Why Your Music Sounds Bland — and What To Do About It

Let me cut to the chase.

Your music sounds bland because of the choices you made when you began composing.

So let me ask you: How do you start writing a new piece?

• Do you start with an image or feeling you’re trying to express? Or with musical ideas themselves?

• With a melody? Or with chords?

• In notation? Or using your instrument?

If you want to write music that STANDS OUT — music that hooks listeners, catches their attention, and captures their imagination — then it doesn’t matter which of bulleted options you choose. They’re all equally fine.

What does matter is an entirely different choice.

The Early Choice That Matters Most

The most important choice you make early on is the sound of your music.

By “sound,” I mean questions like the following:

• What instruments are playing?

  • What register are they playing in?

  • With what articulation or playing technique?

  • At what dynamic?

• How do these instruments relate to one another? (i.e., What’s the texture?)

• What’s the tempo and meter?

These choices are crucial to capturing listeners’ attention.

According to cognition research,[1] they’re what listeners notice literally within the first split second of hearing your music.

But if you don’t make them consciously, your unconscious will make them for you.

The result? Your music WILL sound generic and bland.

Make the Choice—Or It’ll Be Chosen For You

If you don’t choose the sound of your music, it will end up sounding generic because of how the human mind processes music.

Our minds are constantly developing mental models, called “schemas,” of “what music sounds like.”

These schemas are the assumptions about music to which we unconsciously default.

And these assumptions are averages. Meaning, they’re “what usually happens.”

Consequently, if you want to write music that ISN’T average or generic, you must tell your unconscious, “We’re not going to use the default schemas, thank you very much!”

Choosing the Sound First Makes Composing Easier

So what would those choices look like in practice?

Well, instead of saying, “I’m going to write a melody!”

. . . you say, “I’m going to write a loud, legato melody in 3/4 for English horn around quarter = 72.”

Instead of saying, “I need to write a chord progression!”

. . . you say, “I’m imagining a chord progression in saxophones and harmon-muted trumpets at a piano dynamic.”

. . . or maybe you say, “I want a chord progression using mostly 7th and 9th chords that moves stepwise in the bass.”

When you give your mind vivid starting points, you don’t just end up with more unique outcomes. You can actually create faster because you’ve narrowed down your possibilities.

So next time you sit down to start a piece, begin with the sound in mind.

Notes

[1] “The work of Perrot and Gjerdingen suggests that the bulk of the psychological work [for identifying style] is done in the first 250 milliseconds. That means that timbre must provide more important stylistic cues than, say, large-scale form. Although other factors may contribute to differentiating various styles, the principle repository of stylistic information is timbre.” — David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 208.