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Get Started Making Music

learningmusic.ableton.com

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Re: Get Started Making Music

#41

Post by dysoco »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #11

Pro/Fasttracker in the browser: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ And it can load modules directly from modarchive and modules.pl, too! e.g https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m... FWIW, that's how I learned making music, just learning the commands and making things I like by ear. Though being a kid with no internet probably helped.

I might be missing something here but I click record, play some notes with the A-Z keys, stop the recording, and when I click play nothing happens (I hear no audio) however with the demos I hear the audio.

Any ideas what am I missing?

EDIT: I was supposed to add a sample (in the Edit Samples tab) in case anyone was confused like me.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#42

Post by johnhess »

big_chungus wrote: post #19
johnhess wrote: post #18

Ironically for the name, ableton turns out not to be accessible for the blind.

It's not exactly easy to make an "accessible" DAW. Especially not when you consider that there probably isn't a huge market of blind music producers relative to the amount of work it would take to, say, make a somewhat-sane interface for a screen reader for a program as complex as ableton. The interface is very complex as is, and would almost certainly require some re-jiggering before it would work well. I doubt enou…

Perhaps the reason to make it accessible is not because of market share. It turns out that other audio and (yes, even video!) mixing software is accessible, so it's certainly not insurmountable.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#43

Post by human20190310 »

whiddershins wrote: post #10
cubano wrote: post #3

Oh my...this is hardly "making music". Is paint-by-numbers making art? I sure don't think so, so neither is this. What would have been way way better is a brief introduction to music keys, major and minor, then basic chords, then progressions, then melody, with each section having a few examples of each so that the person going through the article could have some understanding of how music is really made, and how mus…

I agree with you but I would put it differently. The notion that music is at all a grid is just ... not true. It’s true of a tiny subset of music. I use ableton (and grids) all the time but this way of thinking about “music” is just reinforcing a weird picture of what it is. Even scales and theory and even music notation enforce a confusing deconstruction of what music is. But it’s really hard to articulate this.

> The notion that music is at all a grid is just ... not true.

Nevertheless you can still make some music with a grid.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#44

Post by pacomerh »

This is great!, I thought they were only gonna do a simple piano roll and start/stop, they touch on pretty good topics including song structure, chords, modes, scales, diatonic triads, voicing, etc. This is a pretty good intro to getting into Ableton Live really. I come from using Cubase and honestly the new Live is very capable for building fluid songs, it has so many features now and the interface makes it really easy to draw automation curves, set different timings, route midi, build drum kits, etc.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#45

Post by PavlovsCat »

dysoco wrote: post #41
PavlovsCat wrote: post #11

Pro/Fasttracker in the browser: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ And it can load modules directly from modarchive and modules.pl, too! e.g https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m... FWIW, that's how I learned making music, just learning the commands and making things I like by ear. Though being a kid with no internet probably helped.

I might be missing something here but I click record, play some notes with the A-Z keys, stop the recording, and when I click play nothing happens (I hear no audio) however with the demos I hear the audio. Any ideas what am I missing? EDIT: I was supposed to add a sample (in the Edit Samples tab) in case anyone was confused like me.

Loading a song and using its samples is best to start out with IMO; not just beause it's easier, but because the instruments also tend to be "in tune" (relative to each other)

Re: Get Started Making Music

#47

Post by yellow_postit »

chevas wrote: post #34

There's a delay when trying to hit stop on any of the boxes. It's really quite frustrating. I really like this idea. This is something I want to explore as a non-music person.

Checkout Pocket Operators from Teenage Engineering if you haven't seen them already. Its a lovely (to me) line of physical synths that are quite inexpensive < $30 USD and also as a non-music person really got me started down a path of wanting to learn more.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#48

Post by PascLeRasc »

This is incredible, I love it. I've recently switched to using Ableton exclusively for making music, it feels like more of an instrument than a computer program to me. It's so expressive and lets me make the sounds I want to hear as well as things I can't even conceive of. I can't really articulate what it is about Ableton, but I really love it and I'm so thankful that it's around.

If anyone wants more, Ableton also has a synthesizer playground site at https://learningsynths.ableton.com/.

Re: Get Started Making Music

#49

Post by filoleg »

fao_ wrote: post #7
cubano wrote: post #3

Oh my...this is hardly "making music". Is paint-by-numbers making art? I sure don't think so, so neither is this. What would have been way way better is a brief introduction to music keys, major and minor, then basic chords, then progressions, then melody, with each section having a few examples of each so that the person going through the article could have some understanding of how music is really made, and how mus…

"Better" is relative. People will learn that by looking at what other artists are doing and figuring it out themselves, and they will remember it better for that reason. Everyone I know who is into making music (which includes a large mix of professional and non-professional musicians) started out in electronic music by putting interesting sounds together, and then by imitating what their favourite artists have done.…

Thank you for your comment, the post formulated extremely well what i was thinking about for a long time, but couldnt express in such a clear way.

I found this holds true for me with many things, not just music or any arts in general. That’s how it worked for me with learning computer science as well. I found that lecture slides and book chapters were waaaaay more useful for me after i attempted the relevant homework assignments and experimented on my won, as opposed to the other way around, where i just read a bunch of theory concepts without much context or immediate useful application.

Reading after attempting and experimenting felt like i was filling out the missing gaps of a puzzle piece, as opposed to completing a puzzle piece sequentially, starting with the top left corner and going left to right and then top to bottom.

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