How to Write "Peaceful Piano" Music • Music Theory from Ludovico Einaudi "Experience"

 

How to Write
Peaceful Piano Music.

 

 

 

Free PDF Tutorial
includes multitrack MIDI file

 

If the link above does not work, paste this into your browser:
https://hackmusictheory.com/album/2536029/peaceful-piano

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intro.

 

I’m just old enough that I got in my Grade 1 to 12 school years before computers and the internet took over. If you’re a Gen X like me, and there wasn’t a computer in your school building either, then our schooling experience was pretty much the same as our grandfathers’ schooling experiences in their youth. How crazy is that?!

 

And the deeper you go back into the past, the longer those stretches of time are where nothing changed. Fast forward to today, and robots are making music and cars are driving themselves! It’s not surprising that there’s a tidal wave of nostalgia sweeping industrialised countries. People are desperate to find anything that can lessen the unpredictable nature of this relentlessly-changing modern world.

 

For most people, an unpredictable world causes anxiety. And the opposite is true too: A predictable world causes calm. It’s totally understandable that this desperate desire to find some predictability in our world has resulted in “Peaceful Piano” being one of the most popular playlists on Spotify. Every track on this playlist creates a predictable musical environment, which counterbalances all the change.

 

If you’ve been in the Hack Music Theory family for a while, you’ll probably be amused right now, as I’ve spent decades teaching people how to make music that’s not predictable haha! Well, my views on music have evolved over the decades, and I now see (and hear) the benefit of well-written predictable music. For the record though, I don’t mean the manufactured “content” that makes up most of the new releases every week, I’m talking about artistic music that’s predictable, like Mozart.

 

One of the most popular composers in the Peaceful Piano “genre”, who’s been paving the minimal path since the mid-90s, is the Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi. So, inspired by “Experience”, one of Einaudi’s most popular songs, here’s our 5-step method for writing peaceful piano music. But first… Tea!

 

 

 

 

Step 1. Arpeggio

 

Set up four bars of 4|4 on your piano track, with the grid on 1/8 notes and the tempo at 80 BPM. If 80 isn’t peaceful enough for you though, go slower. Creating a peaceful atmosphere is all about slowing down from the fast-pace of modern life.

 

Bob Marley famously said: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” That’s a great quote, and we love Bob, but we don’t want anything in our peaceful piano music to “hit” our listeners. And chords do exactly that, as the listeners hear all three (or more) notes together. Under regular listening circumstances, that’s a good thing, but not he