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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#381

Post by a_lieb »

elihu wrote: post #378
a_lieb wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well. My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern…

I agree with your main point -- standard notation is basically just piano tablature and it tends to confuse as much as it enlightens about how music works. However, I disagree about the "there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones" bit. This is a simplifying assumption of standard notation that makes it hard to express the idea of notes that are outside of the well-known 12. Even in the key of C major, this is a p…

I agree that intonation matters a lot; I guess I'm thinking about how you'd make a notation that better conveys the information already there in the current scores, which is 100% equal tempered. I actually like the idea of modifiers for microtones, and presumably any of that stuff would work just as well on a 12-tone staff.

Also, with a 12-tone staff plus shape notes, you'd get a little extra information for just intonation because you can tell for sure what key was intended for a given note.

Re: Get started making music

#382

Post by barryfandango »

penpapersw wrote: post #362
elcapitan wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like how it surprised me to learn that there's a lot of valid, practical reasons to use the Imperial measurement system over Metric. I've always wondered about that. Why?

I don't remember where I read it, but one of the big reasons was that Imperial units are much easier to divide in ways that make a lot of sense in practical usage, whereas Metric is designed to make conversions easier for doing science, which puts practical usage on a lower priority. But take this with a grain of salt.

* 64.7989 mg of salt

Re: Get started making music

#383

Post by sbilstein »

bkanber wrote: post #338
_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?

Songwriting can be taught, yes. In most music courses you start by analyzing the Bach Chorales , which (along with some Gregorian work from the middle ages) is what really kicked off contemporary music composition. By analyzing the Chorales and moving forward from there you learn how to manipulate chord progressions, harmony, point and counterpoint. Composers classically trained this way tend (!) to have an easier ti…

My girlfriend is a trained classical singer whereas I'm a self taught musician. She doesn't really gravitate towards the rock music I like to write but because of her training she can easily jam, riff, or write anything far quicker than I can. Songwriting is a very technical skill indeed.

Re: Get started making music

#384

Post by jdietrich »

adamnemecek wrote: post #295
jdietrich wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's very quick to read and write. It contains all of the vital musical information in a very concise format. Numerous alternative schemes for musical notation have been tried, but none have achieved significant adoption.

Re: Get started making music

#385

Post by skandl »

This is beautiful and amazing. I love how each step builds on the previous, and uses pop examples to explain theory concepts. I've often wondered so many of the things presented in this, particularly around what common characteristics a genre has with respect to rhythm! Big kudos to the team who built this. I'd love to learn about the development backstory, as this feels a lot like an internal sideproject made by passionate individuals and less like a product idea dreamed up with requirements and specs.

Re: Get started making music

#386

Post by enf »

derefr wrote: post #288
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…

Musicians frequently get taught music in large batches at schools, though, which means you don't have to worry about network effects—there are choke-points in the network. There's no reason a given school couldn't teach a "colloquial notation" first, with the "Lingua Franca" musical notation taught later on, for everyone in that given school. Then everyone who comes from that school would know that colloquial notatio…

England had a colloquial notation, taught in schools, for several decades: tonic sol-fa. But it could only talk about melody and rhythm, not harmony. It fell out of mainstream use in the late 1960s, perhaps as the music publishing industry consolidated and globalized, making it easier to have a single international edition of each song instead of separate editions by country.

Re: Get started making music

#387

Post by spiffytech »

fb03 wrote: post #81
JasonSage wrote: post #35

This is some good coverage of the music theory behind songwriting, which is important in making songs that sound good. However, there's another part of making music which is not covered at all here, which is the actual engineering of sounds. Think of a sound in your head and recreate it digitally—it'll involve sampling and synthesizing, there's tons of filters and sound manipulation to go through, they all go by diff…

This is something I struggle as a weekend hobbyist musician: There is some kind of black art involved in making music, in how to get that sound you enjoy on the music you like (which is probably the music that inspires you to make music, at least in my case). What I found was that as your music making experience unfolds, you start amassing these little tricks here and there and they're only yours, usually tied to you…

Are more of your tracks posted online?

Re: Get started making music

#388

Post by areyousure »

drblast wrote: post #210
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 re…

> 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.

You mean 7 notes. Traditional music notation and terminology is confused in many ways, one of which is a fencepost-counting error. As a result: octaves are actually seven notes apart in a scale, two major seconds make a major third (2+2=3?), and two octaves make a fifteenth (8+8=15!?).

Re: Get started making music

#389

Post by CamperBob2 »

elcapitan wrote: post #335
penpapersw wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I've done time and time again, and seen others do too. It's easy to look at something and think you understand it well enough to know how it can be improved. But when you find out the rationale and reasons it is the way it is, it's kind of humbling. Like how it surprised me to learn that there's a lot of valid, practical reasons to use the Imperial measurement system over Metric.

> Like how it surprised me to learn that there's a lot of valid, practical reasons to use the Imperial measurement system over Metric. I've always wondered about that. Why?

Machinists and engineers often prefer Imperial "mils" (thousandths of an inch), for instance. It's easy to convert from kilograms to pounds or kilometers to miles, but there's no convenient metric unit for expressing typical distances and tolerances used in mainstream machining. A millimeter is way too coarse, a micrometer is way too fine.

As a specific case, in electrical work, it's easy for me to specify "6 mil trace/space" attributes for a PC board design. Not so easy to say "0.1524 mm" or "152.4 microns." If I round my specification down to 0.1 mm, the resulting copper features will carry less current and cost more money. If I round it up to 0.2 mm, other physical and/or electrical requirements won't be met. So now I have to add at least one more sig fig, which is a pain in the neck for no obvious benefit.

Re: Get started making music

#390

Post by peapicker »

calflegal wrote: post #85

The timing of this post is funny, as just this week I launched a little ear training game built with React an Tone.js: https://www.notetuning.com/

I first saw a link to this Ableton page from a group I'm in on facebook on April 24, so Ableton's had this up at least since then....
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