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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#321

Post by [deleted] »

criddell wrote: post #306
TylerE wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree. Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. A given note could be played in as many as 5 different places, and they will ALL sound different. An open A (5th string) will sound different than the same A played on the low E string, 5th fret. (This is completely unrelated to the woeful quality of most of the tab floating around on the net. You can…

> Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. But it doesn't encode the note type, right? All the tab books I've bought don't differentiate between whole notes, quarter notes, etc... So that seems pretty lossy. Look at any guitar fake book for an example. Plus, I never looked at tablature as a literal transcription. That's why I would describe it as a more of a f…

[deleted]

Re: Get started making music

#322

Post by busterarm »

adamnemecek wrote: post #152
busterarm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> will it constrain me to its understanding about music This is actually exactly what I'm trying to prevent. Most of the current solutions only kind of constrain you to a certain tonal space that you can maybe explore but the space of possible compositions is actually insanely large. My DAW is going to try to help you explore all that. Microtonality is definitely something I've thought about and I think I can make it…

I lean towards Reaper the most as far as DAWs go.

Often I'll use http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ and my synths and a fair bit of SuperCollider/Overtone.

Re: Get started making music

#323

Post by 2845197541 »

flycaliguy wrote: post #269
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…

Maybe you haven't developed an ear to distinguish between the good and bad? Walk down my college town bar scene and it's awash with dudes who have poured years into an acoustic and it all sounds the same to me... except my buddy Dave (who has the same feelings toward beats as you BTW and honestly I think it's because his guitar is a social crutch...) Personally I've found DAW style copy and pasting, along with a skel…

I use DAW's as well. I make ambient music and sound collages as a hobby. I have a large loop and VST instrument collection and have purchased and used numerous apps. My argument is that to have a thorough understanding of music one should be well-rounded and begin with analog; one should become proficient at an instrument. I can't imagine not knowing how to play guitar, tune it up, improvise on it, play it in real time using scales, affecting its sound with my musculature, feeling the infinite nuance of the striking of a single note by how you strike it with said musculature. I can't imagine not having spent time in garages with friends communicating through instruments. That education is invaluable and will deepen your understanding. I just think starting in an artificial realm is a bad idea for a proper music education and people will benefit more by learning music in-the-world, at least initially. This isn't to say that doing this won't make you the open mic guy doing drivel Dave Matthews covers on an acoustic, as you mention.

Re: Get started making music

#324

Post by troncheadle »

Double_Cast wrote: post #298
H1Supreme wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is a great illustration of how we grapple with the abstraction of scales and key over time.

First, you have tabs, which describe the physical position of the notes on the instrument.

Then, we have root / chord type notation, in which we describe the starting position and shape of the notes on the instrument, and the musician must translate that information to the physical position of the notes, on the fly.

What is important about this second stage is that the musician has a pretty good grasp on how to play, and can usually sight read a piece and get a pretty decent version of it just by tracking chords, or in the case of the piano, just chords and the melody on the other hand, or a small pattern.

Finally, we come to roman numeral notation, which describes the chords based on their relative position to the root note of key, not the chord. This is a powerful abstraction. It provides incredible insight into the relationships between music, notes, chords, and progressions of chords at a level divorced from the 'root' of that key. A 9th played over a minor 7th chord is going to give you a very similar sound in any key. This is a great skill for songwriters and composers, who need to have a strong working intuition about things like what chord will sound good in this progression, or what notes we want to appear in our melody (which is related to the chords beneath it).

Re: Get started making music

#326

Post by avodonosov »

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…

Roman numerals may seem simpler than arabic, but turns out arabic are more convenient for complex operations like multiplication.

Re: Get started making music

#327

Post by MandieD »

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 wonder how many of us "skilled musical technicians" there are - people who can read music really well, produce those notes on our instruments predictably enough to play in a group, but just aren't that "musical" - we're boring to listen to on our own and have trouble singing. I'm a competent flute player, but it's a good thing I was just as interested in computers as a teen.

Re: Get started making music

#328

Post by pishpash »

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…

It's clear that current music software is poor for conveying information when compared to editors for many other tasks. It is easy to blame musical notation for that, but in fact in most music software there are several equivalent views (tracks, piano roll, notation), and you'll find that notation is the _most_ efficient of those.

Consider this: In this system, your most complex Classical scores for an entire orchestra are written, and present day trained composers continue to work efficiently in it. That tells you about its expressive power. It is in fact not stupid, but very well tuned to a lot of music theory. Other than complex timbre manipulation (and even that), you can do probably everything you want to accomplish with just software that does nothing but notation.

Instead, what most music software lacks is in the organization department. The organization of non-linear ideas, their programmatic (as in music) occurrence, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the completion of obvious intent. Tracks and loops are probably not the right view of musical structure, at least far from a _complete_ view. There needs to be a better bridge between musical phrases and ideas at the local level (for which musical notation is perfectly suited) and the organizational structure of a complex piece at the macro level (for which tools are very lacking). There also needs to be a better bridge between some conception of events (for which musical notation is slightly ill suited, being restricted to notes) and the microscopic world of timbres, effects, and transformations.

Until music software makers recognize that what they should be helping with is neither engraving, nor mixing console simulation, but a non-linear creative task, music software will continue to suck.

Re: Get started making music

#329

Post by jozzz »

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…

> However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)

Sorry but this is wrong IMO. You've been reading sheet music your entire life, but you've only been reading tab for the past few years.

I've been reading tab for 10 years. I think in tab. There are a bunch of songs that I can't be bothered learning (sultans of swing, metallica songs+solos, oasis songs.. you get the idea) because I don't like them enough but are fun to play along with, and I do so with Guitar Pro playing the tab at full speed. It's basically like rocksmith/guitar hero but in "real life" mode.

Re: Get started making music

#330

Post by dyeje »

Splendor wrote: post #320
dyeje wrote: post #16

Wow this is super high quality content. Props to Ableton. By far my favorite DAW, but I wish they would come out with a cheaper license.

Cheaper than the $99 Intro license?

Intro has a limit on how many tracks you can have. Which makes it more or less unusable for my purposes.
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