HOW TO WRITE DJENT RIFFS - Part 2: MOTIFS

SOUNDCLOUD - / lucasangelomusic
In this video, I explore the way that bands like Meshuggah (and Metallica!) use the concept of motifs in order to create cohesive feeling riffs and songs. A motif is the smallest identifiable and repeated piece of a musical idea. Learning to identify motifs and understanding how to create variations will help immensely with writing songs that feel like songs, rather than a series of disconnected ideas.
For a more detailed (if slightly esoteric) description of the idea, I highly recommend Arnold Schoenberg's "Fundamentals of Musical Composition".

[@LucasAngeloMusic]

Note: At 7:08 or so I talk about sliding up to the A. My brain was in 7 string mode, not 8 string mode! 12 fret on the third string of my standard tuning 8 string is an E, not an A.

[@TheKentg01]

Awesome, thank you. This is very helpful.

[@LucasAngeloMusic]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[@CERDIP]

Interesting

[@LucasAngeloMusic]

This is a pretty surface level treatment of the topic, but my idea was that I've gone and searched the literal phrase "How to write Djent Riffs" and I've found videos that basically show "Here's a riff. Mess around with it I guess" while giving only the most basic explanation of the thought process. Part of my goal here is to breakdown a "case study" with Do Not Look Down, as well as to show other people trying to write their own music an actual example of how I write while I'm in the process of writing it, including details on my thought process (a little bit like what I do in my writing streams) Schoenberg's "Fundamentals of Musical Composition" is a great resource for the theory concepts I talk about here, but that book still falls into the trap of essentially doing case studies rather than having the equivalent of a worked example. The more I talk about this, the more I consider writing an e-book or something 😅

[@CERDIP]

@@LucasAngeloMusic E-book sounds like a good idea!