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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#201

Post by klodolph »

richardjdare wrote: post #148
_pergosausage wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you said about learning melodies and beats and chords kind of confused me. Do people actually learn how to make up music? I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have. For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while. Am I unuiqe in this respect?

What I find difficult is that by the time I've got my DAW going and found some synths I like, the tune in my head has evaporated. Do all people find musical thoughts so insubstantial, or is it just me? If I imagine a picture or a paragraph of text, it'll stick around and I can remember it more or less indefinitely. I still recall snatches of crap poetry I thought up when I was a teenager, but any music I imagine just…

Imagine that you're a writer, and you have an idea, so you turn on your computer, wait for it to boot, log in, open up Word, and fiddle around with fonts for a bit... that's what you're doing.

Writers keep pens and notebooks by their bed so if they wake up in the middle of the night they can start writing right now. Or they have tape recorders. Anything works as long as it's immediately available. The iPhone has a "Music Memos" app, I'm sure there's something similar for Android. That's what I use.

Learning music theory and how to write music properly can come later. As long as you can sing, whistle, or hum a tune, you can record it.

Re: Get started making music

#202

Post by p0nce »

G4BB3R wrote: post #32
whiddershins wrote: post #13

Ableton Live is my main daw. I use it every day, generally for hours, and for a wide variety of purposes. The most depressing thing about ableton is made obvious in two seconds of messing with that tutorial. A complete disregard for music in the sense of pushing boundaries of time, or doing things that are not tied to any sort of grid, and the sense of music as an emotive form. So many aspects of music are very annoy…

What DAW you would recommend? And what features do Ableton miss?

It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic.

- Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing

- Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel

- Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing

- FLStudio: focus on composing looping music

- Reaper: focus on customization and performance

- Protools: focus on getting the most money out of the customer

- Logic: focus on getting the sound you want and making a song easily, pre-made effect chains

- Studio One: a bit similar to Logic in spirit

- Cubase: I don't know what it focuses on tbh

A major problematic is that the topdown goal of making one song may easily be dwarfed by mixing difficulties that can then capture your focus forever (aka "loopitis").

As an audio plugin developer, I get to know a bit of every DAW out there, for testing. A popular opinion is that tools don't matter for making music, but a more realistic opinion is that they actually do matter, by warping how you think about the problem.

Re: Get started making music

#203

Post by quadrangle »

komali2 wrote: post #190
hxta98596 wrote: post #89

Anecdotal: there's a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The "build up" approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone. If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusi…

Is Apple's Garageband free? I thought you need to own an OSX device to run it? (my understanding is OSX only runs on Apple hardware and also is not a free OS)

Garageband is completely non-free/libre/open which seems what you are saying

Re: Get started making music

#204

Post by lprubin »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #200

I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.). Since wes…

Many non classical musicians use other notations. For example, many guitarists and bassists use tab notation. It's simply a visual representation of the strings and a number for which fret to play.

It's not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.

Re: Get started making music

#205

Post by quadrangle »

plussed_reader wrote: post #68
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…

What don't current DAWS understand about music?

Mostly they don't understand well all the possibilities outside of typical meter and tuning systems. They can do some but tend to push you to writing 4-beat meters in 12-note-equal-temperament. Rhythm and pitch both have far far far more possibilities which DAWs either ignore or at least make second-class options you have to kind of fight for or try a few limited tastes.

Re: Get started making music

#206

Post by andkon »

exodust wrote: post #180
fil_a_del_fee_a wrote: post #73

I purchased the Ableton Push 2 a month or so ago and it has to be one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of equipment I have ever used. Look up the teardown video. Extremely simple, yet elegant. The Push 1 was created by Akai, and apparently Ableton wasn't satisfied, so they designed and built their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs

Push 1 is still awesome and there's a ton on the second hand market for a fraction of the price of Push 2. You get way more than you pay for at those prices. I'm happy with mine, I like the pads and it's fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements. I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it! I also own a M…

Having tried both a ton before settling on the Push 2, the screen is great, but that's not why I bought it. In every way it feels better to make music on than the first Push. The pads especially are a thousand times more responsive — the Push 1's got this weird wooden feeling that never seemed to register the velocity I was going for.

I think the Push 2 is ~3x as much, and it is worth every penny.

Re: Get started making music

#207

Post by aoeusnth1 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #200

I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.). Since wes…

Agreed, but reading sheet music is a very small part of playing piano proficiently (say, at the 97th percentile). Once you get past knowing the notes in a piece, there's the much more difficult task of being able to manipulate the force that you exert from your fingers to create the right volume balance. For example, your untrained thumb will naturally play notes much louder than it should, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to play notes with it at the right volume; the opposite is true with your pinky and ring fingers.

...Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There's a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes.

Here's an example: listen to this performance of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau" by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8

And then listen to this student play it (she is still a high-skill player, just not world-class talent):

https://youtu.be/l2gJSVOdaG8

Re: Get started making music

#208

Post by cmelbye »

komali2 wrote: post #190
hxta98596 wrote: post #89

Anecdotal: there's a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The "build up" approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone. If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusi…

Is Apple's Garageband free? I thought you need to own an OSX device to run it? (my understanding is OSX only runs on Apple hardware and also is not a free OS)

Yes, it's "free" (not open source). It's included with the purchase of a Mac.

Re: Get started making music

#209

Post by nnd »

adamnemecek wrote: post #165
nnd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say HN audience would be one of your target groups, do you mean that your DAW would be more like a development environment/programming language (like Sonic Pi), or would it have a more traditional interface?

Both actually :-). And those aren't even all of the "composition paradigms" and they are all first class citizens in the UI.

Awesome, I'm stocked to get my hands on this!

Re: Get started making music

#210

Post by drblast »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #200

I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven't come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?). I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a "note" (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B's and sharps (depending on the tune etc.). Since wes…

Think of it as data compression that shows you the notes you're most likely to play, without taking up space for notes you probably won't.

If there's a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you're unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp/flat symbol?

Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this.

Edit: For those that don't know, in most western music you're only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it's easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn't accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.

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