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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#271

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

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…

Oven the last 800 years, hundreds of different systems have been proposed to the system that has evolved to be the one in use today.

Generally it can be said that some have been better in a specific use case (klavar notation was pretty big in the Netherlands among those who didn't know regular notation), but they fall apart pretty quickly when you try to write Liszt or Rachmaninov in it.

I might be a bit rigid (I have played bassoon professionally for most of my adult life), but I can't really see how it can be made much better and still keep the same utility.

While chords might be not optimal today, we can still express things like enharmonics easily (which, at least for me, is something that can make sight reading easier as it allows for the notes to stay "in key").

As with the spoken word, music has an advanced coding system. Both coding systems are flawed in their own way (as someone with a different mother tongue than english, I have a hard time spelling just about anything), but they have also stood the trial of time.

Re: Get started making music

#272

Post by jdietrich »

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 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 was a tab-reading guitar player for years, then learned classical notation. Classical notation is undoubtedly faster to parse. For whatever reason, there seems to be a much more direct connection between your eyes and hands when you're reading dots.

It seems to be much more amenable to chunking[1] - you stop seeing individual notes and start seeing chords and scale fragments. Tab is a meaningful and direct representation of the physical parameters of the guitar fretboard, which I think is a shortcoming; classical notation represents information in a way that more directly corresponds with musical theory.

Tab is lossy, but it discards some very important information. Unlike classical notation, it has no native means of indicating note length and can't accurately represent rhythmic subdivisions. If a piece of music has any real rhythmic complexity, tab alone is insufficient.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

Re: Get started making music

#273

Post by Double_Cast »

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…

One advantage of the 5-Line Staff is use of both lines and spaces. It's compact, easy to print, and easy to stack notes vertically.

Another advantage: each note of a diatonic scale is mapped injectively. Cf. representing each line (or space) as a whole-tone, which leads to hash-collisions (e.g. "is that a G or a G#?"). Each note on a line (or space) on which collisions occur would need an accidental. Which defeats the purpose of key signatures.

A diatonic scale contains an odd number of unique notes. The fact that C lies on a line while C' lies on a space is an unfortunate artifact of representing a 7-note scale with alternating lines and spaces.

Re: Get started making music

#274

Post by andyjsong »

codazoda wrote: post #253
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 usi…

Shameless plug, but have you heard of Magic Instruments[1]? It sounds like the bottleneck is the guitar's user interface and not your music ability. One of the features is what we call Magic Mode, where a single button is a chord and buttons are laid out in any key/scale, but it can also be played like a traditional guitar.

[1] www.magicinstruments.com

Re: Get started making music

#275

Post by warcher »

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…

Perhaps you'd be happier with a fully featured keyboard, no computer required? They make some great stuff these days, and it all feeds back into the computer pretty easily if you come up with a riff or loop you like, and want to put it into a proper DAW for polish. Just flip a switch and you're rolling.

Re: Get started making music

#276

Post by deckard1 »

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…

> make depersonalized unoriginal loop music

Seems like the art fits the times, then. We live in a society where it's easier to "like" something on Facebook, or "friend" someone on Instagram rather than talking in person to another human.

In any case, I disagree with almost all of that. Almost all music you hear today is digital, filtered through electronics, and coming out of mass-produced speakers. Often in some giant shopping complex, in Your Town, USA.

Why write on Hacker News using a computer when you should be writing with quill and ink to your local newspaper? Assuming you aren't against Johannes Gutenberg and his heretical ideas.

Re: Get started making music

#277

Post by jh3 »

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…

The Octatrack is a fun box that can basically replace Ableton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjavTXRvZBE

Re: Get started making music

#278

Post by zeitpolizei »

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…

> This seems like the wrong place to start. This seems like the place to start learning a DAW and snapping together samples

I agree that it makes sense, in a lot of cases, to start with learning an instrument, I do not think that replaces the information on this website. This is more about composing than anything. Sure, the first page introduces the user to "snapping together samples", but the next page introduces the user to what a drum beat is. Going through these pages I can learn to compose music, not just triggering samples. Nobody says that a site like this is a replacement for an instrument, rather, it's something additional that anyone could gain some insights from.

While there's an option to use patterns from the site in Ableton Live, this information is completely DAW agnostic, and could also be completely useful for people that have no interest in creating music with a computer.

Re: Get started making music

#279

Post by jdietrich »

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…

>by the time I've got my DAW going and found some synths I like, the tune in my head has evaporated

That's where music theory pays off. Learning to name chords, scales and arpeggios gives your brain a framework to reason about and remember musical ideas. It allows you to break the music into a more concise abstract representation, rather than holding it in your head as sound. If you understand the structure of music, it's far easier to make connections between different pieces of music.

Re: Get started making music

#280

Post by chillingeffect »

dahart wrote: post #263
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 traditio…

You have a great point, that getting the world to switch would be very very hard. But it's not black and white, you can't compare that to anything. If there's a viable alternative to music notation that you know of and is superior to what we know as standard western notation, feel free to share. Your choice of example is interesting, considering metric has won, and the US is switching slowly. But there is no incorrec…

I hope people don't think I'm being brusque here, but these comments are a classic case of an outsider looking at the system, admitting to be lazy and wondering why the rest of the world differs from their expectations vs. asking musicians what they think.

At its core, musical notation is succinct: a mixture of logic and unique symbols. Note markers are isomorphic to pitch. Rhythms subdivide with vertical lines. Special symbols and brief phrases denote beginnings, ends and loop points. (They're not usually in English) Geometric figures indicate volume and speed changes.

A competing system in my purview is "tracker" notation. It's vertical and generally only used on machines, but hand writable: It looks like: C-3 Eb3 G-3 Bb3

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