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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#421

Post by edpichler »

dahart wrote: post #369
edpichler wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory for this. Please, do not down vote me, I am here with limited English but really good intentions. QWERTY keyboard is something humanity found a better solution, people have developed better layouts like Dvorak, per example, and world keeps using QWERTY (not my case). I have studied long time ago that TCP protocol is also not the best protocol, there are much betters and faster, but people keeps using…

The argument that Dvorak is superior and that inertia is keeping people from converting has been studied, and while I think there's some element of truth, it doesn't seem particularly compelling, since big disruptive changes occur all the time. "the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified…

My intention was not to compare music notation and dvorak, but write about human behavior in similar situation against the "inertia" you cited.

Re: Get started making music

#422

Post by Applejinx »

fb03 wrote: post #237
p0nce wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic. - Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing - Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel - Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing - FLStudio: focus on composing looping music - Reaper: focus on customization and performance - Protools: focus on getting the most…

> - Protools: focus on getting the most money out of the customer Why am i giggling sooo much :-) The whole talk about it being a 'industry standard'. I missed Renoise on your list: - Renoise: Focus on appealing to former tracker users and demoscene music makers.

Renoise: incredibly accurate timing. Yes demoscene music makers, but it's also exceptional at producing anything that's got to have incredibly tight timing. It even excels at sending MIDI data without jitter.

Also, as the heir apparent of the tracker movement (its audio can be a heck of a lot better than the early generations of trackers, and it's happy to work with multichannel DACs for outboard analog mixing) it offers a distinct way of thinking about sound-making: that old 'tracker' way of composing. Since it's based on audio samples of arbitrary fidelity, it's not restricted to 'demo-y' sounds: you can just as well use huge 24-bit high sample rate sounds, or use it as a way of layering audio tracks as one might in a DAW.

I'm not involved with Renoise as a company, BTW, but I AM completely charmed by it and own both it and Redux (the DAW plugin version).

Re: Get started making music

#423

Post by ptaipale »

lmm wrote: post #415
ptaipale wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really give any reason why Fahrenheit is a better scale or why inches, or why feet and miles are particularly practical units. It seems to me that people say this simply because they are used to them. You don't convert to metric units and it feels awkward because you don't use metric units. There is an issue with "kilometer" being a complex word for everyday use (as compared to a mile) in the English langua…

> There is an issue with "kilometer" being a complex word for everyday use (as compared to a mile) in the English language. That's more a linguistic issue that about the unit itself. Other languages have solutions to that with shorter colloquial name for the unit. Even in English people of a certain age can say "klicks" and be understood.

Exactly, it's something that mass usage will solve, even if the folk song will not sound just the same with "a hundred klicks, a hundred klicks, I am five hundred klicks away from home".

Other languages often say just letters "k" or "km".

Re: Get started making music

#424

Post by golergka »

adamnemecek wrote: post #103
golergka wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any further details may be?

Are you interested in anything particular? I can provide a lot more detail but I think that none of that will do it any justice. Sign up and check it out when it's out.

No offense, but it sounds like an empty sales pitch. You're trying to bring attention to the product you're building - and there's nothing wrong about it - but you're only presenting only vague promises, without even discussing what do DAWs get wrong about music in any significant detail.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, may be you could at least point to specific negative sides of existing DAWs that you're willing to eradicate?

Re: Get started making music

#425

Post by golergka »

xzel wrote: post #96
adamnemecek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think a lot more complicated music than I can play. I don't always have access to a keyboard. Piano is a good instrument but sometimes I want to write drums. Also sometimes I want to express relationships between the single notes, not just have the notes themselves. To record 10000 notes from a piano, you need to hit 10000 keys possibly more than once to record them. My thing will let you achieve the same thing…

I agree with you with respect to representation. Pattern/sequence generation is something most DAWs don't have outside of something like Cthulhu which the languages can do easily. Another thing I've been dying for is an easier way of layering sounds, for example drum hits. Multiple midi sends feels hacky in Ableton and certainly not a first class feature. On the other side of things, the pain of rearranging multiple…

> Another thing I've been dying for is an easier way of layering sounds, for example drum hits. Multiple midi sends feels hacky in Ableton and certainly not a first class feature.

Layering drum sounds is a typical feature in all DAWs, and in ableton, with it's instrument and drum racks, it's even easier to layer whatever you want. May be I don't understand what exactly are you trying to achieve?

Re: Get started making music

#426

Post by coldtea »

_pergosausage wrote: post #108
hxta98596 wrote: post #89

Anecdotal: there's a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The "build up" approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone. If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusi…

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?

>Do people actually learn how to make up music?

People have studied music and composition since at least ancient Babylon, so, well, yes?

>I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have.

With natural ability you can sing some melodies. For learning to play an instrument, adding chords to the melody, you need studying, even if you learn by yourself and by ear (as many folk musicians did). Song melody, one can have a natural feel for creating, but nobody just starts writing songs in full form "from natural ability".

>For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while.

What would that mean? You'd write a song on the guitar for example? If so, then you already know the chords. And not all of the theory, so how complex is your song? Just barebones songwriting (country/folk style)? Can you take it further? Can you write the parts for musicians to play on your song? Can you write different genres on spec?

There are more things in making music/songs than "spitting out" some melody.

Re: Get started making music

#427

Post by coldtea »

Boerworz wrote: post #408
stfwn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created an account just to reply to your comment. As someone who has played keyboard instruments for all my life, it's not crossed my mind lately that the idea that there is structure to music is not well known. Just for fun: chords in scales are numbered from bottom to top in Roman numerals. I feels like home base, V feels like wanting to go home. If you want to create the feeling of going home but then not really…

As someone who's recently tried to get into (basic) music theory, trying out the chord progressions you mentioned was fun! Do you happen to know of any resources that go through more of these well-known chord progressions? I'm also wondering if these chord progressions work the same way for all scales, or if, for example, the 'sad but I have closure'-type ending only sounds that way in major scales? From experimentin…

Try an app like:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chordbot/id394754767?mt=8&ig...

https://prochords.dk/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-chord-progression-son...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suggester-chords-that-work-t...

There are also desktop apps and DAWs that have chord intelligence built in (e.g. Cubase and Reason do).

Re: Get started making music

#428

Post by sdnguyen90 »

seertaak wrote: post #125
adamnemecek wrote: post #54

I'm actually working full time on a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier. Current DAWs don't really understand music. Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps. Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE. The HN audience is definitely one of my core groups. If you are interested, sign up here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzV…

Sounds really cool! Actually, I'm close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I've thought a lot about composition too. https://zenaud.io Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :) And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)

Does it have per note editing? For example in trackers you can specifically set a note to play volume X, pan Y, pitch Z

Re: Get started making music

#429

Post by jason_slack »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #18

As someone who has no musical talent whatsoever, I'm oddly intrigued by Ableton's products. I've occasionally stumbled across the Push[0] and been fascinated by it as an input device. This site is another thing to add to my Intriguing Stuff list. [0] https://www.ableton.com/en/push/

Me too. I own a Push 2 and Ableton Suite and I just practice and listen to a lot of music. Soon I will have some tracks to put up on sound cloud.

Re: Get started making music

#430

Post by seertaak »

sdnguyen90 wrote: post #428
seertaak wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds really cool! Actually, I'm close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I've thought a lot about composition too. https://zenaud.io Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :) And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)

Does it have per note editing? For example in trackers you can specifically set a note to play volume X, pan Y, pitch Z

zenAud.io is designed for live use, so it currently doesn't have a piano roll -- instead, you define record loops using editing tools in the arrangement view and record MIDI or audio into it. You can also drag and drop to import standard MIDI files into the arrangement if you want to use pre-written stuff.

I realize this is a big limitation, but we intend to add a piano roll in the next few months.

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