So I decided the other day to attempt to make music. I spent a few hours and I **** out a bunch of unfinished garbage.
Your job is to tell me what to do to make it not garbage and to tell me to not quit my day job.
This one I consider unsalvageable. The bass turned out bad from the beginning, and, while I like the melody, I have no idea what to do with that bass. If you like your ears, just highlight everything but the bass and hit play.
This one I actually kinda like. I tried to use drums for the first time, so I figured I'd let the drums lead the entire song. It gives it a slight sort of ambient feel, and I can't really think of anything more to add.
This last one is still a big work in progress. I attempted the bass at the end there again, but I'm considering putting it back to just a guitar. i have a slight idea of where this one will end up, but how it started was basically me pressing random buttons and decided that it was good enough to extrapolate into a full thing.
OmarsComin posted... do you play music or are you just kind of going by ear and making the program try and do what's in your head?
Both? I play a few instruments, yeah, but these here are pretty much the latter. i get an idea for a tune and I try to extrapolate that into a full melody.
-- Bonetail: The cream of Touhou fanboyism. Without breaking time, bonetail has stopped.
BoshStrikesBack posted... If you haven't already, you really should learn basic music theory. Won't take too long to learn, and it'll help loads. Still liked this, though!
I'm pissed because I had it down to take next year for my junior year, but there weren't enough people to make a full class so I got put into the closest other "fine arts" course.
So I'm in ceramics now. Awesome I get to make ash trays and ****
-- Bonetail: The cream of Touhou fanboyism. Without breaking time, bonetail has stopped.
so then was measure 14 of the first one on purpose supposed to be that way, or were you trying to approximate a quarter note triplet? it made me smile when I heard it and saw what you wrote.
OmarsComin posted... so then was measure 14 of the first one on purpose supposed to be that way, or were you trying to approximate a quarter note triplet? it made me smile when I heard it and saw what you wrote.
There are ways to make triplets with this thing, but i haven't quite figured it out yet and the Help page confuses me.
So I guess the answer is maybe? It might be what I was trying to do, whether I was aware of it or not. I'll figure out triplets later and change it if I need to.
-- Bonetail: The cream of Touhou fanboyism. Without breaking time, bonetail has stopped.
The first one starts off good. I think the problem is that you start off with this really strong bass section, but once the treble section starts, you ease off the intensity on the bass. And it becomes too weak
--
"Don't freeze up girl, you're looking quite a sight." - Adam Ant. "Baby, can you dig your man? He's a righteous man." - Larry Underwood
There isn't actually anything wrong with the lead in measure 14, that's a valid rhythm. I use it all the time. Probably not with that bass, though.
there's no question as to it's validity, I'm just guessing that wasn't what he was aiming for. at that speed it'd be hard for most listeners to tell the difference, slower though the difference would obviously be clearer.
Get yourself a program that can make something that sounds good. It doesn't matter if it's hard to work with, so long as you can make a good sounding baseline or melody with it. Sound and synth quality are key.
Expect this to cost money, or find another way to get it. If you want to make music you're going to have to spend money.
Play with this for a month and then see if you're still interested. Come back with the results.
Get yourself a program that can make something that sounds good. It doesn't matter if it's hard to work with, so long as you can make a good sounding baseline or melody with it. Sound and synth quality are key.
the composition itself is the most important thing.
granted I...probably wouldn't recommend continuing to use this program anyway, but don't fall into the trap of thinking better samples will hide bad composition, they don't. working with a basic MIDI editor at first is fine, you can always go back and refine those later but you want to get down basics like making good melodies, harmonies, and rhythms
Actually I disagree, Liquid. The reason is that it's really hard to stay motivated working with something that sounds terrible, and learning the types of tools people actually use is important.
it's not easy to stay motivated if you pick something with a steep learning curve either, at least you shouldn't say "It doesn't matter if it's hard to work with"
I mean, what are some good actual programs for music? I'll still use thisfor the time being because it's relatively simple and easy to use. But soon I'll upgrade to something better to stop myself getting TOO used to this and possibly falling into bad habits.
FL studio, reaper, reason, and renoise are good places to start. reason and renoise aren't recommended if you ever plan to do live recording though, they're more for people who work all in the box. reason is the most expensive of those but also comes with the most ready to use stuff, if you use FL/renoise/reaper you'll probably spend a lot of time finding samples and synthesizer patches and such where reason is very useable out of the box in that regard. FL also comes with some decent stuff but also some bad stuff.
reaper is...actually fully functional in its free version, it just uses the honor code basically that if you profit on your music you're supposed to buy the license -_- renoise is the next cheapest, IIRC like 75 euros, it has a very unconventional interface though that you will either love or hate...FL goes for $150 for the fully featured version, it's pretty newbie friendly. reason is the most expensive one I'm recommending at $500 but as I said before, comes with the most useable stuff out of the box.
note that none of these programs use staff notation with the possible exception of reaper(haven't used it much, heard excellent things about it though). FL, reason, and reaper use something called a piano roll where you draw notes on a graph where Y axis represents pitch(a piano graphic is shown on the left) and X represents time(bars and beats are displayed horizontally). renoise uses a totally different approach where time is vertical and you type notes and articulations in...in any case, downloading the demos for these would give you a better idea, as I said, reaper's free version is fully functional and FL and renoises are pretty useable too(renoise demo can save songs but can't export to wave, FL is opposite and can export audio but can't save project files)
Yeah this seems more for general recording than a music software. i can't find any tutorials about actually making music on it, but if anyone could link me to one that'd be cool. I'll check out the others mentioned and see about those.
yeah it's pretty overwhelming at first, that's why I didn't recommend getting into it immediately necessarily. reaper doesn't come with any sample libraries or anything either so you'll have to scavenge around for some things. just something to quickly get you started, if reaper doesn't have a sampler capable of loading soundfonts download this plugin
then you'll have to find out how to load it within reaper, differs from program to program but there should be a help file that you can reference, you'll probably need to look at it a lot anyway
ninja'd. reaper is more for recording but you can also do digital composition with it. renoise is almost fully geared towards just making music on your computer but also has the non-standard interface. FL is a good middle ground, it actually started out as a drum machine and became more fully featured over time. if you use FL that also helps because I use that program the most so I can answer questions more directly, it also probably has the easiest piano roll out there
FL also has an internal soundfont player so if you use that ignore my advice to get sfz and just get the samples
online help file. the program itself also comes with a helpfile but it's annoying and won't let you minimize it to go back to FL, you can only close it. so the online version is better for that
I like Finale more than Sibelius, the UI makes more sense to me. It's tough to rec trying them both though, the price makes that kind of unreasonable. I think Finale is used more in most places but I have no evidence for that outside my personal experience.