# Why did my composition seem to fail?



## Ulterior Motif (May 11, 2019)

I've written an instrumental nu jazz piece with a fair few seventh chords. Knowing the limitations of the (sampled) instruments I had in mind, my plan was the following: bass playing the root, trombone playing the 3rd, sax the 5th and electric piano the 7th. I just layered the instruments and certain sampled notes in the right way to make an E major sixth - the first chord - and it sounded like a mess. I'm trying to think of what to do to fix the problem, even though I can't quite figure out what went wrong. Make the chords on every instrument and THEN layer the instruments?


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## david johnson (Jun 25, 2007)

An idea - think contrapuntally rather than vertically. Use some 6th chords, blue notes.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

A ton of things could be wrong, from an unbalanced mix to the wrong room(s) being used if the samples have baked in ambience. But reading what you have said, you seem to be be unsure about how to score vertically. The electric piano would play the whole chord probably and I could say more about the brass, but without any examples of what you are doing and in what context (i.e. is there a brass section?), then it's simply just impossible to help.


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