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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#151

Post by rmxt »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #21
meri_dian wrote: post #6

I can't speak for other DAW's, but Ableton was really easy for me to pick up as a complete novice to digital music production

It's pretty easy to get the grid idea, but when you start trying to do anything more complicated Ableton turns out to be a mess, with many limitations and arbitrary weirdnesses. E.g. you can't send MIDI sysex out of Live (except to the Push 2 controller). That kills it for all kinds of hardware automation and advanced synth programming. Live has no concept of a mono track, so it wastes a lot of DSP resources processi…

What does "hybrid clip" mean? Audio + MIDI in the same track? Live's arrangement view + session view in the same screen?

Re: Get started making music

#152

Post by adamnemecek »

busterarm wrote: post #124
jachee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some "syntax-aware" features for their DAW.

Also, if this DAW understands something about music, will it constrain me to its understanding about music? Most of what I write is highly dissonant or straight up microtonal.

> will it constrain me to its understanding about music

This is actually exactly what I'm trying to prevent. Most of the current solutions only kind of constrain you to a certain tonal space that you can maybe explore but the space of possible compositions is actually insanely large. My DAW is going to try to help you explore all that.

Microtonality is definitely something I've thought about and I think I can make it work but I'm curious to know what do you use currently to compose?

Re: Get started making music

#153

Post by uranian »

notjustanymike wrote: post #42
uranian wrote: post #40

A more appropriate title would be: Get started triggering samples. Making music is really something different IMO.

Oh so you're familiar with EDM?

Yes, studied music on the conservatorium and have been a professional producer for years doing pop and edm etc.. Used most of the known DAW's from FL to ProTools.

Re: Get started making music

#154

Post by ivarv »

exabrial wrote: post #134

Guys if you haven't seen Sonic PI ( http://sonic-pi.net/ ), this is also a great tool! You can write beats using a Ruby DSL and it runs them real time. I sat down and did this in an hour: https://github.com/exabrial/sonic-pi-beats/blob/master/house... Sam Aaron is the guy behind the project, he does a lot of ambient type stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts

I wanted to come and post this. Sonic Pi is an amazing tool with a compelling raison d'etre that I would think resonates with the HN community. It's a realtime code as performance tool aimed at teaching kids programming but is also used by advanced users to create wonderful pieces of music.

Re: Get started making music

#155

Post by adamnemecek »

jameskegel wrote: post #135
adamnemecek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ofc! Im working on this cause I wanted to make some electronic music but none of the current daws really let me express myself the way I want.

Cool, I added myself to your list. What would you say makes your interface different than others?

It's gonna be clean and fast, no clutter. Recently there was this on HN https://github.com/peterrudenko/helio-workstation which kind of scared me cause my UI is somewhat similar (but after thinking about it more, I actually find mine a lot better). Also note that the UI is only like 20% of the whole thing, the thing that I'm really trying to improve is the workflows. I will make Hypersphere the fastest DAW in the world when it comes to expressing your ideas

When I'm in the zone, I don't care about check boxes. I have some new user interface paradigms that I haven't seen done before (I can imagine they have been tried before tho) that should make writing music super painless and should let you express yourself.

Re: Get started making music

#156

Post by scentoni »

dri_ft wrote: post #67
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…

I think my idea of a perfect music program is closer to vim than an IDE, but you're on the right track.

Use vim to compose an abc file, then play it with software listed at http://abcnotation.com or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation

Re: Get started making music

#157

Post by adamnemecek »

paublyrne wrote: post #129
jachee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some "syntax-aware" features for their DAW.

Isn't knowing something about music something of a prerequisite for someone who wants to make music? Of course everyone has to start somewhere, but as musician of 20 years who loves DAWs, I would say learn an instrument first, or at least concurrently, if you want to start producing music.

The thing is that once you learn the music theory, few DAWs let you leverage that to be more productive.

Also why do you have to learn music theory first, why can't the DAW teach you as you go?

Re: Get started making music

#158

Post by follower »

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…

> there is free software out there

If anyone is interested in a Free/Libre/Open Source Software option (cross-platform Linux/Windows/Mac) I've really enjoyed producing with LMMS over the past 18 months or so: https://lmms.io/

It's definitely got room to grow in terms of functionality/interface but the development community is of such a size that it's possible to still make meaningful code contributions. I've contributed a couple of small patches to improve the Mac UI as a way to get familiar with the code base.

Of course, the downside is that I have to decide whether to write code or make music whenever I sit down to use it. :)

Re: Get started making music

#159

Post by nnd »

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…

When you say HN audience would be one of your target groups, do you mean that your DAW would be more like a development environment/programming language (like Sonic Pi), or would it have a more traditional interface?

Re: Get started making music

#160

Post by xnzakg »

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 :)

That looks really nice... too bad there's no Linux support :/
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