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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#291

Post by hellofunk »

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 think that you are approaching the notation from a very left brained kind of logical point of view. Once you learn to recognize the patterns in musical notation, none of these concerns actually matter. Musicians just see the pattern and play it, and then focus on the stuff that is really difficult, which is the musicality.

Re: Get started making music

#292

Post by jdietrich »

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…

Check out the Novation Circuit. It's a brilliantly fast and intuitive sketchpad for electronic music. You can turn it on and be making music in minutes, without reading the manual. It runs on AA batteries, so you can doodle ideas anywhere. It isn't a replacement for a DAW, but it isn't supposed to be.

https://novationmusic.com/circuit/circuit

Re: Get started making music

#293

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

chillingeffect wrote: post #280
dahart wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Spec…

I have the same feeling. Music notation might be hard to interpret sometimes, but none of the alternatives actually solve anything. They do however introduce a whole lot of questions.

I think a valid comparison is the regular alphabet. It is, after all, a coding system for language in the same way that notation is a coding system for music. Most of the problems of that coding system (my pet peeve is english spelling) generally stem from conventions rather than problems with the alphabet (italian and german is much easier to spell correctly).

There might be some interesting alternatives (hangul!), but those systems come with their own share of problems and generally have no big benefits. I actually believe that musical notation is better fit for it's task than our current coding system for language.

Re: Get started making music

#294

Post by compiler-guy »

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…

Great point.

To a first approximation:

Tablature is a _physical description_ of how a particular stringed instrument should be played, and the notes are a side effect of that. It is instrument specific and it doesn't contain much information about the musical details of the piece.

For example, tablature doesn't describe the key the piece is to be played in. To figure that out, you have to mentally translate the mechanical description into notes, and from there determine the key.

Standard notation is a _musical description_ of how a particular song should be played, and the physical act of playing is a side effect of that. It is not instrument specific, and it contains a lot of information about the musical details of the piece, but usually no information at all about how a the instrument should be played. (There are a few minor exceptions.)

For example, standard notation tells you exactly the key the piece is in, but the player has to mentally translate the notes into the physical steps of getting that note out of the piece.

Basically standard notation adds a layer of indirection from the music to the mechanical act of playing. Like many indirections, it can be hard to understand at first, but has adds great power and flexibility that a direct system doesn't have.

Re: Get started making music

#295

Post by adamnemecek »

jdietrich wrote: post #282
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.

IMO, classical notation is the Vim of music - it looks bizarre to outsiders, it's totally unintuitive, it requires a lot of memorisation and practice to use effectively, but it's extraordinarily efficient in the hands of an expert user.

How is it efficient? What exactly is the alternative?

Re: Get started making music

#296

Post by adamnemecek »

Nadya wrote: post #198
adamnemecek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. "LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. " I don't need or want any of that. In fact when I write music, music engraving is the least of my concerns. Actually music engraving is generally the least of my concerns period. Also I find the current music notation to be kinda idk outdated. I can read it, but I feel like it's a system designed by someone…

>Also I find the current music notation to be kinda idk outdated. I can read it, but I feel like it's a system designed by someone who had the mathematical knowledge of a 15th century farmer (which is probably how it came to be). What specifically about it? I can read (and prefer) standard musical notation but when handwriting I use Hummingbird [0] because I find it aides itself to handwriting. But I can't really ima…

This is a long discussion. But fundamentally music notation is very paper oriented and doesn't exploit the advantages screens offer.

> (and prefer) standard musical notation

Prefer it over what?

Re: Get started making music

#297

Post by derefr »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #281
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…

The current system is 800 years old, and over that time it has won over hundreds of different systems. A new system is proposed every now and then, and even though they might be better in a specific problem domain (say, microtonal music), but they always fall apart. I have thought a lot about the problem (worked as a professional bassoon player for a very long time), and I can't say I have had many good ideas. There…

What do you think about parallel visualization? Right now, musical notation strives for a single notation that tries to encompass the entire work—and to also serve as a canonical, lossless transcription of the work, from which it can be recovered.

If you drop that requirement (and then assume digital storage) you could have 1. an underlying canonical format that has "all the information" but which is never presented to the performer, nor to the composer; and 2. a number of views that expose various dimensions of the composition. Like orthographic projections of a model in CAD software.

Presuming an interactive display (touchscreen, etc.) you could switch between these views at will; but even for printed sheet music, you could just isolate one measure at a time and then display several "stacked" views of that measure per page.

(Basically, picture widely-spaced, annotated sheet music, but where the annotations are themselves in the form of more musical notation, rather than words, appearing in additional sub-staffs attached to the measure.)

Re: Get started making music

#298

Post by Double_Cast »

H1Supreme wrote: post #238
lprubin wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MOST guitar players I know use tabs. Personally, I'd rather see the chord type and root string. Ie. 6th string AMin, 4th string GMaj7. Tabs are almost as confusing because I memorized the notes, not the fret number.

I memorize chord progressions in terms of interval-number. E.g. {F# m; B dom7; E Maj} becomes {ii; V7; I}. I've memorized which intervals are major chords and which intervals are minor chords. So if I can figure out the tonic, then I can figure out the key. And if I figure out the key, I need only remember a pattern of ordinals (modulo non-triads).

Re: Get started making music

#299

Post by phlakaton »

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…

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12159224 . Which I shamelessly plug since I was a participant in that one. :-)

I got a reply there that the current system is only suitable for professional musicians, and that you'd need something like shape notes to reach mass musical literacy. Now I'm hopelessly biased as a music degree-holder, a semi-professional musician, and a Presbyterian to boot ;-), but this strikes me as setting the bar way too low. Given levels of overall literacy in the US (which were very different when shape notes were developed) I don't think it's that difficult to learn the notation itself – the difficulty I think is in mastering the music system.

Re: Get started making music

#300

Post by Kiro »

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…

DAWs don't use the classical notation system, neither does this tutorial, so I don't understand the context of your comment.
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