Guitar Composition: How to Create More Meaningful Music

Why would people be interested in the music you compose

Self-doubt is a very powerful thing.

It’s there to protect us from doing foolish things, but at the same time, it prevents us from achieving more in life. And we deserve to achieve more in life!

This is the same with composing music, where you might ask: “Why would people be interested in the music I create and play?”

It can be a valid question that can lead to great answers – as long as it’s not asked with a tone of discouragement and self-doubt.

Here are 5 answers:

1. Use self-doubt as a motivator

You can use self-doubt as a motivator to create music that people would be interested in.

How do we know if it’s interesting enough? If the music you create excites you or makes you feel something – it’s more likely that others will feel the same way.

In addition, you’re more likely to present and perform the music in a way that invites people to get into your world and story, and to share the events and ideas that led to the creation of that music.

2. Take yourself away from the equation

You can view it from another perspective that it’s less about you and more about the music itself.

So you can take away the last part of the question “Why would people be interested in music ~~I create and play~~?”

People are interested in hearing new music and want to connect with their own emotions by identifying with other people’s emotions. So why wouldn’t you share the gift of music with them?

3. Disregard your self-doubt

You can answer with another question: “So what?”.

You’d benefit more from dedicating and channelling your attention to create the best art you can than caring about what other people might think of it.

We can’t predict and hear what exactly listeners hear and feel in response to your music. So what’s the point?

Once the music is out there in the world, it’s not ours anymore.

People will interpret it in their own way, and usually in a way that has nothing to do with the actual music and with no regard to the process and efforts it took to bring it out to the world.

4. You can’t please everyone

Some people may not be interested and not like the music. And that’s fine!

We cannot (and should not) please everyone. I had strong positive responses to my music and even had some insults – and I’m totally fine with that.

How come? Realistically, are there any musicians that 100% of the population like all of their music?

We just need to find the people who appreciate and like our music.

5. Sometimes self-doubt is correct

There are cases when our music may need to be more interesting and original when we listen to it more objectively.

Ed Sheeran confessed that the first songs he wrote were awful, and he concluded that we need to get rid of all the sludge before getting a flow of pure water.

How to level up your music composition

These answers, and especially the last one, bring us to another question: how to level up your music composition and ensure that it’s meaningful?

The simple answer is – you learn it!

Two common solutions are to learn it by:

spending lots of time teaching yourself, thinking no one else can teach you.

spending lots of time and money studying in college/university.

The problem with these two solutions is that it takes valuable resources from us, and there’s no direct application to what we want to create.

When you learn on your own, it’s usually by “trial and error” and with no sense of direction.

Also, without an understanding of the foundations of music and music composition, it’s pretty hard to know how to turn your ideas into complete pieces of music.

When you decide to learn music composition in an academic environment, the focus is usually limited to a specific genre (classical music or jazz), and the main instrument is usually a piano.

Also, your compositions may feel like doing an assignment and there’s some bias because you probably want to get good grades.

My conclusion

I realised two things:

There are plenty of guitar teachers and guitar courses that teach technical skills and are based on copying other people’s music.

There’s a lack of guitar composition courses that specifically teach how to compose original music on the guitar with no limitation on the genre.

So I decided to create a new guitar composition programme that addresses these needs.

I set a goal – to show guitarists they can start composing meaningful music on the guitar in one week.

My teaching method is largely based on principles from classical guitar music, but it’s not limited to a specific genre.

If you’d like to know more about how all this is possible, I’ve created a 20-minute overview of a new guitar composition programme.

Comment #overview and I’ll send you the link.

Btw, I’m not sharing the link with everyone, because I only want to show it to guitarists who are really serious about creating meaningful music and levelling up their skills.