Live data from Hacker News

Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

121–130 of 152 posts

Re: Get started making music

#121

I wish there was something like the teenage engineering op-1 but aimed at children (100-200 dollar range). I really feel like my kids would love this stuff but I know nothing about them. I though maybe iPad apps but they lack the physical knob and button feedback that something like an op-1 has.

This might be way more basic than you were imagining but I gave a couple Stylophones as christmas gifts to my younger cousins and they seem popular enough. It's an electronic instrument but it is also a tactile experience and you know how to play it in about 5 seconds.

Re: Get started making music

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t read Good to Great, but have read other Malcolm Gladwell books. They are written to be sensational and popular, not scientific at all. Indeed Gladwell is the one who misrepresented 10000 hours of practice that Anders Ericsson identified as part of his research. Ericsson identifies 10000 hours as a ballpark around which proficient practicers have practiced in their career --- nothing like a prerequisite Glad…

A good way to summarize it is: Gladwell implied that if you did 10k hours, you'd become world class, that's it! Ericsson identified that the most significant differentiator between the top performers at conservatories and the rest was how much of their lives they had spent doing rigorous practice. Those are two totally different things. To paraphrase Ericsson in a way that is meaningful for most people, he basically…

Thank you for this very good summary.

Re: Get started making music

#123
I haven't been tinkering with audio/ browser for a while. I'm surprised latency got down this much.

The lessons seems very well done. Personally I use Renoise Tracker to create music, but it's a little hard to explain to new-comers. So whenever a new comers asks me for a proper introduction, I'll have 'm look a these lessons.

Re: Get started making music

#124
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to consider though is that Ableton is a Software product, so it can’t be resold unlike an actual device

This is not true. You can resale Ableton licenses. In fact a lot of music software allows sale of software licenses.

Can confirm. Quite a few pieces of expensive music software allow you to transfer ownership of licenses. I just bought a used Maschine+ hardware unit and the seller included a printout with confirmation of ownership for the software component along with the required serial numbers for the new owner (me).

Re: Get started making music

#125
post #12

I used to make music as a teenager. Spending many hours in the "studio" certainly shapes your aesthetics and how you approach new music. Even understanding just the basics and tiny bits of underlying techniques makes you listen differently, makes it easy to become a snob to be honest. Overall though, and generally, making things of any sort lets you appreciate the creative process as an overarching art in itself, an…

Well.. After learning how to create music I've come to appreciate certain artists more and others less. Sometimes I missed the ability to listen to music without analysing it. Other times I've wished I could hear my own music, like someone who didn't write it would. These days I listen mostly by feeling the music. Now it doesn't matter much whether it's my or another artists music. As long as it 'feels' right.

Re: Get started making music

#126
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you know this already, but just because making dance music became more accessible and it took more time to find the stuff you liked does not mean that it stopped existing. All of the 90s sounds that you've loved have evolved, been rediscovered, died out, evolved again. New genres have been made and then fallen out of fashion. By volume, there is probably more amazing dance music being made now than ever before…

No. I didn't know that. Thanks. (WTF? Smh). After 17 yrs of selling music - to say nothing of the loads I consumed prior and since - the evolution never crossed my mind. But to take your insight to the next logic step...where is all this innovation and creativity? If the means raised raised the tide, where is the result? The trend, again following your observation, should be a continuous spiral up? Now should be The…

I’m confused why you took such offense to that, I was just trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you were exaggerating on your distaste for modern dance music. Maybe I misspoke.

If you’re aware of the evolution and still connected to the music scene, I am not sure how you could look at the state of electronic music today and not find a slew of artists and albums released in the past twenty years that at the very least pique your interest. Just in the Detroit milieu (since you mentioned Robert Hood in another comment), artists continue to innovate on the Detroit minimal sound (Omar S, Theo Parrish, Kyle Hall, among others), electro (DJ Stingray, The Other People Place). Admittedly some of these were also releasing music in the 90s…but they didn’t stop then.

Since 2000, we’ve seen the creation of dubstep and footwork (RIP DJ Rashad), and then seen the sounds created in those genres incorporated into the jungle/drum and bass sound among others to create a very fun and interesting array of artists (check out the Astrophonica or Hyperdub labels if you haven’t)

To give you an overview of the entirety of innovative and interesting music that has come out recently would be near impossible because there is _so_ much of it, I don’t know all of it, and I’m nowhere near a musicologist. But even not having sold music for any years of my life, the idea that there is not interesting electronic dance music being released today is laughable. Where should you be looking? Everywhere. Any sound you have ever been interested in probably has people releasing new and interesting music in it all the time. Popularity waxes and wanes but people don’t stop creating.

Re: Get started making music

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some pe…

I have read his work, and also am friends with many university and conservatory music teachers who have know some prodigies. I'm sorry... you're wrong. The world is full of thousands and thousands of musicians who had 10k hours perfect deliberate practice from age 3 with world class teachers and don't become those people . Do they become great musicians? sure! Do they become the Pat Methenies? very very rarely. Even…

If someone is reading this and is getting demotivated to apply yourself to any field that you like because you think you don't have the skills, please, don't. Parent isn't saying that you shouldn't try. We're usually terrible to estimate our own abilities. How many times you thought you were incapable of doing something and you end up doing it?

My own anecdotal example. I stopped playing music years ago because I thought I wasn't good, despite liking it. I started playing again because I had no games and I noticed that I should have gotten back to it sooner, despite not being music material. Not only I was able to play stuff that I liked, I learned stuff that I thoroughly enjoyed. Some music were really hard at first, but as I progressed (very) slowly through weeks, I could see my skills improving and I was very satisfied to watch it (slow as it was).

If you like it, I think you should do it, despite of others. Because it won't matter, in the end. It may take time and a lot of effort, can be painful, but it's worth it.

I think this advice by Terrence Tao translates well to other areas: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

Re: Get started making music

#128
post #85

To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical. Over 100s of h…

Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless. You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems…

Any chance we’ve heard your work just in daily browsing? Or mind pointing us to your work?

Would love to associate this comment’s context to the songs we hear

Re: Get started making music

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to…

I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.

There is something to that.

He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.

Re: Get started making music

#130
post #85

To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical. Over 100s of h…

This analogy is moot.

As if someone tried to justify that "it's hard to make a milshake" by saying "yeah but you couldn't make one exactly the same, at the molecule level, as this one I made earlier".

Furthermore, I presume, not even the original creator could make another track with the same sound as one of its own, if it were to start again from scratch. Akin to how it'd be almost impossible for someone to draw the exact same sketch twice.

Post reply on HN