Ed Johnson-Williams

I’ve been writing shapenote tunes in the Sacred Harp/Christian Harmony style. I’ve also been making electronic music (Bandcamp, Soundcloud) – mostly techno things but I also tried making some drum-and-bass. It’s been great.

This is quite new for me to compose music. It does take quite a lot of time and effort to build confidence in doing it. I can tell it’s one of those you never finish learning kind of things.

With shapenote composition, it really helped to have a list of common chords to use and rare chords to avoid to fit within the idioms and expectations of the genre. With electronic music, there’s a much, much wider range of sounds and styles within the genre and you can do your own thing. But also there’s so much more to learn. I didn’t really think before about how people who make music using laptop using programs like Ableton are composing drums, melody, bass, maybe vocals, and doing the whole arrangement with the structure, changing dynamics, changing effects to make different parts change their feel all the time, designing sounds from scratch, finding and manipulating sounds. I’m definitely missing stuff here. There is so much too it.

It’s really rewarding to hear something you made and enjoy it. This is almost instant with Ableton. You export your track and listen to it. You need a group of singers to hear what a shapenote composition really sounds like. I’ve done 4-track versions myself where you sing the bass, tenor, alto, treble in your own voice on top of each other. That sounds weird because it’s just one person and I can’t sing alto! But it’s the best way I’ve found to get quicker feedback on what feels intuitive and not intuitive to sing.

I’d love to find a group of people who like sharing their electronic music productions with each other. I have that with shapenote compositions and it’s really nice.