How to Compose Music While Drunk

Composing music while drunk can be both a fun and educational experience. Writing music requires attention to specific details relating to harmony, rhythm, melody and texture. Allowing yourself to work on these things while intoxicated can free you from the confines of a sober approach to composition.

Instructions

1. Drink at least 3 beers or 2 hard liquor mixed drinks. Wait until you begin to feel a buzz. If the alcohol takes more than 30 minutes to affect you, drink some more.

2. Sit down at the piano or your computer station. Begin to play music on your keyboard of choice before writing anything down. Attempt to forget about your musical training and let the dizziness you're experiencing from the alcohol control your musical temperament. If you feel yourself getting angry, sad or melancholy, play music that matches this mood.

3. Begin to write music on your composition paper or computer screen. Composing with pencil and paper is preferable to using the computer when drunk; the process is more cathartic and fuels your drunken state so that the music you're composing is closer to the emotional feeling you are experiencing.

4. Alternate playing on the piano/keyboard and writing down what you are playing. The more time you spend playing on the keyboard before writing it down the more accurate your transcription will be. Focus on allowing the alcohol's effect to guide the compositional process to areas that you're uncomfortable with. The melodies and harmonies that will come out of you will have a tendency to be a bit different that what you are used to when composing sober.

5. Use alcohol to increase the speed with which you compose. All composers have built in filters within their composition processes. Some filters are a result of the environment they grew up in, others exist because they have studied a certain type of music more often than others. If you happen to be a neo-Romantic composer, use the effects of the alcohol to drop your filters and attempt to compose in another style; the neo-Classical style, for example.

6. Stop writing and playing after about 60 minutes. Go back and review what you have composed. Review it first with just your eyes, listening to the music in your head that you've composed. Second, now play what you have written on the piano or keyboard. Pay attention to how well the music you heard in your head lines up with the actual sounds coming from the instrument. You will find that your composition created under the influence of alcohol will present new ideas and directions that you may not have otherwise pursued if you were sober.