Learning to write music.
May. 16th, 2017 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pandora_parrotI'm learning to write music. I think I'll document my education here, because why the fuck not?
Messing Around: Here was the first thing I put together. Just a silly thing as I learned the interface. It kinda sounds like part of a military video game background music. Just 24 seconds of stuff.
Anxiety: The first real "song" type thing I put together. It's short, but it's a little more complex and involves more stuff... I also felt like this was some sort of video game background.
Mechanical Savior: Don't ask about the names. Whatever. This song was my first "full song." I put together some loops and then composed them together. I also soloed over them at the end, and honestly, while I like some of the ideas there, I'd want to clean it up or remove them entirely. I do like where I was trying to go, but I don't think I got there, and didn't want to put in the effort to make it all the way. I wanna come back to it though, because I think I can improve it. Some bits in the solo really make me wince. Ugh.
Dark Rave: Seriously, don't worry about the names. They're mostly random, tbh. This one is probably my favorite so far. I really like several parts of it, and I could actually see myself listening to it.
Bridge Song: Aborted. I tried to take the Final Fantasy Bridge song and do something with it, but my lack of skill with the tools rapidly got in my way, and I couldn't figure out what I could do about it. It was really frustrating.
Project B: I decided I wanted to try making a fast song. OMG is this hard. At first, I couldn't figure out how to make fast drums, so I watched a bunch of videos online to see how they do drums, and I see you use cymbals a lot more. I learned while working on this that they're called hihats. I also learned what BPM meant! LIke, I knew it was "beats per minute," but I had no idea what a "beat" actually was. How many bass drum notes there were? I had no idea. Turns out, it's quarter notes! OR really whatever notes are at the bottom of the timing thing.
After this, I continued to work on trying to get something to go over those drums, and was finding it nigh impossible. I took a break to work on my scales, and found that my fingers remember all of my white key major scales, which is nice. I'm working on relearning the black key major scales and moving onto minor scales.
Today at work, I'm listening to a tutorial on how to use ableton to make EDM, and discovering a lot about how to think about music. First of all, a strong drum beat is more valuable than a fast drum beat. You can get good dance music without it being breakneck fast. I might abandon Project B to try some of the ideas I'm learning from this. I also found that I might be able to get that cool synth the dude uses, Xfer Serum for $10 a month from something called Splice
Avery thinks I shouldn't bother with a paid synth right now and just try this free one. We shall see.
I wanna listen to more music to learn this stuff, but I also want to look at tutorials to get a better sense of how to "see" the music. My symbolic library for representing and understanding music is so poor, I don't really understand the structure of what I'm usually listening to. It's just this mass of nice sounds, but what is in there doesn't make a lot of sense to me. God, there's so much to learn here.
Messing Around: Here was the first thing I put together. Just a silly thing as I learned the interface. It kinda sounds like part of a military video game background music. Just 24 seconds of stuff.
Anxiety: The first real "song" type thing I put together. It's short, but it's a little more complex and involves more stuff... I also felt like this was some sort of video game background.
Mechanical Savior: Don't ask about the names. Whatever. This song was my first "full song." I put together some loops and then composed them together. I also soloed over them at the end, and honestly, while I like some of the ideas there, I'd want to clean it up or remove them entirely. I do like where I was trying to go, but I don't think I got there, and didn't want to put in the effort to make it all the way. I wanna come back to it though, because I think I can improve it. Some bits in the solo really make me wince. Ugh.
Dark Rave: Seriously, don't worry about the names. They're mostly random, tbh. This one is probably my favorite so far. I really like several parts of it, and I could actually see myself listening to it.
Bridge Song: Aborted. I tried to take the Final Fantasy Bridge song and do something with it, but my lack of skill with the tools rapidly got in my way, and I couldn't figure out what I could do about it. It was really frustrating.
Project B: I decided I wanted to try making a fast song. OMG is this hard. At first, I couldn't figure out how to make fast drums, so I watched a bunch of videos online to see how they do drums, and I see you use cymbals a lot more. I learned while working on this that they're called hihats. I also learned what BPM meant! LIke, I knew it was "beats per minute," but I had no idea what a "beat" actually was. How many bass drum notes there were? I had no idea. Turns out, it's quarter notes! OR really whatever notes are at the bottom of the timing thing.
After this, I continued to work on trying to get something to go over those drums, and was finding it nigh impossible. I took a break to work on my scales, and found that my fingers remember all of my white key major scales, which is nice. I'm working on relearning the black key major scales and moving onto minor scales.
Today at work, I'm listening to a tutorial on how to use ableton to make EDM, and discovering a lot about how to think about music. First of all, a strong drum beat is more valuable than a fast drum beat. You can get good dance music without it being breakneck fast. I might abandon Project B to try some of the ideas I'm learning from this. I also found that I might be able to get that cool synth the dude uses, Xfer Serum for $10 a month from something called Splice
Avery thinks I shouldn't bother with a paid synth right now and just try this free one. We shall see.
I wanna listen to more music to learn this stuff, but I also want to look at tutorials to get a better sense of how to "see" the music. My symbolic library for representing and understanding music is so poor, I don't really understand the structure of what I'm usually listening to. It's just this mass of nice sounds, but what is in there doesn't make a lot of sense to me. God, there's so much to learn here.
