Ask HN: Do you create music? Let's hear it!

Hi, I am Bankai.

It's not that T61 tips are 'funding' it as such (it's actually simply mp3 sales/tips I've already made on there that I'm putting towards it), as much as T61 is the place where everyone involved with helping fund the tour has come from.

To be specific, it's actually the core of the 'Electro Freaks' T61 group (http://www.thesixtyone.com/group/Electro+Freaks/

) who are helping to fund the tour.

Point being, T61 is excellent with it's artist --> fanbase direct connectivity and thus full to the brim with awesome.

Thanks Jmiao :)

edit : I just logged in and noticed that I can upload a song a day on top of my limit, so some of my criticism is invalid. Thanks for the change, and for the advice!

I posted some songs to thesixtyone (http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/nihilocrat/) and wasn't happy with the experience. I'm guessing it's my own fault for sucking, but I do have to fault the site for having a "winner take all" attitude towards artists.

You're in a bad situation if the public doesn't like the tracks you post when you post them. You're practically invisible if you don't get lots of votes immediately, appealing specifically to thesixtyone's community tastes. I don't mean to whine, but I don't see hardly any downtempo/triphop with lots of bumps and thus there's not much encouragement for someone producing such tracks to post on thesixtyone.

To the victors, the spoils, but it's even more humiliating when you're unnoticed and forever stuck at Level 1. thesixtyone is definitely a listener's site (duh) because it doesn't encourage you to post partial songs you are working on and practically no one gives you technical criticism, merely things like "I like it when the song gets heavier in the middle". No one seems to be iterating on their tracks but instead submit only complete ones. Please excuse me if my anecdotal observations here don't match up with any metrics you've put together, maybe I have tunnel vision because I listen almost exclusively to the "dance" and "electronica" portions of the site.

About the Level 1 ghetto, is it meant to encourage us to just start over again with completely new tracks or is that just a side effect?

Even with these reservations, I think thesixtyone is a great music site with a great community.

Mind posting a link of where we can check in on the status? I'm curious what your criticisms of current software are.

I used to make music with Reason, originally purely for the music itself but later on for video games. You can listen to it here (http://nil.cjb.net/music/), some of the later tracks are actually present in video game competition entries. Occasionally I tried Ableton Live but the interface really bothered me and I could never get anything of the same quality out of it. I lost motivation/time to create more music at about the time I was trying to transition from randomly banging stuff out into imagining a song and then actually trying to make it. The random process was easy but ultimately frustrating, as it yielded something good only about 1 session out of 5.

I have zero music education, and I can't play an actual physical instrument. When I was a kid, I hated most music and complained that rock/rap/etc all sounded the same. I only really enjoyed classical music or music from videogames, both of which were entirely instrumental. I can't understand lyrics in songs 80% of the time. I am tone deaf (probably not medically) and had to learn scales because I couldn't tell that what I was making was horribly out of key until other people told me.

I get really annoyed if the stuff I make isn't mixed/mastered to sound vaguely professional, and get quite a bit of enjoyment adding and tweaking effects on synthesizers. When I listen to music, I can't help imagining how they created the sounds they did (usually when synthesizers are involved).

I use FL Studio. I'm a total amateur. A lot of it is pretty bad, but it's fun to write. http://johnfn.newgrounds.com/audio/