New Composer - Any feedback appreicated

Cool piece, and well done posting it! I like the main idea with the embellishments. You repeated your ideas sufficiently to have them stick, too, so well done.

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I found the repeat of your B section a little jarring. The walk up from F-F#dim-G sounded great, but repeating it starting on G rather than resolving or continuing to move felt a little unsatisfying for a great setup. Moving into the last A section with a little bit of a bass line might add some more interesting colour as well. I think the repeat of section A could have possibly used a bit more variation harmonically (subtle rhythmic changes, changes in voicing, etc), but that's me and you're definitely on the right track!

 

Welcome to the forum, Caleb, and thanks for sharing.

I don't have enough time for thorough commenting on your piece just now, but hopefully I'll have a chance to come back to it on the weekend. I like that you have a very clear shape to the melody. There are a couple things that feel awkward in the first 16 bars. The choice to go to C major at bar 7/8 and 15/16 feels like it would be a really cool development if you were about to develop / shift gears. But since you don't yet, it feels somehow out of place. To me, Em/Am for 7/8 would have been perfectly satisfying in the first pass and would have made a C later a unique twist. The other thing that's a bit awkward is the rest in 8 and 16. I think I get what you are after as a kind of clear phrase end, but perhaps you could achieve the effect still by making the C bass note a half note and the chord on beat 3 be a single note instead of a whole triad. I'll try to come back to this when I have enough time to show in notation what I mean.

Hope this helps, and looking forward to hearing your progress on it.

 

Hey, thank you for submitting your work!

• I think the melody needs a resolution. It lacks a proper V-I (or whatever cadence you want to use) and it just awkwardly hangs in bar 16. Also in the "B" section, having the G as the first and last chord doesn't really make it flow as it should, the chord progression pattern suggests the audience that there should be a chord change at 24, but there isn't one. And on the second time around I would skip 24 and go directly to 25; moreover, 25 has an odd rhythm/harmony which I feel like it doesn't act as well as you'd want to. I would keep it simpler and maybe put and Amaj chord, either keeping the waltz-like figure or with dotted half notes.
• On the same token, your piece badly needs a proper ending. You must have a proper cadence at the end, otherwise your audience would just be confused by your ending - and you don't want a confused audience (unless you do, but we're not going down that route now).
• I don't know why you changed the rhythmic pattern at 18, it doesn't make it sound different in a "better" or "developing" way, it just sounds like a mistake; you should definitely keep the [dotted quarter note-eight note-quarter note] the same in that bar.
• Your B section is okay, maybe I would've personally changed the melodic figure a bit to separate it from section A, but what you did is definitely better than having a collection of random ideas, so props for keeping it consistent!
• I'm not gonna comment too much about the harmony, one day you'll have a richer vocabulary if you transcribe enough, and I'm sure you will be able to draw from a more varied set of chords (perhaps more fitting in some places).