Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 476 posts

Re: Get started making music

#121

Post by jungletek »

baldfat wrote: post #69
creativeembassy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital Audio Workstation. Think Ableton Live, Apple Logic Pro, Avid's Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerheads Reason... tools to record/arrange/produce/master music.

They are all different beast that once you learn one you don't want to relearn another. The only difference is that Abelton Live and Bitwig (Runs on Linux) are designed for live performance. I like Reaper (Cost is 1/5 but equally capable) and it also runs reasonably well under Linux. https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=15280 Actually many people never pay for a license it has a similar model as Sublime Text.

>The only difference is that Abelton Live and Bitwig (Runs on Linux) are designed for live performance.

Ableton, at least, also functions perfectly fine in the traditional piano-roll and timeline paradigm of DAW workflow too. Don't let the 'Live' part of the name mislead you into thinking it's only for live performers; it does everything the 'old DAWs' do, AND it's got great features to assist in live performance.

Also in terms of underlying concepts, if you know one DAW well, you can usually learn another one fairly quickly, as it becomes more a question of learning the interface more than anything else.

Re: Get started making music

#122

Post by squeaky-clean »

MichaelGG wrote: post #86
meri_dian wrote: post #6

I can't speak for other DAW's, but Ableton was really easy for me to pick up as a complete novice to digital music production

I agree. A lot of the other UIs are insane. One of them boasts about its full physics package to accurately render the cables connecting one "device" to another. I thought it was so gimmicky but a lot of them do the same stuff and people buy it so what do I know. Ableton just makes sense. But maybe because I'm not an artist. I just like learning these tools. I will say that with a few hundred bucks of equipment (a La…

> Took about an hour to hook up an Xbox360 controller so I got a few x-y inputs. Ableton makes it super easy to map them.

Fun tip: You can do this with an Xbox 360 (probably Xbox One) Rock Band drum kit for a cheap e-kit. The drumkit just sends gamepad input and there are programs to convert that to MIDI.

Re: Get started making music

#123

Post by YorickPeterse »

maze-le wrote: post #84
dri_ft wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my idea of a perfect music program is closer to vim than an IDE, but you're on the right track.

Have a look at extempore, a lispy live music/notation language and environment. Only emacs bindings, no vim, but impressive preformance nevertheless... [0]: http://extempore.moso.com.au/ [1]: https://github.com/digego/extempore

I played around with this a while back and there are Vim plugins for it. My biggest problem was having to compile the thing from source which involved also compiling a custom version of LLVM, which took forever. It's possible this is no longer a problem.

Re: Get started making music

#124

Post by busterarm »

jachee wrote: post #120
plussed_reader wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What don't current DAWS understand about music?

I'd argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some "syntax-aware" features for their DAW.

Also, if this DAW understands something about music, will it constrain me to its understanding about music?

Most of what I write is highly dissonant or straight up microtonal.

Re: Get started making music

#125

Post by seertaak »

adamnemecek wrote: post #54

I'm actually working full time on a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier. Current DAWs don't really understand music. Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps. Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE. The HN audience is definitely one of my core groups. If you are interested, sign up here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzV…

Sounds really cool! Actually, I'm close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I've thought a lot about composition too.

https://zenaud.io

Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :)

And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)

Re: Get started making music

#126

Post by squeaky-clean »

whiddershins wrote: post #66
rmxt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to be a pedant... but I'm not sure any one person gets to define what "music in the art sense" even is. Yes, Ableton is rigid. Yes, Ableton favors certain musical styles over others. Yes, Ableton, here and in their design of Live, may just be giving lip service to anything beyond rigid song structure, tempo and dynamic changes, etc. Yes, Ableton loves their little boxes. But, I find it hard to believe that Ablet…

I think either my phrasing was terrible (likely) or people aren't seriously considering what I am saying. Try just looping a sample that is of arbitrary length, not some multiple of beats. This is something that we could do fairly easily since the 1980s, and with moderate effort before that. Ableton made this in to an unusual technique. The entire arrangement view only superficially resembles protools, the automation…

You can disable quantizing and "warp" for clips (or just some clips if you like).

I sometimes use Ableton for noise shows, you can definitely get weird and off the grid with it. Record in 2 loops, not quantized so their lengths don't match exactly, duplicate each loop a few times. Disable warp on a few copies, enable repitching on a few others. Then when you twist the tempo knob some loops rise in pitch while getting faster, some just get faster but keep constant pitch, and some stay the same length and timbre. Record that to another track, then duplicate THAT and repeat, etc.

Re: Get started making music

#127

Post by PascLeRasc »

copperx wrote: post #45
PascLeRasc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaper is incredibly full-featured and free/cheap.

Reaper is optimized for live music, and, although it can do electronic music decently, its workflow is not tailored for it.

That's true. I should have qualified my response with that I pretty much exclusively do live instrument recording.

Re: Get started making music

#128

Post by adamnemecek »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #115
adamnemecek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better question is what do they do understand about music?

Well can you tell us about that? You're the one who made the claim.

Check out synfire, it's the only sw that somewhat similar. but it's very expensive, and the ui isn't great (sometimes it looks like writing music in excel, like it can provide "intelligence" but you have to check check boxes and click on things, aintnobodygottimeforthat.maymay. Some people might find it interesting that it's written in Smalltalk tho.

Re: Get started making music

#129

Post by paublyrne »

jachee wrote: post #120
plussed_reader wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What don't current DAWS understand about music?

I'd argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some "syntax-aware" features for their DAW.

Isn't knowing something about music something of a prerequisite for someone who wants to make music? Of course everyone has to start somewhere, but as musician of 20 years who loves DAWs, I would say learn an instrument first, or at least concurrently, if you want to start producing music.

Re: Get started making music

#130

Post by mortenjorck »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #100
JasonSage wrote: post #35

This is some good coverage of the music theory behind songwriting, which is important in making songs that sound good. However, there's another part of making music which is not covered at all here, which is the actual engineering of sounds. Think of a sound in your head and recreate it digitally—it'll involve sampling and synthesizing, there's tons of filters and sound manipulation to go through, they all go by diff…

You're right that it's a staggering amount of arcane knowledge. But starting out I always recommend experimentation over getting too deep into the theory. It does help to have some baseline understanding of: 1. Frequency 2. Harmonics 3. Oscillators/Waveforms 4. Envelopes 5. Filters The only problem with the last part of your request is that even if you are to watch people design sounds for a couple of hours you might…

I would even narrow that list down to one: Harmonics. Once it clicked in my mind that every sound is just a combination of sine waves, and that it's the intervals, amplitudes, and dynamics of those sines that make up everything we hear, it made sound design a lot clearer for me.

Of course, finding the right waveforms, filters, and envelopes required to get to a particular pattern of sines is still the challenge, but having that understanding of the medium underlying it all makes experimentation that much more productive (and fun).

Post reply on HN