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[Core Xii]

I like Purple Motion.

[agj]

yeah im not saying its IMPOSSIBLE.. but i would LOVE to see anyone just add a piano roll it coulnt be hard, its just that SCENERS dont like the idea of it becuase they love filling out a SCANTRON form to make music.. when its really hard to do for all of the rest of us. haha...\:

I found the tracking paradigm to be pretty approachable, but that's maybe because Nitrotracker uses an interface with piano keys, which is awesome. I even got used to the CDEFGAB notation (we use do re mi fa sol la si here). If you have a homebrew-capable DS, Nitrotracker comes highly recommended.

[soundofjw]

Tracking is silly. It's best when used in combination with MIDI to create ridiculous rock-chiptune-mashups. Any questions?

[GregWS]

yeah im not saying its IMPOSSIBLE.. but i would LOVE to see anyone just add a piano roll it coulnt be hard, its just that SCENERS dont like the idea of it becuase they love filling out a SCANTRON form to make music.. when its really hard to do for all of the rest of us. haha...\:

I found the tracking paradigm to be pretty approachable, but that's maybe because Nitrotracker uses an interface with piano keys, which is awesome. I even got used to the CDEFGAB notation (we use do re mi fa sol la si here). If you have a homebrew-capable DS, Nitrotracker comes highly recommended.

Funny you mention it, after my friend got back from his trip to Hong Kong, my DS became homebrew compatible, and I bookmarked Nitrotracker to check out over the holidays when I'm not so busy.  I guess I'll really have to check it out now. 

[Jad]

Just to break the pattern of people either loving or loathing/not getting tracker/piano roll, I just feel the need to say that I think both are intuitive and good alternatives.

There is one system of writing music that just fudges up my brain, and that's goddamn Musical Notes. Shit, a system not even dealing with chromatic notes without having to add special marks and shit? Wow, I don't even wanna touch that ):

But yeah. I'm a cakewalk and reason-user and have been playing around with piano rolls since I was like 12 years old, so my workflow there is good.

Instantly writing music into a tracker is kinda awkward for me, but I have once written out a song 'sketch' in cakewalk to get the harmonies and melody down, and then fleshed it out with milkytracker, and that worked really well.

So yeah, I think both ways are plausible, it's just that I have a workflow going on with piano roll style composing, and not at all with tracker.

But getting over hurdles is awesome. The thing I can't stand about trackers is the loading of samples and how to get them, especially with simple waveforms, to set loop-points in less-than-milliseconds-increments makes my head asplode. But the rest is easy I think, especially when the tracker has a preview-tone-interface where you can play your keyboard as a  ... keyboard and hear the notes you're putting down. If you've made some of the song with a sequencer, then you already know where to go.

So let's overcome our own hurdles, people, and start making some awesome music in all formats we like (this includes me and my tracker aspirations )

[soundofjw]

I respect all forms of music writing. For me, something different comes out depending on what I do - when I track I can get a very oldschool sound and the melodies tend to be more catchy and complex (typically because they are the melodies I cannot play on the keyboard in one sitting). I track extremely fast because you don't have to spend too much time fooling with mixing and plugins and stuff (although arguably, good trackers create their own samples which involves a pre-mixing stage... I tried some of this in Bonesaw).

Then, when I sit down with my MIDI Keyboard and Cakewalk something entirely different is unleashed. I tend to write fuller more sophisticated music with a DAW then I do a tracker, and I really love to toy with audio processing.

Now, when I sit down with Finale open, I create an entirely different monster. This is the music that is most closely associated with neo-classical music and it's something else entirely - I have a lot more control and sophistication with harmonies, progressions (or lack-thereof), and the music can be extremely playful. Plus, sheet music is just fun to write (although it can get tedious).

Now, the reason I purchased Renoise is simple. How could I -NOT- want to marry the idea of tracking with classical VST programming?! The results have never let me down (and some of my favorite TSE2 tracks were created in Renoise entirely).  However, it is not my goto environment for writing music because the tick-based system makes it very difficult to create detailed MIDI-Controller envelopes. Now, that said, I COULD just turn up the resolution, but I hate seeing the notes fly by that fast, and it's just not my style...

I avoid keyboard rolls to input notes because I think they are evil. Music already has a grid system, and that's sheet music - the note durations are just shorthanded - I don't like scrolling years away to see how long my notes are going on for. Of course, it does have a certain usefulness and I can see the appeal to musicians who can't read sheet music or that don't have MIDI Controllers to input their music. So it's just a personal preference with me. I do however use the keyboard roll to manipulate MIDI data, but I'd never start there. (:

That's my two cents, gents.