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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get started making music

#301

Post by deckard1 »

p0nce wrote: post #202
G4BB3R wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What DAW you would recommend? And what features do Ableton miss?

It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic. - Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing - Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel - Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing - FLStudio: focus on composing looping music - Reaper: focus on customization and performance - Protools: focus on getting the most…

> but a more realistic opinion is that they actually do matter, by warping how you think about the problem

Yes, and this is a more general problem with tools. In some cases, the tool changes your attitude towards the activity in very subtle manner.

A good example of this is the creation of the ballpoint pen and what it did to handwriting (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballp...).

> Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write.

It takes serious effort at times to force a ballpoint pen to actually write. Which has the effect of turning off people to writing and ruining the quality of written material.

I find it best to always acknowledge that there may be a better tool for the task you're trying to do at any moment, and realize the point at which you should go and search for that tool.

But as Rumsfeld would say, the unknown unknowns are what you need to worry about. That is, the case where you don't know the tool you're using is limiting you, and in what ways.

Re: Get started making music

#302

Post by a_lieb »

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'm a programmer/musician and I can read on guitar and piano. I'm somewhere on the middle on this debate. I really dislike conventional notation but I also agree that the alternatives have some big downsides as well.

My biggest objection to conventional notation is that it gives a profoundly misleading picture of how music and harmony really work. It defines one reference key (C Major/A Minor) with a certain pattern of steps and gaps, starting on a certain note. Then for all of the other keys you add more and more sharps or flats until you get into ridiculous keys where all 7 notes are modified. The truth is that there's just one evenly spaced set of 12 tones, and all it means to be "in a key" is that you've picked a certain note out of the 12 to start the pattern on. There's nothing special about C. We could have chosen the key we call F# as the reference key and named it C, and everything would work the same.

It's hard to overstate the damage from this. Lots of musicians I know—serious players, people who took music in college—still think of "complicated keys" and "easy keys" and are only vaguely aware that the keys are actually all the same and they're just being tormented by the notation and terminology. I'm teaching guitar to a friend who was first trombone in high school and it blows her mind that she can play the same scales starting anywhere up and down the fretboard and it sounds the same.

It all comes from the design of the keyboard, where the notes of C major are evenly spaced (white keys) and the sharps/flats are stuck in between. There's also the fact that in the past the 12 notes weren't evenly spaced, so the different keys really did all sound different back then.

Conventional notation does have one big advantage, though: every line or space represents one note in the scale. This is more how musicians think: you don't care that much about the notes outside your key, and having the other ones "tucked away" in between makes it easy to see what's going on. That's why it's so quick to read once you know it. Out of the hundreds of alternative notations, I haven't seen one that's both key-neutral and also makes it easy to see things in terms of scale degrees.

(One idea I've had is a 12-tone staff with Sacred Harp-style shaped note heads to show you what scale degree you're playing. Not sure if that's ever been tried.)

Re: Get started making music

#304

Post by ninjakeyboard »

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…

piano rolls are used instead in production. (source: I make lots of music - http://www.soundcloud.com/decklyn)

Re: Get started making music

#305

Post by zanny »

dahart wrote: post #263
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven't recognized yet. I think that this is the incorrect way of looking at it. I suspect it is less that the traditio…

You have a great point, that getting the world to switch would be very very hard. But it's not black and white, you can't compare that to anything. If there's a viable alternative to music notation that you know of and is superior to what we know as standard western notation, feel free to share. Your choice of example is interesting, considering metric has won, and the US is switching slowly. But there is no incorrec…

> the US is switching slowly.

As a US citizen who is a metric fan and loves using it, in what way? The government did switch - in the 70s - according to its own statutes, it had to.

It has crept up in various places (and I find it hilarious) innoculously, like in 2 liters of soda, or in how computer processors are talked about in mm² die areas.

But the average American still uses imperial units religiously, anywhere they approach a problem involving any unit of measurement they always default to imperial, and having a 14 year old brother I see no change in his education or habits to indicate a slow transition of mindshare. The government moved decades ago, but the people aren't moving at all.

I get the impression it is much like high school language classes - you learn it once early on, never practice it, and by the time you are a full adult you have completely forgotten it. I'm not sure how to improve the situation to actually get the people to start using international standards, because if you were to start trying to force it on the supply side people would just not buy metric tools and information because they forgot it back in primary school.

Re: Get started making music

#306

Post by criddell »

TylerE wrote: post #270
criddell wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion. I've tried learning guitar a few times and when I've asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it's been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It's a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy).…

Totally disagree. Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch. A given note could be played in as many as 5 different places, and they will ALL sound different. An open A (5th string) will sound different than the same A played on the low E string, 5th fret. (This is completely unrelated to the woeful quality of most of the tab floating around on the net. You can…

> Tab is LESS lossy than traditional sheet music because it encodes the string as well as the pitch.

But it doesn't encode the note type, right? All the tab books I've bought don't differentiate between whole notes, quarter notes, etc... So that seems pretty lossy. Look at any guitar fake book for an example.

Plus, I never looked at tablature as a literal transcription. That's why I would describe it as a more of a framework. Like you say, a note can be played in a lot of different places. Once you internalize the fretboard logic, when you see an A in the tab, you play the one you think will sound right or is physically accessible.

Re: Get started making music

#307

Post by mejari »

uranian wrote: post #167
copperx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's space for all kinds of music, and for some, triggered samples under a grid is considered music.

Making music (also EDM) is really, really hard. Most people that try will fail, and Ableton knows that. They are just trying to sell their product here which is fair enough. But 'getting started making music' is like you only need their product, trigger some samples and you can be an artist too. Try sit behind a drum kit for the first time, you think you can start making music? Most aspiring drummers need to practice…

> But 'getting started making music' is like you only need their product, trigger some samples and you can be an artist too.

I mean, is that wrong? Unless you stick to some elitist definition of artist, why is someone who plays with these samples to create something not being an artist?

Re: Get started making music

#308

Post by Nadya »

adamnemecek wrote: post #296
Nadya wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also I find the current music notation to be kinda idk outdated. I can read it, but I feel like it's a system designed by someone who had the mathematical knowledge of a 15th century farmer (which is probably how it came to be). What specifically about it? I can read (and prefer) standard musical notation but when handwriting I use Hummingbird [0] because I find it aides itself to handwriting. But I can't really ima…

This is a long discussion. But fundamentally music notation is very paper oriented and doesn't exploit the advantages screens offer. > (and prefer) standard musical notation Prefer it over what?

I wanted to bring up Hummingbird notation with a specific context in which I prefer it (handwriting) while still being clear that I prefer standard notation over Hummmingbird as a whole.

Re: Get started making music

#309

Post by dahart »

Jach wrote: post #283
dahart wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?). You're not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844 I see some great re…

Maybe no one has succeeded with a general replacement, but there are different notations for guitar. I assume some other instruments have their own notation too. When electric music kicked off, to reproduce sound you have to trade setups / circuit diagrams, old music notation can't encode that! I kind of think of it like x86 assembly. It's here to stay, for better or worse, but that doesn't mean you can't have nicer…

Tablature has a long history as well, it didn't start with guitar. Before guitar there was lute and cittern tablature -- which typically use letters and not numbers. I play both guitar and lute and I actually wish the letters convention had stuck, it's more fun. Wikipedia says that the first known tablature was for an organ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Origin

Yes, some other instruments have their own specific notations & tablatures as well. These aren't replacements for standard notation though, and never will be. They have a place, and they are useful, but they aren't in competition with standard notation. Tablature has its disadvantages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature#Disadvantages) but also the single biggest reason for standard notation -- groups, band, ensemble & orchestral playing -- is something tablature can't help with at all.

Totally agreed that standard notation doesn't help with electronic sound reproduction, but I'd suggest that standard notation isn't for sound reproduction in the analog world either, that's not it's purpose. Standard notation is the sequencer, not the synthesizer. You can use standard notation to encode songs in the electronic music world, but it's definitely not super convenient, hardly anyone does that. The analog version of trading setups and circuit diagrams is carving your violin using plans and specifications of a Stradivarius violin.

Re: Get started making music

#310

Post by iamacynic »

compiler-guy wrote: post #294
ganonm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music. Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string . However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwid…

Great point. To a first approximation: Tablature is a _physical description_ of how a particular stringed instrument should be played, and the notes are a side effect of that. It is instrument specific and it doesn't contain much information about the musical details of the piece. For example, tablature doesn't describe the key the piece is to be played in. To figure that out, you have to mentally translate the mecha…

another feature/side effect is that you can use any instrument to play any part of a written piece, as long as it's physically possible to play the notes as written. and if not - you can improvise easily by dropping superfluous or unnecessary components/notes without changing the overall sound of the music.
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