Music making help
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Started 1d ago
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Started 1d ago
Does anyone know how to get started making music that doesn't suck.
I've got a 32 key toy keyboard that I don't know what to do with, and I know that to get started in beepbox with something slightly better than stupid painful noise what you do is look up a chord progression and then click in the relevant notes for that chord progression in a random-ish pattern, then make a random melody out of notes that are found in that chord progression. a random drum pattern or two and boom, it's a 20 second, repetitive, bad song-like thing instead of total random noise. that's what, 10% of the way to a 3 minute track?
As for the keyboard, well, that's most fun when you play the melody (chords are miserable to play and there aren't enough keys to do both chords and melody) but the melody isn't anything without the chords at this stage, so it's still useless. you can look up recognizable versions of commercial songs that are just one-finger-at-a-time melodies, but composing one? forbidden knowledge, apparently.
Lots of people seem to be into making music, but I can never find explanations that really click for me. I guess because they over-do the theory instead of just showing what sort of patterns I should be looking for so I can understand visually what I'm doing. Anyway, if anyone here knows what they're doing I'd appreciate it if you could help me out here because I don't have whatever gene they have that lets them intuit it.
Thanks
I've got a 32 key toy keyboard that I don't know what to do with, and I know that to get started in beepbox with something slightly better than stupid painful noise what you do is look up a chord progression and then click in the relevant notes for that chord progression in a random-ish pattern, then make a random melody out of notes that are found in that chord progression. a random drum pattern or two and boom, it's a 20 second, repetitive, bad song-like thing instead of total random noise. that's what, 10% of the way to a 3 minute track?
As for the keyboard, well, that's most fun when you play the melody (chords are miserable to play and there aren't enough keys to do both chords and melody) but the melody isn't anything without the chords at this stage, so it's still useless. you can look up recognizable versions of commercial songs that are just one-finger-at-a-time melodies, but composing one? forbidden knowledge, apparently.
Lots of people seem to be into making music, but I can never find explanations that really click for me. I guess because they over-do the theory instead of just showing what sort of patterns I should be looking for so I can understand visually what I'm doing. Anyway, if anyone here knows what they're doing I'd appreciate it if you could help me out here because I don't have whatever gene they have that lets them intuit it.
Thanks
Learn theory. You should be building music from melodic and/or harmonic ideas you came up with, not copy/pasting chord patterns you don't understand. The thing that will help you the most is learning to play music that's actually good. Modernist musicians are all niggers.
The problem with building from melodic ideas is that i cannot transcribe a melody, and theory's never helped me get closer to that. I can hum a little tune i've made up on the spot, but i cannot for the life of me then translate that into clicking down the correct notes in the correct order to replicate it. That's why at the moment I work backwards from chord progressions rather than forwards from a melody.
As for learning theory, it's not that I refuse so much as that I hold out hope someone's made a good practical guide or can write a good practical explanation for someone who doesn't already have an intuitive sense for these things. Everything I know, I've got from reading theory, but usually it feels like banging my head off a wall until a random bit of knowledge clicks. Often, it feels more like learning Italian than learning about music.