How to Invent a Music Fusion Genre

A fusion of pop music with Indian music might mean an acoustic guitar alongside a sitar.

As musicians experience a variety cultures and musical styles from around the world, they are increasingly attempting to blend these influences together. This is a form of self-expression that communicates to an audience that the musician loves these musical styles. Fusing genres together is usually an issue of arrangements: it often means using instruments and rhythms from multiple genres together in a musician's songs.

Things You'll Need

• Instruments
• Musicians

Instructions

1. Think about your musical influences. What do you like to listen to? Have you been influenced by more than one musical genre or musical culture? Have you ever arranged a song that contained different musical traditions or instruments? If you have, that's fusion right there.

2. Decide which musical genres you would like mixed together in your songs. If you're aiming to create and popularize a new genre of fusion music, you should stick to two or three different genres to fuse together in your songs. If you simply like fusion and would like to express your influences in each of your songs, you can make each one as different as you would like.

3. Choose the instruments that attract you to each of these genres. If you can't play them yourself, you will need musicians who can. For example, if the genres that you are attempting to fuse are Latin and Indian, you can arrange songs which contain percussion played on bongos or congas with a combination of an acoustic guitar or a tres and a sitar as your melodic instruments.

4. Write your songs and use these instruments and musicians in your instrumental arrangements.

5. Popularize your new fusion of genres by talking about your new creation. If you do not have a mouthpiece via major press outlets, use your website or your regular update email lists to fill your fans in on the project that you are working on. If you have media attention, use it to its full potential.

6. Talk about your inspirations and goals when you play live. More than anything, your fans and potential fans will remember this.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember to be passionate about your new creation, because if you aren't, no one else will be, either. If you are interested in combining languages in your songs as well as instruments, you will need someone who speaks the languages, if you do not. You could enlist the help of a friend or another musician who plays that kind of music. If you make music videos, represent your creation visually. If you are trying to fuse Latin and Indian, show musicians playing the bongos or congas and have Bollywood dancers alongside them.

• There is always going to be a purist out there who criticizes you or who is offended by your creations. Ignore it; it's your music.

References

• National Geographic: World Fusion Music