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Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

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Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#1

Post by przemoc »

I am not a professional musician (just played on a music keyboard for ~8 years till I stopped ~10 years ago), but sometimes various ideas flow into my mind or I want to quickly transcribe (at least some parts of) heard music. The problem is with figuring out and writing down the stuff (or staff if you prefer, but literal staff is not needed, anything easily convertible to SMF or music XML would be fine). And doing it efficiently, obviously.

I lack sound recognition skill (cannot immediately reconstruct heard or thought sounds, have to find them out using trial and error method, which sometimes becomes more effective if I am getting into vibe of currently analyzed tune).

I have my old Casio CTK-750, but:

1. It's not next to my PC, so I have to relocate (it would be acceptable if not the other things below).

2. It has memory only for 2 songs. (There are though many tracks, so I can abuse them going with single idea per track and muting all others during recording/playing. Cumbersome.)

3. After recording I still lack the score and next day I can easily forget how I played it before.

There is a MIDI stuff. Haven't tried it recently, because my current desktop doesn't have gameport or I don't have the cable anymore or both (don't remember now the exact state, sounds ridiculous, I know). But I tried it many years ago on my AWE32 (that was really expensive and huge back then!) and Cakewalk was getting some more notes than I played (some very high and very low tones), so it was practically useless. Never figured out whether it was bad cable (didn't have the second one), bad keyboard (didn't have the second one) or bad gameport (didn't have second sound one). Maybe I should buy MIDI-on-USB, cable, and recheck it nowadays.

Ad rem. I tried some applications (haven't checked them thoroughly, though) like musescore, noteedit, nted, rosegarden, milky tracker, (modplug on Windows also) and possibly some others I don't remember their names now, but apparently no one has sane recording/playing via keyboard feature. The best what you can get are shortcuts for notes, like C for C, D for D, etc. which are possibly ok for slow editing/tuning purposes, but far from being even acceptable for "live performances". Having some music keyboard mode is so obvious that I am amazed not seeing it anywhere.

Well, there is VMPK, but it doesn't have good enough way of mapping tones (tones -> keys instead the other way, which means you cannot have same tones on two different keys) and I failed at seeing/hearing its output in musescore, i.e. did set the connection via qjackctl's connect dialog box, but musescore doesn't have any way to choose the input provided to it in IO tab. Musescore is not the best target actually, as it is ok only for storing notes alone, without timestamp and duration information.

(I have voluntary preemptable Linux kernel right now in my debian squeeze, so it's suboptimal for MIDI stuff and audio in general, but still have to say that latency I get in VMPK is extremely awfully annoying.)

So tell me HN, what are your music prototyping solutions, suggestions, tips, favorite apps, etc.?

My first AskHN thing here, hopefully it's not too long and I'll get some insightful comments.

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#2

Post by bane »

Digital trackers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)

I have yet to find a faster way from idea to music. It's clunky to get into until you spend some time to learn the idea and build up a collection of music and wrap your brain around the entire concept, but it's a few decades old a very mature concept with tens of thousands of works created with this method.

Here's a site that streams tracked music 24-7 http://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/

Some of it is quite good (thought the quality obviously ranges quite a bit though both talent and technology).

If you want to see the music with a visual production try http://demoscene.tv/

I've been working with a piece of software called MadTracker 2 for a while, but I'm about to transition to Renoise (MadTracker 2 is long since a dead project) which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux and is about as professional as a piece of software has any right being.

http://www.renoise.com/

In a rush I can crank a reasonable tune out in a few hours. I've heard of at least one major artist cranking out an entire album (vocals and all) in less than a week.

http://hunz.com.au/

Most of the modern trackers will let you render individual tracks to file for final downmixing.

Note: These are most definitely not intended for live performance, though a few folks have used them for that purpose.

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#3

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

I am a professional musician. For getting things typeset, I use Lilypond, and the two tools I use are vim and rumor. (https://launchpad.net/rumor) Very simple, but it gets the job done.

For live performance, I have a USB keyboard and several voices in Csound (http://www.csounds.com/) and run the whole thing through a keyboard amp. Cheap and effective.

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#4

Post by jodoherty »

I use a little Akai LPK25 keyboard (fits perfectly right above my computer keyboard, so I just reach up a little to play) with seq24 for editing/recording MIDI notes and zynaddsubfx as a synthesizer on Linux. It's a straightforward, simple, and clean setup. Notes in seq24 are displayed in piano-roll format, and you can compose looping patterns that you can then combine into song patterns. I'll also use an electric guitar with jack-rack to mess around with ideas on and record stuff in Ardour with, or even tab it out in tuxguitar, since I can find my way around the notes on a fretboard a bit more easily sometimes.

I also bought a license for Renoise, which I use occasionally, but trackers are too involved for my tastes and I prefer a piano roll layout for editing notes. It does allow you to use your computer keyboard as a music keyboard though, and the layout isn't bad, but you're still better off using a small MIDI keyboard.

I used to use Cubase (got the full version in a box somewhere), but it's overkill for an amateur like me, and I don't even have a Windows PC or a Mac to run it on anymore. Maybe someday I'll buy a Macbook Pro or something.

http://www.akaipro.com/lpk25

http://www.filter24.org/seq24/

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/

http://www.renoise.com/

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#6

Post by eccp »

bane wrote: post #2

Digital trackers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software) I have yet to find a faster way from idea to music. It's clunky to get into until you spend some time to learn the idea and build up a collection of music and wrap your brain around the entire concept, but it's a few decades old a very mature concept with tens of thousands of works created with this method. Here's a site that streams tracked musi…

+1 for Renoise. I've heard some awesome compositions made on it, and it's the natural evolution of demoscene trackers. For a sample, see the following video with the track 'Leandi' by Mosaik (a fairly known demoscene musician): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N-f4sSU75I

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#8

Post by meatsock »

the problem is finding a software sequencer you can get comfortable with. pick one and stick with it, and use it every day. don't give up on a track till you've spent an hour on it, as there's no better practice than finessing an idea you're not sold on to improvement (this will come in handy if you end up doing it for money). with an apt combination of keyboard shortcuts and smart combinations of presets, no amount of software will hold back your ideas from fruition. i use FL studio in this manner to great effect, and can have a 5 minute song assembled to some structure in about 30 minutes. from there it's a matter of EQ and balancing.

another option may be to use something like audiomulch or PD to create the sort of work-flow environment you need to sit down and start sketching.

Re: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

#10

Post by jdietrich »

Logic or Digital Performer on the mac, Cubase on PC. If you're very score-centric, Sibelius. Buy a quality audio interface with MIDI ports. Not cheap, but the only way to get genuinely high quality MIDI and score editing.

Trackers are a crutch for people without a musical education and simply aren't sophisticated enough. They represent music mechanically, using an abstraction that collapses in the face of something as mundane as triplets. There are no good sequencers on Linux. Lilypond does excellent engraving, but there's no Free software that'll prepare a score without endless hair pulling.

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