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Crossposting from the music theory thread: Let me preface this by saying to please tell me where to gently caress off to if I've parachuted into the wrong thread. That said... I've hired a musician to write music for my game (dev.log thread). They've turned out some great tracks, but I've noticed that they have a real weakness when it comes to writing melodies. Their approach generally is to create a phrase that they like, then repeat it several times verbatim. When I ask them to add variation, have the repetitions build on each other and bring them to a satisfying conclusion, their response generally is to randomly tweak a few notes in the successive phrases, or make the phrases so long and meandering that they feel pretty breathless by the end. Neither of which is what I was asking for. I don't have any formal music theory training; just a few years' worth of piano and cello, and growing up with classical music and a skilled pianist in the family. I'm pretty good at listening to a piece and picking out what's wrong, and I can sometimes supply my own suggested melodies, but I can't figure out how to tell my composer to just, like, write better melodies. Are there some resources online I could point them to? Maybe some kind of breakdown of what makes for a satisfying melodic line? Like, here's the introductory phrase, here's the digression, here's where we heighten the tension, here's where we bring it to a satisfying conclusion, and these are the specific things at each step that create those emotional responses in the listener. I feel like it's gonna be an awkward conversation no matter what. But hopefully we can phrase this as an opportunity to train on the job, or something like that. Thanks in advance!
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Feb 24, 2021 16:31
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Hawkperson posted:Yeah that poo poo’s hard to do. I guess show him some Beethoven/Rachmaninoff/John Williams/maybe even Mario Galaxy music to show him what you’re looking for. Sounds like you’re looking for some Romantic style developments of your theme, yeah? Yeah, Romantic style is a good descriptor. Fortunately, I think we've had a bit of a breakthrough. I sent them some "music theory minute" videos that were recommended in the music theory thread. Once we had a shared vocabulary, it was a lot easier to communicate  And they've turned in a much better version of the current track, with a far stronger melody than what we'd been working with previously.
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Feb 24, 2021 21:55
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Can anyone identify the instrument right at the start of this piece? The one that sounds kind of like an electronic howl? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPb8ZTfQb14 I'm hoping it's a "real" MIDI instrument and not just a distorted sound effect they did as a one-off for that specific bit.
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Aug 18, 2021 23:59
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Great, thank you! To answer an implicit question: I'm pretty sure that the soundtrack for that game was recorded as compressed MP3 or something similar rather than being MIDI with software synthesis at runtime, so they would have had access to whatever real-world instruments and recording equipment the musician(s) had instead of having to rely on a more limited software instrument set.
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Aug 19, 2021 00:30
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Thank you for the kind offer! I'm actually not using the samples myself, but I'm trying to communicate to the musician I hired for my game what kind of effect I'm looking for. I'm not sure if they can make use of samples (my impression is that they mostly work with a big ol' bank of instruments, and I don't know the difference between "instrument" and "sample" in this context), but I'll ask!
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Aug 19, 2021 19:22
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On a different, but perhaps related note: I'm trying to work out dialog sounds for the characters in my game. I don't want to deal with the expense and complexity of voice acting, but fully silent dialog lacks punch. I spent a day or so fiddling around with instrument samples and Audacity and came up with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRzklL6xrCw It works, kind of, but it's a bit too cartoony for the characters. Does anyone have any suggestions for other things to try? I tried more mechanical sounds, but they just made the characters sound like insect people. The basic process here was: - Isolate a single note - Crop/up-tempo it to be about .2s long - Apply a Paulstretch to smooth out some of the variation and disguise some of the musical origins - Apply a sliding pitch change of -3 tones so it's deeper at the end of the note - Optionally adjust the overall pitch I'm not an expert at sound manipulation...this seems to work OK, but like I said, it's too cartoony. I can't figure out how to make a sound more "serious" though.
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Aug 20, 2021 21:23
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What I'm hearing is that the note is being silenced shortly after it starts, so you just get the attack from the note and then nothing else (except for some reverb, not sure where that's coming from). Then there's a bit of popping at the end of the note, which I tend to associate with a discontinuous waveform. Just adding/subtracting/multiplying/etc. waveforms together shouldn't be able to produce discontinuities like that, but cutting off the note before it can fade to zero volume would. I don't know enough about the software to speculate as to causes, but if you can get access to the instrument samples, you should be able to manually tweak them to recreate the effect.
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Oct 21, 2021 18:55
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Is there a thread for getting started with composition software? I think what I'm looking for is something that will let me compose scores, with a decent selection of MIDI instruments. I have a reasonable musical background (piano, cello, singing), though I'm extremely rusty. I think the way I'd characterize my skills is that I have a well-developed ear, but minimal music theory. My goal would be to compose music styled like this piece that I commissioned for my game. In other words "epic orchestral with some electronic elements".
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Jun 13, 2022 02:21
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for fucks sake posted:If you want to go the free open source route, check out musescore. Thanks! I don't mind making a one-off purchase if it'll get me better tools/instruments, though, in case that changes anything. Also, to be clear, my eventual goal is to output audio files. I just assumed that a score notation would be the easiest for me to work with, since I have plenty of familiarity with reading music.
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Jun 13, 2022 15:52
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Thanks, y'all! I appreciate the advice 
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Jun 13, 2022 21:03
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I'm trying to learn to use FL Studio, but I'm finding it a bit hard to get traction, so to speak. Can anyone recommend a guided course, or set of tutorials, or something that I can follow along to help me get started? I can play music, and I have a lot of experience with Audacity, a sound editor, so I have some basic understanding of stuff like reverb and signal processing. But the UI and workflow is pretty impenetrable right now.
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Nov 1, 2022 18:09
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Thank you, I'll give that a shot!
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Nov 3, 2022 01:09
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Does anyone have advice for how to transcribe music that you're listening to? I wanted to make a variation on the "you got shot down" sting from Starfox for the SNES, but I cannot for the life of me get the notes right. I'm pretty sure the first two are G and D, but nothing I follow it up with sounds right.
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Nov 29, 2022 05:03
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Lester Shy posted:Probably a better way to do it, but I just experiment until I find it. I think yours is G, D, C#, Ab. Thanks, you're right, and my issue was that I had the third note way lower than it was supposed to be. Xiahou Dun posted:Interval training. Part of my issue probably is that I'm not actively practicing any musical instruments right now. And I never did train from a music theory standpoint, just from a performance standpoint. I'm open to recommendations for resources around training my ear to recognize specific intervals!
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Nov 29, 2022 05:51
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I tried one of those apps but it didn't actually seem to help any more than just practicing more. I can say at least that as you get better the flailing gets less annoying : in the beginning you're basically deciding between every note, but every time you get better at dividing it (Octaves> 5ths > 3rds/4ths, etc.) you get a lot closer. Likewise if you can get the key that's almost half the space taken care of unless there's modal fuckery.
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I'm no audio expert, but the first thing that came to my mind is that if your voice audio is really dry (this is a sound tech term, basically meaning that it's a clean recording with no echo/noise/effects) and the rest of the music has reverb or other effects applied to it, then your vocal audio is going to sound out of place. You should try to figure out what kind of settings the producer used on the music, and match those settings as closely as possible. Those settings were used to create a particular sense of place (in particular in terms of room size and reverberance), so it's no wonder that your own audio sounds wrong when layered over that.
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Feb 4, 2023 01:18
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Pollyanna posted:Ideally I’d like to quit my job and focus on music and actually get my executive dysfunctional rear end into some goddamn structure and organization, but that costs way more than $200. Just to check, are you hoping to make money as a musician?
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Feb 23, 2023 18:46
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Okay, good. webcams for christ posted:I think you're setting arbitrary barriers for yourself that aren't conducive to growth. having ambition and high standards is admirable, but a good instructor or coach will be able to meet you at any stage of a project. you don't need to be "ready" Yeah, I'll second this analysis. Your primary job right now is to do it, not to worry about doing it well. Skill will come with practice. Sure, there's things that you could do to make your practice more effective, but because you're fixated on optimizing your practice, you're not actually practicing. Make musical shitposts. Turn some dumb copypasta into a song with autotuning and instrumentation. Make the Jurassic Park theme with kazoos (sure, it's been done, but it bears doing again). I think there's a strong argument to be made here that the best use of your $200 is whatever recreational drugs that might help you just get in there and start making some noise. Or if that isn't the kind of thing you're interested in, then use the $200 to buy yourself some non-music-related reward that you're only allowed to have once you've accomplished a music-related goal.
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Feb 23, 2023 19:04
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cruft posted:I only do music as a hobby after switching majors to computer touching. And my stuff sucks. Like, really: it's bad and dumb. But it makes people laugh! I found a shortcut to getting a sense of satisfaction and all I had to do was completely compromise my artistic vision! But it's okay, it's just a hobby. People need to stop thinking that art is only the highly-polished "professional" stuff. Seriously, this is one of the biggest problems with how culture is presented these days. You are making art! It's legit! It doesn't have to be designed for mass appeal, or to hit some kind of arbitrary quality threshold, to be art. It's OK to be the modern equivalent of a peasant with a flute, playing for friends and family at a small gathering.
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Feb 23, 2023 19:36
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How would you finger the left hand in this sequence? Not shown, because it's on the next row of the page, is that the immediate next note is a G1/G2 octave chord. So far the best I've come up with for the second phrase is 5-2-1-2-3-5, but landing that last note is really tricky. I'm not used to doing blind jumps that land on my pinky. The piece in question is an arrangement of the "Port" theme from Terranigma. The spot I'm asking about occurs at 0:53. If you click through the video, there's a link to the sheet music in the video description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLBnAry5E5c
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Mar 31, 2023 04:24
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Jazz Marimba posted:532121 532124 Thanks! That's definitely better than what I came up with on my own.
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Mar 31, 2023 19:34
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Is there any guidance on what an appropriate amount of practicing (of the piano, in this case) is to do in a day? I imagine there's some tipping point where you're too tired to benefit, and that it's probably different for different people, but I'm curious what findings there might be. Different question: any recommendations for improving speed at the piano without sacrificing accuracy? The piece I'm working on has some fast arpeggios that span 1.5 to 2 octaves, as well as some whole-hand chords that move around fast enough that I have trouble landing the jumps cleanly. For example:  The BPM on this piece is listed as 53 per dotted half note. I can sometimes manage to land the last measure on the first row there, but I feel like I need to be looking in two places at once, because both hands are doing jumps that I can't just do by feeling where I am on the keyboard. The second row is more doable, in the second that I can regularly get individual measures cleanly; I just struggle to get the entire passage cleanly. Either I'll slip in the right hand and hit extra notes, or the left hand will miss one of the jumps. Third question: any advice for finding a piano teacher that takes adult students? Everyone around me seems to be geared towards teaching kids.
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Apr 11, 2023 20:28
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I generally stop either when my performance is clearly degrading (don't practice sucking or you'll just get better at sucking) or when I get too frustrated or otherwise in the wrong mindset.
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Apr 13, 2023 20:44
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The time signature affects how the composer and performer think about the piece's structure. While you can write any music piece in any signature, generally you choose one where the phrases and notes fit neatly into the measures. So I would expect a 6/4 piece to be fairly slow/meandering, since there's so much space in each measure to fit notes in. A 6/8 piece would be more conventionally-paced.
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Jul 6, 2023 04:22
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DAWs are for making high-quality audio, and they are purpose-built for that task. You get very fine control over a ton of different parameters that change how things sound, but what you don't get is the kind of score-based composition help that you might expect as a musician. Scores don't let you control things like the character of the reverb, the attack/sustain/falloff on each note, potentially a lot of instrument-specific configurations, and on and on and on. There's honestly a lot to using a DAW, and it's made worse by the fact that they're very modular, with every module having its own, weird, bespoke user interface.
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Mar 25, 2024 01:26
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I. M. Gei posted:So what I'm hearing is I'm never gonna get a good-sounding, accurate playback short of an actual band playing the music I'm writing. You can also learn to use a DAW, it's not impossible. Or you can record the individual (real-life) instruments yourself, separately, and then combine the separate audio tracks to make the complete piece.
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Mar 25, 2024 01:41
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