[HN Gopher] Get started making music
___________________________________________________________________
Get started making music
Author : RageoftheRobots
Score : 393 points
Date : 2021-10-31 08:28 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (learningmusic.ableton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (learningmusic.ableton.com)
| numair wrote:
| If you're into this sort of thing -- a few years back, a little-
| known artist named Grimes posted a really great tutorial on using
| Ableton to make music.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150831081620/http://actuallygr...
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Yeah, I remember that tutorial. For those who do not know:
| she's married to Elon Musk now.
|
| Edit: Apparently broken up by now.
| eruleman wrote:
| They broke up recently.
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| You can sometimes get a free Live Lite license from apps or on
| Splice. You can get one cheap with a controller, which I
| recommend having anyway. It's a lot easier to demo sounds you
| make/find while working on music with pads or keys.
| arketyp wrote:
| 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 appreciation you can
| often transport to other fields, even those not conventionally
| regarded as artistic.
| lwn wrote:
| 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.
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| Making music had the opposite effect on me in regards to
| snobbery. After years of trying to make stuff sound good and
| write good songs I've learned that it's really really hard and
| I no longer judge musicians as much as I used to.
| drawqrtz wrote:
| I started with Ableton about 12 years ago with zero musical
| training and consistently am having fun with it mostly learning
| by doing. I think just playing around, seeing what sounds good
| can get you incredibly far. Sometimes tutorials how to do
| something specific help; but I have found that there is always a
| million ways to achieve what sounds good to you. Very similar to
| code.
|
| Tl;dr: Experiment with Ableton, you can have a lot of fun just
| f**ing around.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Also by Ableton folk: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/
| [deleted]
| thomasfl wrote:
| All you need to make music is an iPhone and some ideas. I make
| music like this on my phone after the kids has gone to bed. I
| simply use Garageband and a couple of plugins. Sometimes I
| connect to a physical keyboard.
|
| https://youtu.be/iS-gRUzPrKI
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ableton seems to have the in-the-know buzz though. Just looked
| at the UI for Ableton for the first time today; know how it's
| preferred by some over Garage Band?
| natdempk wrote:
| You can think of GarageBand as a simplified version of Logic
| which is used by a lot of professional producers, so
| GarageBand is maybe not as amateur as it might seem. More of
| a simplified entry point into music production to get people
| eventually into Logic when they get more advanced. Ableton
| includes a lot of more professional features, but if you want
| a more serious comparison I might compare Ableton to Logic
| where you can basically accomplish the same things in each
| one with different workflows etc.
| ushakov wrote:
| Ableton is really two softwares in one, for composing and for
| performing
| MikeDelta wrote:
| There are quite some videos out there from famous producers
| showing their craft, and many use Ableton (Deadmau5,
| Timbaland) or Logic Pro (Armin van Buuren). It helps develop
| the buzz.
| blub wrote:
| They're not competing with each-other... Ableton's a pro
| tool. Garageband for iOS is a fun app aimed at beginners,
| which allows one to experiment, record, have fun and maybe
| even produce some tracks. It's surprisingly capable, although
| it's focused on loops and presets.
| drawqrtz wrote:
| Agreed! Sometimes being restrained in what is possible opens up
| a myriad of ways to get creative.
|
| Start with very very basic equipment/samples etc. and very
| rarely add to your setup.
|
| It's crazy how much you can achieve with just a drum tracker,
| EQ, compressor and a dozen samples.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Ableton has a radically different interface from previous DAWs
| whiddershins wrote:
| I'v commented on this before, I wish Ableton would phrase this
| differently.
|
| This is the basics of a certain very narrow subset of music
| making.
| Kye wrote:
| I'm sure the target audience knows it's not the only kind of
| music.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I'm absolutely terrible at anything music related and can't hold
| a beat to save my life but I love the world behind songwriting
| and how music gets made. Best podcast I've heard is Switched on
| Pop https://switchedonpop.com/
| telesilla wrote:
| Try Arcade, it's gorgeous and no prior music ability or
| knowledge required to make genuine music tracks.
| https://output.com/products/arcade
| petecooper wrote:
| This is a nitpick.
|
| For clarity: the company/vendor is Ableton, their flagship
| product is Live. Ableton Live is its full name. Ableton Live.
| Compare Apple Logic Pro, Steinberg Cubase, Image Line FL Studio,
| and so on.
|
| Respectfully, please try not to refer to the product as Ableton,
| e.g. "I made [...] in Ableton". It was done in Ableton Live, or
| just Live in a pinch.
|
| (This used to really wind me up back in the old days, but I've
| calmed down about it. I can't begin to imagine how the Ableton
| marketing/branding teams feel about the mismatch. Maybe it's just
| me, this isn't a hill to die on.)
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Yeah well, that's what they get for choosing a bad name. They
| can wear that one. (I love the product and use it every day,
| but come on, "Live"??? no wonder everyone calls it "Ableton")
| petecooper wrote:
| >but come on, "Live"??? no wonder everyone calls it "Ableton"
|
| I did say it was a nitpick. Besides, before it was a DAW it
| was aimed squarely at live performance, hence the name.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Get a midi controller for the iPad.
|
| On iOS this is an affordable app - Korg Gadget[0] and you can
| get a controller[1] for it.
|
| [0] https://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_gadget/
|
| [1]
| https://www.korg.com/us/products/computergear/nanokey_studio...
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Whether you like Ableton Live or not relative to other options is
| a matter of preference, but regardless, the folks who run Ableton
| are pretty cool:
|
| - run by real musicians who play shows, it came out of a
| scratched personal itch
|
| - so far, good new owners of Cycling 74, the bug squash numbers
| in the last couple of releases were stellar
|
| - totally hacker friendly, they know people release disassembled
| Python code for control surfaces, and basically said "we can't
| support individual users doing this, but we know it's out there
| and won't do anything to stop it" (this was what actually got me
| on the bus!)
|
| - really good educational outreach initiatives, and they give
| away a very capable light version for peanuts (or free with many
| controllers)
|
| I find their prices high, all things considered, but am happy to
| be a long time customer, and as a serious musician musician
| (university educated, etc.), I think it's great that it has
| become such a gateway to appreciation of instrumental music by
| making music creation a more accessible hobby.
|
| And the fact that I can script the heck out of such a full
| featured commercial product in Scheme by writing a Max/MSP
| external is fantastic (plug, I wrote Scheme For Max, which allows
| you to run lisp in your Ableton...)
| ushakov wrote:
| I think it's also important to mention that Max costs $399
| extra
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Correction, Max for Live costs $200 extra. Ableton Suite
| costs more, as does owning both standalone Max and Max for
| Live, but you do not need the $400 Max to script Live with
| Max, you just need Max for Live. And given how much it brings
| to the table and how many community and built in devices you
| get for that, I would argue it's very reasonable compared to
| other pro audio software. (Mind you, not incredible like
| Reaper, Valhalla DSP or Klanghelm's prices, but very fair
| compared to many others)
| ushakov wrote:
| yeah i agree with that, but i think Ableton prices are
| still bit ridiculous given they make a new version every
| year or so
| tcgmu wrote:
| Four years on average for the last few releases:
| Ableton Live 9: March 5, 2013 Ableton Live 10:
| February 6, 2018 Ableton Live 11: February 23,
| 2021
| iainctduncan wrote:
| They are high, I don't argue that. I don't think they are
| _ridiculous_ , given the quality of the product and size
| of the market (it's not word processing...), the fact
| that they are independent, and they way they run their
| company (which, from what I've heard, is a very nice
| place to work). It is extremely stable with very very few
| bugs, and running an independent software company that
| way requires high margins. (I'm a software mergers and
| acquisitions consultant, so I get to talk to buyers about
| this all the time.) Personally, I'm happy to pay a
| premium to support the way the company is run, I don't
| think for a second they would be as hacker friendly if
| they got bought by one of the big PE fund owned media
| conglomerates.
|
| But you're not wrong, they are pricy. If people are on a
| tight budget (and I spent many years being that musician
| 20 years ago) I would tell them to buy Reaper and either
| standalone Max ($8/mnth, cheaper for students) or use
| Pure Data (open source).
| ushakov wrote:
| One thing to consider though is that Ableton is a
| Software product, so it can't be resold unlike an actual
| device
| eclipxe wrote:
| This is not true. You can resale Ableton licenses. In
| fact a lot of music software allows sale of software
| licenses.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Nice work on Scheme for Max!
|
| Much less impressive, but I spent a bit of time building a
| simple M4L device a while back using Typescript, and put some
| effort into figuring out how to make TS play nice(r) with the
| M4L API (the JS support in Max is pretty basic).
|
| I never got around to splitting it out into its own reusable
| module but it might be of interest to anyone interested in
| playing with scripting Ableton from Max, but not interested in
| learning Max's visual programming paradigm:
| https://github.com/tomduncalf/livefader
|
| Would be interested to know how Ableton's scriptability
| compares to some other DAWs... I know Tracktion and Bitwig have
| some degree of JS support, and Reaper has its own scripting
| language. Personally I'd love it Ableton made the Python API
| etc. a bit more official but I can of course understand why
| they don't.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| thanks! :-)
| gavinray wrote:
| > "Would be interested to know how Ableton's scriptability
| compares to some other DAWs... I know Tracktion and Bitwig
| have some degree of JS support, and Reaper has its own
| scripting language. Personally I'd love it Ableton made the
| Python API etc. a bit more official but I can of course
| understand why they don't."
|
| There's nothing that really holds a candle to REAPER's
| scripting API.
|
| For interpreted scripts, it supports Lua/Python/Eel (simple
| C-like language):
|
| https://mespotin.uber.space/Ultraschall/Reaper_Api_Documenta.
| ..
|
| It also has a C/C++ native extension API, and a community
| Rust API. I have translated the API into C# and D.
|
| https://github.com/justinfrankel/reaper-
| sdk/blob/main/sdk/re...
|
| https://github.com/helgoboss/reaper-rs
|
| The total number of (stock) API functions is ~1,000. Some
| core parts of REAPER itself like it's piano roll and media
| browser are written using it's own plugin API.
|
| It supports making audio plugins with GUI's that hot-reload
| and have a realtime variable + debugger panel using the Eel
| language (called "JSFX"). Many of the user-created JSFX are
| better than paid plugins I've used.
|
| https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/js/js.php
|
| The scripting community is very large and active.
|
| https://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3
|
| It has an in-DAW IDE with intellisense. There are multiple
| community GUI frameworks, including bindings to ImGui, etc.
|
| https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2416501
|
| https://github.com/cfillion/reaimgui
|
| Really blows your mind.
|
| (I am familiar with the docs for Tracktion's JS API, know
| about Studio One's hush-hush JS scripting, Renoise's Lua
| scripting, Ardour's scripting, etc.)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Ardour uses Lua as its scripting language. But then of
| course, it's also 100% open source, so you don't _have_ to
| rely on what is made accessible via the scripting language.
| You can just change the actual source.
|
| Of course, some people don't see things that way:
|
| https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-
| fr...
| 0898 wrote:
| Question: with pre-made loops it seems fairly easy to make
| something that sounds decent. Is it okay if it's really that
| easy? Could you put a few of these together and release a track?
| Should it be "hard"? I'm sure most producers have fiendishly
| complex arrangements. But do some producers basically paint by
| numbers?
| Guessnotgauss wrote:
| Today a lot of the hard work is done for you. Many people who
| produce hip hop or electronic music take advatage of pre made
| loops and beats, so yes people do actually publish tracks based
| off of pre made sounds and thats ok. The tricky part then comes
| into mixing it all together and getting it to sound the way you
| like it or just different from others. Sometimes simplicity
| just sounds good. For me mixing and mastering is the hard part,
| but even that is becoming automated with software like iZotope.
|
| Music has almost become like successful No-code, where you can
| just click everything in without even touching the keyboard.
| However you need a good understanding of what you want and how
| its done based on music knowledge to get something complex
| done. Also you might find transitions a little challenging.
|
| Tastes have changed and the bar seems to be set lower, but
| still the sound has to be interesting or the appeal will be
| limited.
|
| I believe that whatever enables you to make music that YOU like
| to hear is the important part. Forget the audience and make
| something that makes you feel, evokes your emotions, or just
| helps you relax. This is your advantage to be able to create
| something that is tailored to you.
|
| With that said, sometimes its better to put a project aside or
| listen to it in your car and see how you feel about it then,
| your opinion may change.
|
| Hope this made sense.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| If you're using well known loops, people will notice. I hear
| GarageBand's old loops sometimes to this day! Man, I really
| have to get around to extracting the ones from 1.0...
| junon wrote:
| If an artist uses premade samples (by "samples" here I'm
| talking about loops, not normal sampling) and do nothing to
| transform it, it's generally really easy to hear.
|
| One, because it's usually quite boring. Two, usually because
| we've heard the samples a hundred times before and know roughly
| where they came from, or at least where they've been used
| before.
|
| That being said, most large artists do percussion and whatnot
| from scratch, perhaps re-using individual sounds but almost
| always coming up with their own arrangements.
|
| A notable artist (group) that used sampling almost exclusively
| is Prodigy. They're famous for coming up with unique ways to
| arrange old breakbeat samples and whatnot. I would be surprised
| if anyone had any issue with it.
| Kye wrote:
| On the history of breakbeats:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY
|
| It's unfortunate the guy who made the drum pattern so much
| modern music is built on apparently died broke and unhomed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_C._Coleman
| Grakel wrote:
| "Homeless" means without a home. "Unhomed" sounds like
| someone did it to him, and furthermore is not a word.
| akyu wrote:
| Make the best songs you can make with the skill level you have
| now. Too easy or too hard is irrelevant really. Is the song
| good? And maybe more importantly, are you having fun? When you
| ask a musician about what is the best song they ever wrote, it
| is fairly common for them to say that their best song was the
| easiest to write.
| dvh1990 wrote:
| Not sure what "paint by numbers" means in this instance, but
| making beats is ridiculously easy nowadays. Go listen to the
| top 10 singles right now. If you have a good ear you'll notice
| that most of the arrangements are very simple - indeed
| something many home producers could put together in a couple of
| hours with just a laptop.
|
| But that's just what the genre requires.
| subroutine wrote:
| Here's a taste of how (good) producers can take a given sample
| and create something completely unique...
|
| https://youtu.be/7JUNnmehy8k
| beezischillin wrote:
| A small anecdote: Back when I was still a little kid I had an
| awful music teacher in school. He would throw all the theory on
| the whiteboard but never explained how it actually relates to the
| music itself. I would've loved to know so I asked how this
| strange mathematical stuff of 4/4ths makes music and he told me
| to learn it or I'd fail but nothing actually relating to my
| question. So I always had a bit of antipathy towards the subject
| and never looked it up or even asked somebody afterwards, even to
| just satisfy my younger self's curiosity because the whole
| subject's been tainted.
|
| If those classes ever even mildly resembled even how well this
| little interactive tutorial presents and explain thing I probably
| would've joined the school chorus or learned to play instrument
| in an extra-curricular fashion. Which I regret never doing.
|
| Eventually when I got my hands on a copy of Reason at age 11 or
| 12 (can't remember) and started messing around with it, I got to
| a point where I kind of understood the concepts -- the whole
| process was kind of similar to how this tutorial is put together,
| it just took way longer to figure out. :)
| drorco wrote:
| Sometimes teachers have a negative net value huh?
|
| Brings up the point that if the education system can't properly
| teach a subject, maybe we're all better better off with it just
| not teaching the subject.
| [deleted]
| parenthesis wrote:
| What you needed was something more like this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygn7ORgPbEE
|
| (some snippets of composer/conductor/pianist Leonard Berstein
| explaining some musical concepts to young people using examples
| from pop/rock music).
| jiriro wrote:
| No sound on safari/iphone.
| donbrae wrote:
| Is your phone muted? I assume this is using the Web Audio API,
| which doesn't sound on iOS if the iDevice is muted (requires a
| hack of playing silent HTML5 Audio in the background).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I feel like this crowd would be more interested in Pure Data:
| https://puredata.info/
|
| It's an open source visual programming language for music (with
| some plug ins for visualizations, too). Years ago, I had fun with
| it, taking Rock Band guitars and turning them into synths, or
| "scratching" wav files with a DJ Hero controller.
| [deleted]
| codedokode wrote:
| It is an interesting language, but it is very low-level and it
| lacks many functions that you have to implement from scratch.
| For example, as I remember, there is no filter with custom
| response curve. Or there is a low-pass filter but you cannot
| choose its type, rolloff slope or modulate it with an
| oscillator. There is no spectrum viewer.
|
| So you will have to reimplement functions that are built-in
| into modern DAWs. And it is not an easy task, for example, to
| implement filters you'll have to deal with equations with
| complex numbers.
| agency wrote:
| I'll also plug VCV Rack[1], an open source emulator for modular
| synthesizers. It takes the cost of exploring modular synthesis
| down from "prohibitive" (thousands of dollars easily) to
| "zero". Really cool project that's come a long way in the last
| few years.
|
| [1] https://vcvrack.com/
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Does making music de-age the brain?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Playing (physical) drums reduces my stress/anxiety.
|
| But I suspect creating music, like reading, writing have to be
| good for the aging brain.
| codq wrote:
| Why do you ask?
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I always liked listening to edm and when I first got to know that
| you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks the idea of
| becoming an edm artist sounded exciting and glamorous to me.
| (like alan walker, martin grx)
|
| I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats
| (https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos).
| Before I spent too much time on it I released it's actually less
| about making catchy beats and more about the marketing,
| connections in music industry etc. Now, I'm writing code again.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats
| (https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos).
| Before I spent too much time on it I released
|
| From 1990 to 2007, I owned a (vinyl) record store (B&M then
| ecomm) that catered to DJs. I got to listen to quite a bit of
| "dance music". The early, mid, and even late 90s was jammed
| packed with creativity and innovative sounds.
|
| Eventually things changed (as Ableton and similar became
| popular). More and more tracks were "half baked". As you noted,
| workable / good enough, but the extra time to create magic was
| not being invested. As digitl came along, it got worse because
| non-vinyl releases lowered the bar further. In a addition that
| noise, that glut made the good stuff hard to find.
|
| I'm not a snob. Taking anything more accessible is generally a
| positive. That said, for "dance music" too easy cause problems.
| The higher bar of the 90s was a form of quality control. If you
| invested in gear, you generally did your best to get the most
| out of it. The culture was quality. Then ease and a lower
| investment bar put the emphasis on quantity.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Dance music seems awful simple but if it's being played live
| there's a very simple quality test which is, are people
| dancing to the music?
|
| If you're just on your computer in your room, making beats
| and perhaps not even moving to them because to you it seems
| trivial and all about the marketing, you might be glossing
| over a fundamental part of the music. Seeing what moves an
| actual dance floor full of real people is important feedback.
| [deleted]
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| True. But there is a difference between minimal (e.g.,
| Detroit legend Robert Hood) and something that is half-
| baked (e.g., too many examples to list).
|
| Dancing or not, the music is still music and it has to
| stand on its own, at least in the context of its peers.
|
| When something is cheap and easy to produce and release,
| there is an overabundance. That glut clogs up the
| environment (read: the haystack buries the golden needles).
| Plastic seemed like a great idea at first but then we've
| (kinda) come to realize cheap and easy ain't such a good
| thing ;)
| kziller wrote:
| 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 _because_ it has become so much easier to make, not in
| spite of it. Not only that, it is probably easier than ever
| before to discover all of it. That obviously benefits someone
| just listening to the music, but also all those producers now
| have access to previously hard to find regional sounds and so
| the past decade in electronic music is defined largely (just
| like lots of other genres) by a massive cross-pollination,
| deconstruction, and incorporation of global dance sounds into
| new and insanely creative music.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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 Pinacle of the craft. The most golden
| of all golden ages. It should be the late 80s to mid 90s
| endless stream of "WTF was that?" on steroids.
|
| I still know DJs and working high profile producers and to
| the best of my knowledge none of them is seeing that.
|
| What are we all missing? Where should we be looking?
| (That's not sarcasm, like the opening line. It's a serious
| inquiry. Tia)
| kziller wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think what you said is all that different from people
| who want to be a successful writer but don't really want to
| write.
| 323 wrote:
| > you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks
|
| You just need pen and paper to unify gravity and quantum
| mechanics.
|
| You just need a laptop to write the next TikTok.
|
| > less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing
|
| That's a common complaint from unsuccessful artists. Michael
| Jackson spent a ton of money on marketing his last album and it
| was a total flop.
| aw9f70gae wrote:
| In a market oversaturated with good talent, marketing has to
| be the differentiator.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > it's actually less about making catchy beats and more about
| the marketing, connections in music industry etc
|
| If you make good music you can throw a couple tracks towards a
| small, local label and stand pretty decent odds of getting
| signed.
|
| Getting on a tiny little label with some people you like isn't
| going to be enough for it to be a career, but it's definitely a
| lot of fun and can be creatively enabling.
|
| Coding can still pay the bills, though!
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It's about the same as building a startup I'd say. Luck plays a
| huge role (and there are lots of people trying to divine rules
| extrapolated from their lucky experience to _help_ you) but I'd
| also say the music (product) really does need to be incredibly
| good for you to make it. But maybe it isn't needed initially as
| long as you get feedback and develop product market fit for
| your music, but that would be considered very uncool in the
| music industry.
| Kiro wrote:
| Not sure how to interpret your comment. What made you come to
| that conclusion?
| joeberon wrote:
| That's a pretty common beginner's trap, to have your motivation
| be to release music rather than in creating music itself. For
| basically any beginner you need many years to get to the point
| where that should be a consideration. Your main motivation
| should be fun and enjoyment of making the music. Ironically
| this is what actually differentiates the greats from those that
| struggle: the former make music primarily for themselves, the
| latter make music primarily for others.
| VieEnCode wrote:
| "Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making
| the music."
|
| On principle I agree with this. Tracks made following a tick
| list of successful tropes with an eye on getting released are
| liable to be highly forgettable.
|
| Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with
| production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and
| tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I
| would argue that some form of shared community outlet is
| essential in persisting and making something of greater
| merit.
|
| I tend to think that the best music is emergent from real-
| life communities: people, time, place, culture, politics.
| That is, communities that have an aesthetic and reason for
| being that goes far beyond, say, craving new synths after
| watching youtube reviews.
|
| Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow
| stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of
| meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human
| context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to
| keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of
| shouting into the void.
| drawqrtz wrote:
| If you are playing for an audience (can be tiny too!) you
| will always be much more motivated to produce quality and
| improve your skills.
|
| That being said it can also put pressure on you to the
| point where you also lose your joy due to stress.
|
| I guess some middle ground can be found but as with
| everything that is easier said than done.
| joeberon wrote:
| > Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with
| production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and
| tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I
| would argue that some form of shared community outlet is
| essential in persisting and making something of greater
| merit.
|
| Still most of your time with music will be solitary. If you
| accept that, anything social is just a bonus.
|
| > Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow
| stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of
| meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real
| human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my
| desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an
| expensive way of shouting into the void.
|
| Well you basically just proved my whole point here. You
| stopped making music because you weren't happy doing it
| alone. Learn to be totally content doing it alone, and you
| won't have this issue. It is possible, because I was stuck
| in your situation for a long time, and thought myself that
| music was pointless if not socially shared. I realise now
| that it just isn't true, and in fact that mindset puts huge
| pressure on yourself and indeed on the community around
| you. It is possible to enjoy making music without the need
| for social reinforcement.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| What I keep thinking is that "making X primarily for others"
| is intended to mean "other people are the driving influence
| on what kind of X you produce", in a sense that you lose your
| individuality by creating only what other people want.
|
| However, I often think it's intended to mean "producing X so
| that other people can consume X, regardless of what results."
|
| And I have frequently heard that it means "producing X so
| that other people can critique your work and tell you how to
| improve."
|
| These interpretations seem to be at odds. I've had
| instructors in creative bootcamps tell me that the difference
| between the strugglers and the greats was that the greats
| released their work to the public, got critique on what to
| improve, and integrated that advice into their next work. In
| their minds, remaining solitary means you won't get that
| critique and will always lag behind someone who communicates
| with others to find better ideas and improve on their own.
|
| So it really isn't as cut-and-dry as "screaming into the void
| is better", in terms of how I personally frame the
| distinction.
|
| At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave
| something in the world that serves as an artifact of what
| kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought
| to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive
| for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I
| honestly feel.
|
| Put another way, if I were to write a thousand pages worth of
| novels over the course of my life, never releasing any of it,
| and just before I was about to kick the bucket I were to pour
| a bucket of gasoline on the entire pile of paper and burn it
| to ashes, I would probably feel the worst I'd ever felt about
| myself up to that point. I would have destroyed a significant
| product of my existence, and in a sense, destroyed a part of
| myself.
|
| So maybe this way of thinking is flawed, and this clearly
| indicates that I am overly attached to my work, and perhaps
| to the idea of social acceptance as well. But this is why I
| cannot force myself to create if I know nobody is ever going
| to share a space with my work. Why would I be doing this if I
| was only going to keep all of it to myself?
|
| And this doesn't even have much to do with the solitude that
| creating something necessitates - I am capable of weathering
| the darkest, loneliest storms alone, but only if I believe
| that there is someone at the end of the tunnel who would be
| able to see what came out of it all. Otherwise, the entire
| effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.
| bregma wrote:
| > Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making
| the music.
|
| It's much like brain surgery. People assume you should start
| out treating people's illnesses and curing them, but the
| successful brain surgeons know that you should spend your
| early years just having fun and enjoy playing around inside
| people's skulls. It's such a rush the first time you probe
| someone's central gyrus and see their arms twich. Don't waste
| your time planning for "in network" glory and how to
| calculate billable hours, just power up that bonesaw and
| start shredding.
| joeberon wrote:
| I don't think my music is bad enough that it will make
| people braindead
| analog31 wrote:
| Quite agreed. Granted, I come from the world of analog music
| made on alcohol powered instruments. But in my circle, the
| vast majority of musicians are delighted with finding non-
| commercial outlets for their musical interests. This includes
| some people who are quite skilled, and a few who have music
| degrees.
|
| Possibilities include: Playing in church (a huge portion of
| both amateur and commercial music is religious), entertaining
| oneself at home, jamming with friends, exploring and even
| performing esoteric music that can't be commercially viable.
| Even many otherwise successful professional musicians have
| noncommercial side projects that need volunteers. For
| instance if someone is willing to compose something new, or
| dig up something interesting and weird, I'm willing to chip
| in and help them try it out, just for the spirit of
| adventure. I'm satisfied to perform for just a small handful
| of people who share similar interests from the audience side.
|
| It's not all that different than people who are into extreme
| sports, cooking, etc., without any expectations of ever being
| competitive at it.
| lwn wrote:
| 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.
| yobbo wrote:
| 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 hours, this will train you ears, and you will
| appreciate the production quality of today's pop music.
|
| This just covers the production and mixing, not the writing.
| Catchy pop songs sound deceivingly simple, which is the point and
| why they are so difficult to write.
| analog31 wrote:
| There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My
| opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a
| rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies
| that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz
| tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand.
|
| He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study
| composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to
| create a melody. I don't know if he was implying that it can't
| be taught. But it's certainly valuable.
|
| I know someone who wrote tunes on speculation, and one of his
| melodies was chosen as the year's jingle for a major brand. It
| made him enough money to pay cash for a house. Of course this
| was many years ago.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| 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 the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how
| to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to
| regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well
| be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I
| did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping
| the whole time he played, listening to him describe his
| experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.)
|
| Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of
| them just say the most completely useless advice because they
| can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever
| they hear.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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.
| megameter wrote:
| The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of
| talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great
| mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-
| solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of
| "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too
| strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so
| they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that
| would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to
| explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some
| point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites
| talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's
| tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the
| subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So
| they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in
| tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily
| improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.
|
| For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting
| between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us
| explain our results when we get them, and highlights using
| structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy
| lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the
| synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between
| poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do
| it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just
| "sit at the keys" and get swept away.
|
| All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There
| are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no
| particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in
| the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm,
| scale or harmony.
| laserlight wrote:
| > 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 people's wiring
| differently, but if one could become Mozart without special
| wiring maybe we shouldn't count on the idea too much.
| asdffdsa wrote:
| Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good
| to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across
| all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific)
| conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
| laserlight wrote:
| 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 Gladwell portrayed
| it to be. To the contrary, Ericsson states that without
| deliberate practice, the number of hours of practice
| doesn't matter.
|
| Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to
| everyone interested in practice and improvement.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| 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 said
| "10k hours is the average we saw of our top performers"
| (10+ years, 3 hours a day). He in _no way_ implies that
| doing that would make you world class, or that all world
| class performers had done it. He never says it 's either
| necessary or sufficient - just what they observed their
| top subjects had done relative to their bottom ones, so
| if you want to get good, start there. There are people
| out there who are world class after playing half that,
| and scads and scads who aren't and have done more than
| double.
|
| I took a lot longer than 10 years to do my 10k+ hours,
| but by now at age 47 I've done them. So have most of my
| musician friends. We gig around town. lol. 10k is table
| stakes.
| laserlight wrote:
| Thank you for this very good summary.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| No, if anything Peak was written as a response to
| Outliers, which _grossly_ misrepresents Ericsson 's work.
| Peak is his popular science version of his own work,
| presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act
| as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in
| mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were
| done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the
| super-elite geniuses.
|
| Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals
| take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked
| extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story
| and has no idea what he was talking about.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| 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 among jazz elite,
| Metheny is known as special.
|
| And there are also has many cases of people who did not
| have any of that perfect-practice upbringing and and have
| aural awareness that is on a completely different plane
| from regular people. I _know_ some of them (I 'm doing a
| Master's in Music Tech right now). I know folks who,
| _without_ the proper years of deliberate practice, are
| able to do things I and 99.99% of musicians will _never_
| be able to do. That does not mean they will necessarily
| become famous or have great careers, but they can do shit
| that is out of this world. One of Canada 's best jazz
| musician's recounted to me chatting after a masterclass
| about music cognition how he had a college student who
| came to him for her lesson and could remember EVERY
| SINGLE NOTE of Keith Jarrett's concert the night before
| and play it for him. That shit is not normal, it's crazy
| savant stuff. From what I have read, Metheny was in that
| category.
|
| Music is a funny thing, deliberate perfect practice is
| obviously the most important thing, but there absolutely
| are geniuses who do not have the same brains as us, and
| the top 0.001% or whatever has a lot of them. Savantism
| occurs (relatively speaking) often in music. If you want
| a counter balance to Ericsson's "practice is everything"
| stance (and there is lots of excellent material to take
| from Ericsson's work), I suggest reading Oliver Sacks,
| "Musicophelia", about the music related clinical stories
| from his career as a neuroscientist.
| karmickoala wrote:
| 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...
| laserlight wrote:
| > I'm sorry... you're wrong.
|
| > deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most
| important thing
|
| I said that we shouldn't count too much on the idea of
| brain wiring. As far as I understood, the second quote
| above agrees with me. I didn't mean to disregard the
| presence of savants or other phenomena not explained by
| practice, deliberate or not. If my previous reply
| suggested so, I would like to correct it here.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| No worries. I've just happened to have read about
| Metheny. He is a genius, no doubt about it. Even among
| the super elite he is considered a special case.
| analog31 wrote:
| "Musicophelia" was really eye opening. I think it's
| attuned me to noticing more of the interesting
| differences among the (mostly amateur including myself)
| musicians I play with.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| 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 very obvious
| that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden
| behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false
| starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of
| complexity in some cases.
|
| It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full
| sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before
| hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that
| absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard
| the entire rest of the song and build something new around this
| new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often
| turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel,
| message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not
| have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process
| leading up to it.
|
| I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding
| steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the
| collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck
| in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're
| at now.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| 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
| gavinray wrote:
| You can use Machine Learning tools to isolate the vocals from
| the original song. I've done this exact thing (song
| recreation/transcribing) as part of taking music theory
| lessons.
|
| For anyone else who would like to try this, I will share how to
| do it: 1. Use one of the popular models for
| Source Separation. Facebook's is called "Demucs" and one of the
| best. Deezer's is called "Spleeter", also very good, and then
| there's "OpenUnmix".
|
| There's a webservice to separate a song using Demucs here:
|
| https://demucs.danielfrg.com/
|
| And a great Dockerized webapp that lets you choose from several
| models and parameters here:
|
| https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web
|
| Otherwise you can just install them locally and run them
| through the CLI, it's pretty easy (one command)
|
| https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians
|
| https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start
| 2. Now you can take the isolated vocals, and build the rest of
| the song yourself
|
| I've also found that it really helps to be able to listen to
| each of the parts of the song in isolation when trying to
| recreate them.
|
| The drums, the bassline, the lead/synth, etc. It can be hard to
| distinguish notes when they all run together. You can use an EQ
| to try to single out instruments but it's harder.
|
| Hope this is helpful to someone.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| bauerd wrote:
| Guess this is still written in Elm btw
| https://mobile.twitter.com/abletondev/status/861580662620508...
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| This style of music making reminds me of
| https://www.incredibox.com
|
| I have no idea how they make so many loops that all sounds great
| together.
| ushakov wrote:
| I have fond memories playing with Garageband on the first iPad
|
| now, imagine what could have happened if more operating systems
| came with a DAW pre-installed
|
| i'd like to believe it would spawn generations of new artists
| HamburgerEmoji wrote:
| Pretty cool. If you like Ableton but would prefer to use a more
| obscure underdog for some reason, there's Bitwig.
| gpcr1949 wrote:
| which is also by far the best DAW that runs natively on Linux
| (warning: it costs money, though well worth it)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Bitwig is amazing and awesome, but this still applies:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060000
| loxias wrote:
| Obscure, and yet technically superior in all ways...
|
| Bitwig == Ableton++, after Ableton management vetoed
| engineering's desire to do a _major_ and much needed
| architectural rewrite. As I understand it, they didn 't see how
| tearing down all the legacy code and building something more
| stable and modular would help them sell more licenses the next
| year. Hence, we have Bitwig.
|
| I like it as one of the rare examples of engineers wanting to
| fix problems and create something great winning out over the
| desire for predictable annual returns.
| daydream wrote:
| Bitwig was founded in 2009 (from Wikipedia). Seems like it's
| worked out fine for both Bitwig and Ableton.
| Joeboy wrote:
| Also Ardour (which is GPL'ed and runs natively on Linux as well
| as Windows and Mac) is currently growing Ableton-like features:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwUN7hz6eU
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I've been working on an IDE for music composition
| https://ngrid.io. Launching soon.
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Interesting project, got any screenshots so far?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I'm polishing up the UI as well as the analysis algorithm.
| I'll be done by the end of the year.
| shric wrote:
| Previously:
|
| 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14299628
|
| 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965386
| agumonkey wrote:
| suprisingly thorough, thanks for the initiative :)
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Not quite the same, but along the same lines in terms of showing
| what tracks are made of - https://www.incredibox.com
| jarl-ragnar wrote:
| Ableton was one of my Lockdown amusements last year. A few weeks
| playing around with it resulted in this
| https://youtu.be/I3XrZOw8ZJA
| ushakov wrote:
| really awesome sounding!
|
| yesterday i've had some fun replicating Nightcall by Ravinsky,
| really recommend that if you're looking for something (easy) to
| reproduce next, it also helps, that originals stems are made
| available by author
|
| i'd also suggest using side-chain compression, which basically
| gives the synths the ducking effect
| (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fOlOAqgBNM0)
| kvz wrote:
| This is very inspiring. Sounds so great! Would love to see a
| video about your process, including the failures and dead ends
| that you must have also hit in these weeks.
| dmje wrote:
| FWIW, the notion that Ableton is just for dance music is very far
| from the truth. Sometimes they don't help themselves with their
| marketing, but the software suits all kinds of music making from
| dance to classical to ..whatever.
|
| Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind _the_ best DAW by a long
| stretch. For me there are many reasons for this but the killer
| one is that the time and effort from idea to laid track is
| miniscule.
|
| When you're dealing with initial ideas, they're extremely
| fragile. I've had so many of these slip into the abyss in the
| face of crap software. Ableton - once you've learnt the basics -
| has you getting stuff down within seconds of booting. That's
| immensely valuable IMO.
| Kye wrote:
| The quality of the scale limiting is beyond any DAW I've used.
| That's great for me as someone who can't seem to memorize
| scales. I've heard FL Studio has a good scale limiting feature,
| but I can't figure it out. Ableton's is 1-3 clicks and, to me,
| intuitive. I wish they would steal Reaper's ability to load
| scales from files. Live comes with a lot, but sometimes I want
| to experiment.
|
| Bitwig doesn't have it _at all_ and they broke the paint scale-
| >nudge to -1 workaround (which still works in Live) the last
| time I tried the demo.
| lolpython wrote:
| That's really cool that Live has it built in to the piano
| roll now. I've been using Bitwig with the plugin Scaler 2 for
| this purpose.
| navbaker wrote:
| A good hardware controller makes it even better. They make the
| Push, which is great if you have that kind of money, but I
| bought a Novation Launchpad Pro for half the price and it
| transformed how I use Live.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind the best DAW by a
| long stretch
|
| You did try to add some caveats to this, but I think it's
| really, really important to stress that there is no "best DAW".
| Workflows for audio production vary dramatically, and while
| Live is a very, very cool program, there are plenty of
| workflows for which it be inappropriate at worst, and not the
| best choice at best.
|
| Fortunately, these days there's a DAW for everyone, and it
| sounds as if you've found yours.
| dmje wrote:
| I'll take that!
| laikinfox wrote:
| No sound on safari, anyone else?
| lwn wrote:
| works fine on my Safari (macbook).
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(page generated 2021-10-31 23:01 UTC)