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

251–260 of 476 posts

Re: Get started making music

#251

Post by psyc »

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…

I whistle into my phone. A few of my most complex pieces started that way.

Re: Get started making music

#252

Post by criddell »

ganonm wrote: post #225
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…

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music. Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string . However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwid…

I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion.

I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy). Would you agree with that?

Re: Get started making music

#253

Post by codazoda »

2845197541 wrote: post #235

This seems like the wrong place to start. This seems like the place to start learning a DAW and snapping together samples—to, IMO, make depersonalized unoriginal loop music in a society awash with it because DAW's and looping have created an angel's path to production and proliferation. Learn to drag and drop and you can tell people you meet that you're a musician or a producer. I've met too many mediocre people like…

For me, I disagree. I'm a fairly untalented guitar player. I spent 2 years with several teachers and self-learning and I can't really play anything. I can improvise a bit, knowing the Minor Pentatonic scale for example, but I can't really re-produce anyone else's music. I also have a lack of motivation to do so; after all, someone already wrote and performs that.

On the other hand, I am able to write my own music using tools like Guitar Pro, Garage Band, music sequencers, etc. I can even play that music if I'm careful to write it inside of my limited knowledge of the guitar. I really wish I would have been introduced to an easier way of creating music when I was younger so that I first became a hobby music builder and later moved on to playing.

Re: Get started making music

#254

Post by dahart »

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…

> 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?).

You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844

I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet.

I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn.

Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.

Re: Get started making music

#255

Post by psyc »

puranjay wrote: post #211

I'm an amateur musician and one of the things I hate about electronic music is how "distant" it all feels. I'm used to picking up the guitar, playing a few chords and writing a melody. Ableton (or any other DAW) feels like a chore. I have to boot up the computer, connect the MIDI keyboard, the audio interface and the headphones, then wait for Ableton to load, then create a new track and add a MIDI instrument before I…

I've used all the software DAWs. They are a chore. They're all terrible. Extremely cluttered UIs, and way too much to learn to do the simplest task. By contrast, I always found hardware DAW touch-screen interfaces a joy, because they strip it down to entering and editing notes, everything is tactile, and they sound great.

Re: Get started making music

#256

Post by Pyxl101 »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #239
breadbox wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?). Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invent…

That doesn't jive with the "I can do better" mantra around these parts. I say that both sincerely and sarcastically.

They are not saying you cannot be better. They're just saying to respect what came before and learn from it as you devise the better scheme.

Re: Get started making music

#257

Post by Moru »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #239
breadbox wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?). Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invent…

That doesn't jive with the "I can do better" mantra around these parts. I say that both sincerely and sarcastically.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Get started making music

#258

Post by BookmarkSaver »

dahart wrote: post #254
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…

> 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?). You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 I see some great re…

>I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet.

I think that this is the incorrect way of looking at it. I suspect it is less that the traditional notation system is highly evolved and effective, and more that getting a critical mass of musicians to transition/relearn/teach/translate into a newer system is incredibly difficult.

For instance, while Imperial units aren't without some advantage, they are pretty generally inferior to the Metric system. But the US hasn't really switched because it requires a significant level of coordination and control that simply isn't easy to access. And getting musicians to learn and teach a brand new, objectively better system would be much much harder.

Re: Get started making music

#259

Post by olivermarks »

criddell wrote: post #252
ganonm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music. Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string . However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwid…

I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion. I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy).…

I think most guitarists (including me) use tabulature as a loose framework to extemporize around rather than as an exact transcription. You can find lots of youtube videos of people playing exact versions of old favorites (stairway to heaven for example) but they are usually the musical equivalent of painting by numbers, lacking feel.

Jazz musicians typically learn the changes (chords and melody line) to tunes and improvise around that from a sophisticated understanding of harmony, a variation on the tab approach.

Sight reading music, especially for guitarists, is more akin to tightrope walking in my opinion but typically a combination of tablature, staves and chord changes gets me to where I need to be

Post reply on HN