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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#431

Post by fb03 »

spiffytech wrote: post #387
fb03 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, I post all my stuff to Soundcloud and Youtube, this way I can get constructive feedback and learn even more.

Here are the channels you can listen to more of my stuff, and by all means please help me get better by commenting and feedbacking me if you can. If you make music as well I will gladly return your energy and time by commenting and giving feedback. :)

Also, I usually participate on the listen thread/feedback rounds on reddit's /r/edmproduction, you'll find me there as well commenting on everyone's tracks ;)

https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03

https://www.youtube.com/user/cadumimi

cya o/

Re: Get started making music

#432

Post by fb03 »

Applejinx wrote: post #422
fb03 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 of…

\o/ I found a Renoise user.

Yes a thousand times, dude, Renoise is that good. It's my main DAW and I feel really spoiled by it, specially by its incredible stability.

Everytime I read articles or forum posts about people talking about their DAWs I hear people complaining about ableton/fl studio etc being unstable, crashing on odd occasions etc. I have never experienced a crash on Renoise, not even using multiple VSTs etc, even some buggy ones that are prone to crashing or scrambling other DAW's internal state hehehe... I have composed tracks on Renoise for over 6 hours to only them realize I hadn't saved a single time.

Re: Get started making music

#434

Post by fil_a_del_fee_a »

khalilravanna wrote: post #88
fil_a_del_fee_a wrote: post #73

I purchased the Ableton Push 2 a month or so ago and it has to be one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of equipment I have ever used. Look up the teardown video. Extremely simple, yet elegant. The Push 1 was created by Akai, and apparently Ableton wasn't satisfied, so they designed and built their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs

Oh man I've had mine for I think a bit over a year now and I love it so much. It really builds off the fundamentals mentioned on the first page of this shared post: you jam out little riffs and then mix and match them till you get something you like. There have been many days/nights where I've needed to do some programming on my game and instead burn 3-4 hours without realizing it because I hit a groove. It's so cond…

I am scared to get the OP-1 because it looks like TOO much fun! Yes, I find myself jamming with the Push, not really making anything in particular. The scale mode helps me as I have little music training. Ableton simply works for me. I am using Push 2 + DDJ-SR / Serato and couldn't be happier. Although Serato has a LOT to be desired (pitch shift + fx + vst support), it just SOUNDS great.

Re: Get started making music

#435

Post by dahart »

edpichler wrote: post #421
dahart wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally, I understand. And mine wasn't to counter Dvorak specifically, but mention that the inertia theory has been questioned, and also mention that sometimes things are believed to be better by some people but in reality aren't much better if at all for most people. Sometimes inertia is posed as a reason for not changing when in fact the reason is the accepted system is the superior system for the largest number of people.

The latter is my theory about music notation; that inertia is not even at issue yet because there are no serious alternatives.

And inertia might never be an issue, because music notation is a fluidly changing system. TCP and qwerty/Dvorak are static systems that don't ever change, so you can argue about which one's better. Music notation is changing and improving, so it's hard to suggest that people are resisting change, and hard to suggest that something better will supplant it, right?

I agree with your theory in general though, outside of the issue of music notation, and I think a lot of people do. It's just a matter of finding the right examples that clearly demonstrate it. And it would be really interesting to somehow quantify the amount that something needs to be better before people will adopt it. It's like static friction in physics -- it takes more force to get something started moving than it does to keep it moving.

Re: Get started making music

#436

Post by fil_a_del_fee_a »

andkon wrote: post #206
exodust wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Push 1 is still awesome and there's a ton on the second hand market for a fraction of the price of Push 2. You get way more than you pay for at those prices. I'm happy with mine, I like the pads and it's fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements. I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it! I also own a M…

Having tried both a ton before settling on the Push 2, the screen is great, but that's not why I bought it. In every way it feels better to make music on than the first Push. The pads especially are a thousand times more responsive — the Push 1's got this weird wooden feeling that never seemed to register the velocity I was going for. I think the Push 2 is ~3x as much, and it is worth every penny.

I was shocked at how sensitive the pads are on the Push 2. A graceful brush of a finger triggers the pads. I know that sensitivity can he adjusted, but wow! I produce classic Hip-Hop / Rap music which involves sampling. The screen is insanely helpful when it comes to chopping samples.

Re: Get started making music

#437

Post by fil_a_del_fee_a »

exodust wrote: post #180
fil_a_del_fee_a wrote: post #73

I purchased the Ableton Push 2 a month or so ago and it has to be one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of equipment I have ever used. Look up the teardown video. Extremely simple, yet elegant. The Push 1 was created by Akai, and apparently Ableton wasn't satisfied, so they designed and built their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs

Push 1 is still awesome and there's a ton on the second hand market for a fraction of the price of Push 2. You get way more than you pay for at those prices. I'm happy with mine, I like the pads and it's fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements. I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it! I also own a M…

I have been listening to some of the Maschine patches on YouTube and am very impressed.

EDIT: Wow the Mikro is very affordable!

Re: Get started making music

#438

Post by louthy »

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…

Picking up an analogue synth with all the knobs on the front is a good way to get your head around sound design, and very quickly discovering what does what (sound-wise). An oscilloscope on the output also allows you to see what is physically happening. VSTs tend to 'get in the way' because of the interface, but obviously you could get something like Diva and experiment in the same way. I think reading up on the physics of oscillators, filters, envelopes etc. can be a real help getting that picture in your mind of how to make the sound you want as well.

I've been building up bit of an epic studio [1] over the past few years after being in-the-box for years. And the hands on nature of real synths is so much more intuitive that VSTs imho.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/kzl97vl

Re: Get started making music

#439

Post by xzel »

danielskogly wrote: post #188
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…

The Song Exploder podcast is awesome for both approaches, and I would really recommend anyone interested in writing and/or producing music to give it a go. "A podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made." @ http://songexploder.net/

+2. Only podcast I listen to. The first few episodes are a little rough around the edges, bad questions, people not knowing exactly what they were getting into, but the rest are all incredible.

Protip: sample the guest's clips they put on his show :) I've gotten some really great material from this show sonically since most of them seem to be the individual instrument tracks.

Re: Get started making music

#440

Post by acjohnson55 »

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 once thought the same thing, but after months of studying our music system and our way of notating it, I came to understand why it's so difficult to improve upon staff notation.

First of all, Western music has complex structure both horizontally and vertically. This makes it rather difficult to encode and visualize, right at the outset. You need some sort of matrix visualization, like a staff or piano roll, to capture all of the nuance.

What makes the staff so useful is that it also captures the tonal aspects of music in compact way -- those that relate to the key the music is written in. Every triad in the same inversion looks the same in every key. A triad is three consecutive lines or spaces. And then deviations from the standard triad for that tonal function are marked with accidentals.

This turns out to be extremely useful for performers, because you learn to play an instrument by learning to play in all the keys, rather than learning what the 12 notes are and playing note by note. I realized this when taking piano class and doing exercises where we'd transpose to another key while sightreading in the original key.

There are other notation systems that have been as successful as the staff, but they tend to be specific to particular instruments or styles. For example, most guitarists find tablature much easier to play than standard notation, especially if the tablature is augmented with note durations and rests.

Also, although I've become a true believer when it comes to the staff, I have less rationale for why the traditional clef system has stuck around. It seems like something that is more regular as you go up and down the scale would be more helpful. There are systems that use things like note shapes or colors to help mark the note name. I guess we just haven't found a standard.

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