So, Tropers can do music too, right?

By ear? Yes. MIDI to SoundFont? No.

I'm a classical Trombone player, studying to be a recording engineer. I do a little bit of guitar work and piano, but that's self taught and required by the school (respectively).

Imagine Rakan applying Calling Your Attacks to doing paperwork.~Anarchy Rakan for the hell of it COMMISSION THIS BRIDGE!~EHK

[Redacted] is my first attempt at a hip-hop beat (took about half an hour, tops). The string sample is from 'The Wired' by Machinae Supremacy. Yes, two somewhat-nerdy references in one. Thoughts from people who listen to more rap/hip-hop than me?

edited 24th May '12 8:01:06 AM by BoundByTheMoon

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

It's okay, I've never been fond of that kind of percussion, and given the dominating presence of the strings it could definitely use something heavier, maybe a break.

To be honest, that sounds more like something you'd put in a contemporary R&B Pop song than hip-hop.

What did you make it with?

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

FL Studio. The percussion is from stock samples that came with it. I'll see how it sounds with the percussion beefed up a bit.

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

I'll listen to it again then and see if I can't suggest an apropos break. But off the top of my head "Holy Thursday" by David Axelrod might work.

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

I played piano since kindergarten, and I was always "that kid" who played the finale song in piano recitals, but I'm still pretty much slave to the MIDI roll in Logic Pro whenever I make music. I might post what I make once I make something good.

I've recently composed a simple music composition for the recent Sendai earthquake victims. I know it is simplistic, but at least I have work on something for them.

*brofist*

I have about 30 tracks sitting around in Logic. I planned to use them for my video game-in-embryo, but it turns out that banging my head on a clavinova is easier than coding, so they'll be finished early. I'll probably clean up one of my songs this weekend and post it here.

I've had Logic for about three years now, and I have a grand total of... 211 project files. *faints* I have some self-esteem issues, to say the least.

I have over a dozen albums under my belt.

They've gotten less than 100 hits between them. Some have never even been published.

whoo....hoo...?

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

I put out one album and a single about a year ago, which sounded decent, but it used quite a bit of Apple Loops which bugs me now... (Shameless promotion!: http://www.last.fm/music/Kaiein ) Right now, two of my biggest musical concerns are originality and sound design... stuff which I don't really have a problem with, but is much easier to fit into about 20 seconds of awesome, but hard to stretch for over 5 minutes or so without sounding monotonous. : I'm currently giving my normal style a break though, and making an ambient drone album, and it's going pretty well... probably going to release it...

edited 24th Mar '11 7:19:09 PM by Goomba4001

Can to haz? I love listening to other people's stuff (I still listen to Mike K's Beats+Noise).

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

Sure! Here's the LP: http://www.mediafire.com/?ewy2gzqgzki Here's the EP: http://www.mediafire.com/?juymwiymzom

^^^ Wow. *checks for own sockpuppets possibly created while sleepwalking* Nope, no sockpuppets.

Here's a couple of piano loops I finished this week:

Untitled (couldn't think of a name for it)

Sunrise (if someone did an arrangement of this, I would be happy forever)

It occurs to me that I don't have any music I could actually show people online, and I don't just mean through randomly posting it on internet forums — even if I got an official website under my own name, I wouldn't have anything to upload.

My compositions are entirely notation-based, and I'm not an instrumentalist, so that means I have to find other people to play my music. And thus can't upload recordings without their permission — with which there are often various issues (e.g. contractual requirements, union regulations).

I'm probably the only person around here with that particular problem, though; wonder how I should go about rectifying it.

Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever. ~ Anonymous

Learn to play something yourself?

Buy a synthesizer?

Murder your contract holders?

I spread my wings and I learn how to fly....

@SM - well, there are programs like Musescore which can create MIDIs, aren't there? Obviously, it's not ideal, but it is a way of showing your work. I have a friend who composes classical music as well (in fact he's got a place at Guildhall to study it next year) and he uses those to show me things he's written

edited 27th Mar '11 12:25:17 PM by SunshineWerewolf

All good ideas. (1) I could theoretically learn to conduct, for example, in order to produce larger-ensemble works. Sadly my piano compositions are difficult enough that, though I could learn them, it would take forever and not sound good. (2) I would, but no money :/ (3) See (2). Handguns are pretty expensive and none of my knives are sharp enough.

Yeah, my notation program *can* export MIDI audio files. The problem is that MIDI tends to be a bit too... limited to be of any use whatsoever.

If we take a score that looks like this◊ — okay, so that's an exaggeration, but not a huge one — the only things playing back correctly are some of the notes in the right-hand piano part. All of the other extended techniques and some of the normal ones (none of those percussion sounds are remotely realistic for instance) would only be possible on acoustic instruments. Glissandi, trills, resonance, and a variety of other things also can't be realistically rendered. Microtones can be but are a bit of a pain.

On the other hand.... if I wrote some stuff that was specifically intended as electronic, this wouldn't be a problem. The only issue there is being clueless about how electronics work. (I'm even pretty clueless about the notation software I do use — wrote entirely on manuscript paper for years, still often have trouble figuring out how to get the computer to do stuff.)

Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever. ~ Anonymous

Yeah, I can see how it'd be awkward if you're using a lot of extended techniques...

I'll ask my friend and see if he has anything to say. He's had some of his pieces performed by a youth orchestra which is made up mostly of people who go to our sixth form college, but if you're writing technically demanding/really odd stuff then that might not be so feasible

Yeah... I suppose what I really need to do is make friends with some musicians of reasonably high caliber, and have them record stuff. (Well, it would be even nicer if people who have already recorded my music came around to my point of view about availability and stopped with the "no, we're saving it for sometime when we can hope to make a significant profit", but I can also wish to turn into a purple dragon while I'm at it. Won't happen.) Or, as mentioned, go electronic.

Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever. ~ Anonymous

Going electronic... I have a similar situation. I've been thinking for a while about switching styles, keeping the same general type of composition I use (classical/film-score plus metal), but making it more guitar-oriented, like Steve Vai. That would make recording a lot easier (since I have a guitar and I can play it), but I just don't see it happening. Let me know how going electronic works out for you, though.

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!

^^ I take it you compose music for standard classical instruments and just have an issue of presenting it feasibly? MuseScore supports SoundFonts, which is a good way of getting sounds much better than MIDI for free or symbolic costs. Render the final result to WAV, etc.

If that option doesn't satisfy you, the price only gets higher from here. You'd have to get a pro-class score writing program like Sibelius or Finale which have built-in libraries of sounds and are at the price point of Photoshop. If you won't be satisfied with these, you'll have to shell out for the VST sampler Kontakt and sound libraries for that. Or some cheaper orchestral VST.

v Sorry, I got the arrows wrong. That was directed at Still Movement.

edited 27th Mar '11 2:21:24 PM by Litis

I've released a couple songs already, actually, using the default Windows soundfont and FL Studio. I've got a copy of Fluid R3 (an awesome open-source sf2), I'm just not sure if that'll sound "pro" enough once my compositional skills get better. (For what it's worth, I've been using Melody Assistant's patch library for some of the voices, but that's only a $20 composing program.)

There are snakes in the grass, so we'd better go hunting!