; this is a very powerful tool, and it’s great to know how to control it.
At this point, we could say that the only ingredient still missing is the musical genius/talent necessary to make all the elements we talked about, work well together.
This is what can make a song musically great or not; the unique elements each one of us can express as a form of art. If you think about it, the song you woke up singing this morning has something very exceptional that makes it so special; elements that caught our ears' attention in a way that other songs don’t have (Sometimes this actually happens because that song is a very annoying one, but still so incredibly catchy!). I think this is probably the most important aspect to be valued when thinking about writing a song.
As we said before, it’s all about writing a memorable music statement.
Also, one last piece of advice: Always remember to use your ears. That’s your most important instrument.
I hope this column about writing music is going to help and possibly clarify some of the concepts involved into this.
Next week, I’ll talk more about the writing process specifically in All Shall Perish, since so many fans asked about it.
The first album from the Francesco Artusato project, Chaos and the Primordial, was released on June 28 via Sumerian Records. The new All Shall Perish album, This Is Where It Ends, will be released on July 27 through Nuclear Blast.
